GFT Retrospective #83: The Dream Eater Saga #3 (Myths & Legends #6)

Article by Sean Wilkinson

a.k.a. the Ticketmaster

Last week, my research for The Dream Eater Saga #2 (The Piper One-Shot) led to me getting a Final Jeopardy! response right.

There's none of that this week, and I've already aired my grievances about my winter financial situation in the Time Drops post on Saturday, so all I have left is to ask that you please Become A Ticketholder if you haven't already, leave a legendary comment at the bottom of this post, help out my ad revenue as you read so I don't have to resort to monetizing viral videos where a witch and a florist beat up an old man, and follow me on Tumblr, Reddit, Facebook, and LinkedIn to like what you see and receive the latest Grimm news on my mythical content.

Before I begin this week's Grimm Fairy Tales Retrospective in earnest, you can check out my thoughts on the above character biographies (and others) in my review of The Dream Eater Saga #1: Once Upon A Time. I've also compiled reviews of all of Samantha's appearances in an Omnibusted chronology post, and done Retrospective reviews of Baba Yaga's first appearance and her collaborations with Belinda in the Monkey's Paw Halloween Special and the Sinbad Crossover.

The Dream Eater Saga #3

Myths & Legends #6

As this entire event series is possibly loosely based on Japanese folklore (read my Prologue/Prelude review for details) and its only other source material that I know of comes from the Grimm Fairy Tales series itself, I have no further information of historical note to share, so the key words this issue are character and atmosphere.

Set two days before the events of The Piper One-Shot, this cross-promotion begins with Baba Yaga hiding out in her cave in South Dakota from snippets of Myths & Legends Volume 1 and the Once Upon A Time issue of this event series. This most likely takes place after those events, as she is still in the cave here and Belinda is not (having already taken Baba Yaga's portal to the end of Grimm Fairy Tales #62).

We learn that the Dream Eater can shed its old man disguise to network with the land and sense its prey, the visuals for which are cool and sinister and expressed well for a static medium.

This issue even makes sense of the Prologue's ending, making it clear that Baba Yaga intends to claim the Dream Eater's power for her own (which she got a taste of from using his page of the Book Of the Lost to absorb the souls of her murdered family) so that she can destroy the Dark One. I could be reading too much into this, but she only mentions the Dark One here. Granted, Shang and the other council members she swore revenge against have been dead since Hard Choices, so the "there is no good or evil, only power" morality that made her interesting before is severely limited now, and she will continue to do evil-coded things in the future to achieve her goals and stamp out those who interfere with that, but Baba Yaga comes off as kind of a badass antiheroine-by-necessity this issue, and I'm on board with it.

Of course, being mainly coded as a villain means that Baba Yaga's thirst for power beyond her...means...is fruitless. She's been shown and said to have precognitive abilities that were trained into her from birth, and yet she shows genuine surprise when the unkillable, shapeshifting, primordial embodiment of gluttony and magical genocide casually chomps its way through her entire army between panels. We even learn that the literal dragon she summons from the Cyclops Eye (one of the last of a race so powerful that their mere existence burned Myst to the ground and the only means of killing them was to let them destroy each other, and yet, the Dream Eater just looks up at it like, "oh, hi; it's you again...") wasn't a match for it, either.

We've addressed the old man and the witch; now, it's time to catch back up with the florist.

That's right, folks! When she isn't raiding Storm's wardrobe or watching holograms of everyone on Earth throughout space-time on magical holograms in her Sanctum Sanctorum, Samantha Darren works in a flower shop. And because irony is just as important as thematic juxtaposition, we not only have the "two women who can see all but are too myopic to know what's coming" trope, we also have Samantha and Baba Yaga as a bright mirror composite of the Dream Eater. Samantha reflects the Dream Eater's inexperience and deep connection with and desire to protect humanity, though it lacks the compassion to include Falseblood humanity in its directive as well as the nuance to guide those it is designed to protect. Baba Yaga reflects the Dream Eater's moral neutrality in service of its goals and hunger, compromising her compassion for those she deems lesser beings despite power being a more complex need than mere mechanical hunger.

Note also the irony of Samantha connecting to the Earth but also having a job where she dismembers and mutilates plant life for human commercial consumption.

That aside, it's a pleasant, unique circumstance to see Baba Yaga approach Samantha with a civilian appearance, and their tense, witty banter as they feel each other out and come to blows is among Zenescope's best character moments.

We even get a line from Baba Yaga that I didn't realize was true until I read it. She talks about knowing Shang "well" and being "very close" to Allexa...but today I re-learned that Baba Yaga and Sela have never met!

Baba Yaga intends to imprison Samantha in the Cyclops Eye, but their conflict is interrupted when the Dream Eater shows up. 

It easily tanks their strongest combined blasts, but Samantha has a surprise of her own to make GFT lore interesting: she pulls Baba Yaga into a mirror with her before shattering it on the other side (hinting strongly that the dimension she traveled through in The Good Witch was connected to Wonderland in some way), and into the "Inner Sanctum Of the Nexus" (which Baba Yaga has apparently heard of, and which bears some resemblance to the Order's library, though I think this is only a coincidence).

Thankfully for the story continuing to happen without our current odd couple being existentially eaten to death, the Dream Eater is thereafter distracted by a news report of a wild animal slaughtering the staff and students of an Arizona high school (probably the Cheshire Cat or another werewolf...?).

Because Zenescope will continue to publish comic books long after this, there must be a way to kill the unkillable (a weapon "of this Earth, but not of this time"), and the key to transcending time (now that Baba Yaga blew all of her time travel magic on the Sinbad crossover...I guess?) is the not-so-Pied Piper. So this issue ends as the previous one did, with Baba Yaga summoning him through the Book Of the Lost, to be continued in the Wonderland One-Shot.

If I had to criticize something about this issue, it is the idea behind the Inner Sanctum being hidden by magic. I mean, the Dream Eater's whole mechanism is that it can distinguish between magical beings and normal humans, so don't you think that a being capable of sensing magic could, I don't know..., sense magic, even if it's magic that's being used to conceal other magic? I guess this is a case of "if logic made sense, the story would end with every character you like dead."

In terms of art, the covers don't give much to talk about, save the A variant (that you'd have to seek out a physical copy of or find it in the cover gallery at the end of the TPB) by frequent contributor Ale Garza being cartoonishly unsettling with the Dream Eater sucking energy out of the back of Baba Yaga's head. In the issue itself (penciled by Alfred Trujillo and colored by Jason Embury and Andrew Elder), there's a lot to like, from the early panels of the Dream Eater shifting form, to the detail work on the dragon, to Baba Yaga's human disguise, to the chalky, simplified off-modeling that's used when the ladies fire their magic beams, to the panels that show size differences between characters by forcing perspective or simply putting the short-statured Dream Eater nose-to-nose with a dragon the size of a small mountain.

I love rivalry-fueled team-up stories like this, and even though the "magic hides magic from magic-sensing villain" conceit doesn't work and the two leads' chemistry can't fully be explored when the story has to rush at the end to make the timeline fit, this issue does more than enough in its art, tight lore, and writing of Samantha and Baba Yaga's rival chemistry to make the reading experience enjoyable, even for someone who's reading it to criticize and over-analyze it.

Be sure to practice those Cheshire grins for next week, and please remember to Become A Ticketholder if you haven't already, leave a legendary comment at the bottom of this post, help out my ad revenue as you read so I don't have to resort to monetizing viral videos where a witch and a florist beat up an old man, and follow me on Tumblr, Reddit, Facebook, and LinkedIn to like what you see and receive the latest Grimm news on my mythical content.

Ticketmaster,

Dreaming On.