Zenescope - Omnibusted #28: The Dream Eater Saga Volume 1

by Sean Wilkinson,

Omnibusted Dreamer

& Ticketmaster

The following is a compilation of my reviews for Volume One of The Dream Eater Saga, Zenescope Entertainment's first big, "let's pare down our Universe" event, introducing an ancient, unstoppable force with the power to wipe entire franchises out of existence, kill the previously unkillable, and give good and evil no other choice than to work together to ensure their own survival.

It's why Belinda abducted Sela from Myst, and why Samantha Darren and Baba Yaga were at odds over the fate of Britney Waters (that still feels wrong to me).
And thankfully for my word count, the Dream Eater isn't a wholly original concept, so I get to talk about its origins in myth, folklore, and popular culture.
In the Pokémon series of games, Dream Eater is an attack used on sleeping Pokémon to heal the user's HP for half of the damage dealt. In the Kingdom Hearts games, Dream Eaters are Darkness-born creatures from the Realm Of Sleep, classified as Nightmares (who eat good dreams and create bad dreams to replace them) or Spirits (who eat bad dreams). There is also the Celtic adder stone I mentioned in a previous post, and the indigenous Dreamcatcher, which serve to cleanse evil spirits and/or bad dreams in the lore of their respective cultures. But most fitting to the Dream Eater here is a Japanese folk spirit known as the baku.

Baku, Wikipedia 

Whereas Zenescope's Dream Eater is more of a conceptual boogeyman that takes human form, the baku was inspired by the Chinese giant panda and Malayan tapir, and depicted as a chimera with elephant and rhinoceros features, the body of a bear, the tail of a cow, and the clawed limbs of a tiger. It was believed that they warded off evil and pestilence in addition to eating or destroying nightmares, but if summoned too often or mistreated, the baku would devour a person's hopes and dreams as punishment.

Because even psychic librarians can't see their own deaths coming, please Become A Ticketholder if you haven't already, leave a comment at the bottom of this post, help out my ad revenue as you read so my dreams don't get eaten by video game characters or cosmic forces, and follow me on BlueSky, Tumblr, Reddit, Facebook, and LinkedIn to like what you see and receive the latest Grimm news on my content.

And for those who have been putting requests on my socials for a link to all of my Retrospective and Omnibusted reviews as a gateway to Zenescope's Grimm Universe without the financial investment, here's my Zenescope tag. For a minor financial investment, you can get a pretty affordable ComiXology subscription that lets you check out full trades and individual issues of nearly the entire Zenescope library. I don't know if it syncs with Amazon Prime, but it's worthwhile if you just want to read every comic book ever made....

The Dream Eater Saga #0: Prologue/Prelude

On the TPB's Table Of Contents page, this issue is referred to as the Prelude, but it says Prologue on the cover of the issue, so that's what I'm going with...except that the title page inside the issue calls it the Prelude, so that's what I'm going with?

Speaking of the cover, it's an homage to Marvel Comics covers for Days Of Future Past and Deadpool Kills the Marvel Universe Again, but with the collage of images being issue covers from Escape From Wonderland, Grimm Fairy Tales, Salem's Daughter, Fear Not, Inferno, Sinbad, Neverland, and other Zenescope titles. Derivative, but well drawn and ominous, and I love it.

The art in the issue itself (penciled by Anthony Spay and colored by Falk) is gorgeous, giving a sense of grandeur to the intimate, smallness to the grand, and darkness to the wonderful in every panel.

And I was pleasantly surprised by the reminder that this was an origin story for Baba Yaga.

Born into a holy order of oracles who were charged with recording the history of the four Realms Of Power into a library (not that one) of fairy tale books, including Sela's Book Of Provenance and the Book Of the Lost that Morrigan would later give to Belinda, Baba Yaga was only a child when her mother (with the unfortunately prophetic name of Fel) was killed by the Dark One, who invaded the order's sanctuary looking for the Book Of the Lost, with Morrigan, Orcus, and the Priestess in tow.

Angered by her mother's death at Malec's hands, as well as Thane, Shang, and Hakan for arriving too late to save her, young Baba Yaga realizes that power is more important than good or evil, and vows revenge against both factions, using a page from the Book Of the Lost to empower herself with the souls of her murdered family.

That page: "The Tale Of the Dream Eater."

This issue was featured as the short story for the Grimm Fairy Tales Volume Ten Trade, and being an origin story that fleshes out minutiae of the series' lore, it fits that spot well. But it also does enough to set up The Dream Eater Saga, of which it is an official part, so I covered it here, separate from Volume Ten.

As its supplemental material, this issue comes with a restatement of the explanations of Earth and the four Realms Of Power from Little Miss Muffet Part 2, the Highborn, Pureblood, Falseblood, and Lowborn character classes and the Dark Horde from Cinderella Revisited, and the Council and Realm Knights who were introduced in Hard Choices.

There are also short bios for the characters who will be featured and/or killed in the event, but they are too numerous to include here, so I will bring them up in the future as they become relevant.

I literally have nothing bad to say about the Prelude (or Prologue, or whatever you want to call it), save for one question: why is it that psychics in fiction almost never see their own deaths coming, but when they do, they're just cool with it?

While you're pondering that, let's move on to issue #1, where the Dream Eater makes its first official appearance. Its Bio from Dream Eater Saga #0 reads as follows:

This will start to have context once I get into talking about the issue itself (which was the random insert from the first Myths and Legends Volume, and the short story from the Tales From Neverland Trade, a review where I mistakenly referred to it as issue #0).

The Dream Eater Saga #1:

Once Upon A Time

Yes, this sharp-toothed old man is what the Dream Eater chose to look like. I'll get into that more a bit later, but for now, let's talk covers.

Perhaps my Third Demon World fatigue from watching Dragon Ball DAIMA has something to do with it, but I'm not a fan of this cover. It may stand out stylistically when compared to the zero issue's chosen cover, and fit the tone and style of this issue better than the others, and I get why the other covers weren't chosen, but the all-warm color scheme with some creepy old man standing in a desert with this high Dutch angle perspective looks more like it belongs on a Goosebumps book than a Grimm Fairy Tales comic.

Aside from the usual, sexy convention exclusives (Sela or Belinda posing in booty shorts or a bikini with a car or motorcycle was a common theme), the main available covers also included a Justice League homage with a beautiful, painted realism to it, the sprawling, "everyone is here!" double-wide mural (my two favorites this issue) that I edited for the banner way up top, and what I think is a bloody variant of an old Wonderland cover because SPOILERS.

Retcons can suck.

They aren't always bad (I again point to Dragon Ball DAIMA for its cool lore drops), but they can absolutely suck if not handled right. Case in point, the Dream Eater. The previous issue would lead one to believe that the Dream Eater was unleashed hundreds or thousands of years ago within Baba Yaga. Hard Choices (and GFT #51) would have one believe that the Dark Horde killed the entire Realm Council except for Blake.

But because the Dream Eater only needed to be a thing now, continuity is what it needs to be so the new threat can exist.

Following the Dark One's short-lived invasion of Earth (stopped, unbeknownst to anyone left in Myst, by a time-traveling Belinda and Baba Yaga and their magic Pokéball made of crystallized cyclops blood), it turns out that Thane was the one to unleash the Dream Eater, desperately sacrificing himself in a last-ditch, scorched earth play to stop Malec from doing what every big comic book villain wants to do.

This would be fine as a simple, misguided act of heroism, but the story cuts to Blake and Sela, the latter cradling a dead Nyssa in her arms as a shooting star passes by in the distance. Blake's reaction makes it clear that he suspects something is up, considering Thane's emotional state the last time Blake saw him and the fact that we haven't seen the lion-man since. So if he thinks that might be the Dream Eater (a limitless, ancient force that specifically targets those born of the Realms Of Power regardless of their polar morality), why has he been laying on his ass and traveling Myst with Sela like they're on a long, life-threatening vacation instead of investigating the end of all non-Lowborn life as they know it? Like I said: retcons can suck, and this is one of those.

Speaking of Sela, her issue #0 bio is pretty on-point, with the exception that it says she is currently trapped in Myst (the last time we actually saw her, Sela had been kidnapped by Belinda, leading into a cliffhanger ending for Volume Ten), but this is less a case of continuity errors than of publication order, as the individual Mother Nature issues hadn't finished releasing when The Dream Eater Saga started its run.

Getting back to continuity, it turns out that the Dream Eater retcon isn't that bad because we're shown a montage of the same shooting star across time and space, including South Dakota (where Belinda and Baba Yaga are preparing to recruit Britney and Sela), New York (where Pan is shown to be alive and feeding on the homeless like a hobo vampire), the Salem's Daughter timeline (where Anna is having visions of an approaching evil and she and Braden encounter a teenage girl who has had the youth sucked from her body - bringing to mind Allexa's fate from the Baba Yaga issue, as well as Pan's vampirism and necromancy-like abilities), Arizona (where Calie and Violet Liddle are trying to cope with the former's Wonderland trauma as an ethereal figure in white observes them from afar), Sinbad's timeline (where Pots has a nightmare, but can't articulate anything beyond binary responses because of a wish he made on Belinda during that unreleased Lamp series), and an unknown location that's probably the cabin from The Good Witch (where Samantha has a 90s Jean Grey faint-gasm while trying to sense the Dream Eater because being able to Big Brother everything and everyone in the Universe and display them as magic holograms is a thing she can do now.

Which is where I start criticizing the character bios.

First, Samantha's bio says that Shang trained her to be the new Guardian of the Nexus when Sela died, and upon her resurrection, Sela "quickly named Samantha as her replacement" if her efforts to stop the Dark Horde invasion failed. This retroactively gives Sela too much credit, as we know from The Good Witch onward that Sela was insulted to learn that she had been replaced and would later be repeatedly thrust into high-stakes scenarios with little to no training where she would fail by allowing personal feelings to interfere with her vaguely defined mission, and merely gave Samantha a reluctant, passive "Good luck," where the bio makes it seem like some profound passing of the torch based in love and trust. Thanks, I hate it.

Speaking of the Dark One's invasion, his bio says it was "thwarted by Sela's brave actions." To recount those brave actions, they include fixating on a dead man she met in her dreams once while all of her allies get slaughtered around her, distracting an ally from making a weapon that could close all portals to the Nexus, using that weapon to destroy the book that she had used to help countless people find their way as well as the box of all remaining Provenance energy in the Realms (which accomplished nothing), being defeated by a swarm of insects, failing to stop the Horde from invading Earth, killing the last fairy in existence, and as we learned this issue, leaving Thane with no option but to unleash a beyond-multiversal shapeshifter programmed to eat all magical beings across time and space. The real heroes of Earth? Belinda and Baba Yaga.

Their bios also contain information that doesn't track with what we've been told in the comics so far, like Baba Yaga being the one to reveal that the Dark One had been using Belinda, and Baba Yaga ingratiating herself with Orcus and claiming part of the Horde as her own. I can't recall Baba Yaga and Orcus ever sharing a panel together, Baba Yaga leading an army or commanding any monsters past Hard Choices (unless you count the lycan who attacked Britney in Myths and Legends, and that's mainly supposition), or any meaningful conversation between the two women aside from Baba Yaga going, "I want revenge on the Dark One; wanna help?" (with no hint to her motivation until The Dream Eater Saga #0) and Belinda agreeing because they'd been shown working together a few times.

Pan, Sinbad, and the Salem's Daughter and Wonderland characters' bios are solid, but the bios that remain fall into a special category (much like Belinda and Baba Yaga's relationships, motives, and social maneuvers) that is less factually inaccurate and more, "that sure would have been nice to see in print!" This begins with the tidbit about Sinbad's crew (who are combined into one bio with "various useful abilities," probably because they're getting eaten later and don't matter) where he "helped free them from the mind control of a merciless wizard." That sure would have been nice to see in print! I'll get to the Piper and Mercy Dante in a minute (relative to how fast you can read, of course).

When the Dream Eater lands, we see it is something like a mix between the T-1000 and a Transformer, as it magically scans humanity before taking the form of an old man and heading straight for the Queen Of Hearts' House Of Mirrors (she/they have seemingly been operating a legit carnival attraction and are in the beginnings of a romantic relationship with a co-worker...but also have dismembered body parts hanging all over their home like grotesque popcorn string ornaments). The Dream Eater devours the conjoined sisters one by one, with the dark-haired bottom half (pause) repenting before her death, asking the Dream Eater if it will hurt.

We don't get an answer from it, but when the issue cuts to the Pied Piper, it's clear from the scream he (and Malec and Lucifer, because it's more magical than it is sonic) hears that being eaten by the Dream Eater does hurt. A lot.

Mercy's bio is a mix of inoffensive inaccuracy (referring to Lucifer as Satan, when we know from Inferno that her name is Lucifer, and Satan will be revealed as a separate character much later on) and things that would have been nice to see in print (Mercy killing unrepentant souls on Earth in the canceled Soul Collector series).

As for the Piper, it's unclear if he's the one from his debut issue or the miniseries (logic says it's the latter because the one from the issue was a construct in Sela's book - which was destroyed - while the miniseries Piper was a real character chronicled and imprisoned in Belinda’s book. Whatever the case, like a lot of the bios mentioned here, it is fleshed out with information that wasn't made explicitly clear in the then-six-year-old original material, retconning the importance and depth of an under-utilized character (since the miniseries, he had only appeared in Hard Choices as Prince Erik's puppeteer) who is guaranteed to be eaten to death despite already being dead. Even Malec and the mysterious white-clad observer from earlier have written him off as a doomed soul.

Leaving the Piper to his own devices, Malec grabs Cindy and transports her to the Inferno with him to team up with Lucifer and Mercy because it's apparently not considered a Realm so travel there isn't restricted?

It makes more sense than Baba Yaga just being able to magic a crack in reality with her bare hands that pinpoints to Sela's exact location so the end of GFT #62 can happen, though.

The issue ends with the reveal that the white-robed observer is one of a group of five who exist in a foggy, Stonehenge-like dimension beyond the Realms. They will be relevant in a future event as well.

I can't recall if her identity is ever revealed, but I like to speculate that she is the innocence Baba Yaga abandoned in her vow of revenge, as she bears some resemblance to the young Baba from the Prelude/Prologue.

The art this issue (by Roberto Viacava, colored by Jason Embury and two others because this is a packed story and Embury worked on two of the covers), while not being on par with the beauty of the zero issue, is still really good (though some properties and characters benefit more from the style than others).

Now, it's time to see what happens when the Piper gets his own One-Shot, which has the distinction of being the first One-Shot Zenescope has ever done that isn't a Tale From Wonderland or Neverland. Typically, like those aforementioned Tales, a One-Shot is a single-issue, standalone comic that highlights a particular character or franchise. But this is different because of its place in a major company-wide crossover event, which Zenescope had never done before. Sure, they had revealed links between GFT, Wonderland, and Neverland (and hinted at similar events transpiring in Oz, which had yet to have a published series at this point) and done a smaller crossover with Sinbad, but this was something new for the little pulp juggernaut that could.

Also, it's been awhile since we've seen The Piper do...anything.

As his bio says The Piper began his short tenure as a member of the Underutilized & Overpowered Club in Grimm Fairy Tales #12 before getting his own limited spin-off series. 

For obvious reasons (he can easily control people and animals to do his bidding from a distance without being seen, including those with similar powers, making him uninteresting and sucking any tension out of whatever scenario he might have otherwise appeared in), the Piper would not be used again until Hard Choices as the puppetmaster behind Prince Erik's murderous heel turn at the end of GFT #49, and wasn't seen after that until the previous issue of The Dream Eater Saga, where he failed to slaughter some nameless coeds because he was scared by the Queen Of Hearts' psychic death knell, and was promptly disowned by Malec, calling into question the white-robed girl's claim that he is important and worth observing. So...he's going to die screaming, too, right?

The Dream Eater Saga #2: The Piper (One-Shot)

In Hamelin, Germany in 1284, a hundred-thirty children mysteriously disappeared. It's in the town's actual public record as early as a centennial memorial. But being real and mysterious was also enough at the time to spawn a folk legend that rings very similar to the Irish legend of Saint Patrick that predates the Pied Piper by almost a thousand years, just darker and creepier because Germany. And because mysterious tragedies needed "plausible" causes (colorfully dressed Crusade draftsmen and an undiagnosed epidemic of St. Vitus' Dance weren't good enough reasons), we wound up with a fairy tale about a mercenary musician with a magic flute who commits mass kidnapping because he was underpaid for his rat-catching skills. And because tragic history cannot escape economy, the town now celebrates the Piper legend in plays and other written and performance media.

In The Piper One-Shot, things begin as the miniseries did by going back to the year of origin, but surpassing the source material in terms of darkness when the Piper (looking considerably non-Pied) uses his Falseblood gift to march the children into a river to drown.

Now that the Dark One and his Horde have been known entities for quite some time, the Piper's simple, financially-driven act of revenge is muddled here by the use of the children's souls as an offering to the Dark One in exchange for "power so great that not even death will hold sway over me." So...was it never about money and revenge? Would he have taken the children even if he was paid fairly because he wanted power that badly? That becomes slightly more clear later in the issue, but for now, I said what I said and simpler is better, even with the exposition boxes telling us that the Piper may already be dead here.

When the issue isn't expositing how unique, unstoppable, and important the Piper is to a crossover event where seldom-used and abandoned characters like himself are set to be cannibalized to death, the story focuses on the elderly Mr. Douglas, a man so distraught over the death of his wife that he summoned the Piper to get revenge on the doctor who failed to save her life (and presumably the drunk driver who landed Mrs. Douglas in the hospital to begin with).

When the old man has regrets after the fact, the Piper tries in vain to transfer his own petty, emo motivations, but Mr. Douglas is too old and ill-versed in psychology to know what emo transference is, so the Piper eats his soul.

Which is when the Dream Eater shows up, reaches down the Piper's throat (which, given the vagina dentata design of his face,

is probably someone's demonetizable fetish), and rips Mr. Douglas' soul out of him to return it where it belongs.

I've criticized the Dream Eater's chosen appearance in the previous issue, but I love that, despite being designed as a primordial genocide machine to protect humanity, it has a personality. The Dream Eater cracks jokes, shows concern for the Lowborn, and listens to those of the Realms who repent in their final moments even though it treats existential cannibalism like an office job. And the fact that it is an unstoppable force in the form of an old man actually serves that personality well and plays into the subversion of expectations when its targets see it and believe that they have a fighting chance.

There is also more to the Piper's past (developing a hatred for humanity because generic witch hunt tropes made his girlfriend's father think their relationship was based in brainwashing), but it felt too little, too late, and I was genuinely disappointed when the issue ended not with the Piper being eaten "alive," but being summoned away by Baba Yaga at the last possible moment.

The art this issue (drawn by Allan Otero and colored by Volume Nine beasts, Studio Cirque) is beautiful and detailed, with a cool color pallette and a style reminiscent of Wonderland and the better parts of Neverland. My only real gripe is the returning plot device of the Piper being summoned with the Book Of the Lost. It raises so many inconsistencies regarding Belinda’s connection to the book, and made me question which book it was (the cover is seemingly red in color in the one panel we see Mr. Douglas with it,

but at the end, when Baba Yaga summons him, she's clearly using Belinda’s book).

In essence, I don't care for the Piper, I think the Dream Eater is becoming a fun, entertaining, badass villain, and I enjoyed looking at this issue, including the above chosen cover.

There's also a B Cover from Jason Embury that features Belinda holding the Piper's severed head, and a retailer exclusive that's a Psycho homage, and I like them all. The shown A Cover is my favorite, though, because of its rough, gleefully morbid, dynamic imagery (and my feelings about the Piper as a hastily fleshed out, sarcastically quoted "character").

Next, The Dream Eater Saga meets Myths and Legends as witches collide, and a psychic and a florist attempt to beat up an old man.

To catch you up on these characters' individual histories, I've 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 psychic 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.

In the individual Dream Eater and Myths & Legends reviews, I initially included reprints of content relevant to each issue’s focus property (like I did with The Piper One-Shot and Britney's M&L Volume). But if the reprint content was dense enough (Samantha already got her own character-focused post, plus some appearances in Myths & Legends, and Baba Yaga has had her introductory issue, a Halloween appearance, a Tales From Wonderland appearance, appearances throughout Volume Eight, and the entire Sinbad Crossover trilogy, not to mention Myths & Legends and her focus in this very event series), I simply included a link if you wished to catch up.

Such is the case with Wonderland, which gets the One-Shot treatment next, after a trilogy of miniseries, another trilogy of Tales Volumes, and three years of Annuals because threes coming in threes is so three that it deserves to have won one.

Don't at me for being weird, Ticketholders; this is Wonderland I'm talking about here. Weirdness is how you keep the sanity from driving you mad. Now have some tea and let's get back to the reviews.

The Dream Eater Saga #4

Wonderland One-Shot

As hinted at in the Myths & Legends crossover (and just looking at the chosen A Cover by Planet Hulk and Witchblade cover artist Keu Cha, which I think is a callback to a Tales From Wonderland cover), this is a Cheshire Cat issue.

Cheshire here is an...interesting character. If you recall from previous Wonderland titles, he was the result of Henry Allen sending a normal housecat through the mirror portal in his basement. After being wounded and defeated by Calie Liddle in Beyond Wonderland, Cheshire was forced to revert to his original form in Tales From Wonderland until he could take enough lives to regain his power, at which time he was adopted by a young woman named Lina, whom he would exploit for murder victims and bring with him to Wonderland as his queen. In Escape From Wonderland, Calie would once again defeat Cheshire, trapping him in the Jabberwocky's cave with a ceiling collapse that also killed Lina.

Jumping forward to this issue, Cheshire is now gaunt and skeletal-looking after being trapped for two years of publication time (which is seventeen years in-Universe, and given the nature of time in Wonderland, could be more or less time for him), his paws bloodied from trying to climb and claw his way out of the cave so he can take revenge on the Liddles.

What makes this revenge motive, and this evolution of Cheshire as an overall character interesting (with a heavy, elliptical pause of qualification) is that he expresses love for Lina here. That's right; the insane, corrupted murder-cat, who used Lina's grievances as a kill list and twisted her into a Hellraiser-level piercing fetishist, loves her.

And coincidentally (or because of the time-space-transcending nature of the Dream Eater?), Cheshire is at last able to break through from Wonderland to the Nexus just as a certain, ominous comet goes streaking by overhead.

Meanwhile, presumably in Arizona because that's where the last issue said a school would be attacked by a wild animal, we catch up with Calie, who is making breakfast for Violet while hallucinating and holding an inner dialogue fueled by anxiety and Wonderland PTSD.

If you've been following along with the series and my reviews, you know my feelings on psychological horror that wastes time by faking out the audience and is therefore bullshit. But you also know my feelings about what happens when the Wonderland series' writing uses things I don't like, in a new way, to show character progression. The pages with Calie and Violet early on in this issue are full of tense, surreal psychology that combine real-world parental worries with the "it's the anniversary of that time an insane dream dimension tried to kill you and corrupt your daughter, so you can't keep hiding the horrifying truth from her anymore" context of Zenescope's most and least coherent Grimm Universe franchise, giving powerful (if a bit heavy on the tell side of the "show, don't tell" equation) insight into the toll that Wonderland has taken, and will continue to take, on Calie Liddle.

Unfortunately for the Liddle women, we know they are still trapped in a horror movie for three reasons: first and most obvious is that Cheshire has followed Violet to school; second is that Violet's seat in first period English is right by the big picture window so she can see the killer staring at her and vanishing between panels like she's Laurie Strode in Halloween (the first one, not the Rob Zombie one or the one from 2018 that replaces Halloween II); and third is the horror movie trope that said English class is studying H.P. Lovecraft.

Except we might as well throw Friday the 13th Part III in there for the awesome panel and splash page of Cheshire smashing through the window and into the classroom where he proceeds to dismember everyone who doesn't have plot armor, and reference Hollow Man because Cheshire also does some of that while invisible, including an entire police force (because if The Library is good for anything, it's as a reminder that emergency responders in the Grimm Universe are not equipped to deal with magic, giant carnivores, or any combination thereof).

Also, he bisects a legally distinct Mary Jane facsimile wearing a tight-fitting MILK shirt. Unimportant, but I felt like mentioning it...for some reason.

What is important is that, meanwhile, Calie is shopping to drown out the suicidal voice in her head when Violet calls her about Cheshire, and gives the worried mom voice in her head plenty to say in response. For lack of a less punny choice of words, a verbal game of cat and mouse ensues, with the Cat adding much dialogue and scenery to his usual diet of human flesh and souls.

With Calie on her way to the rescue and Violet huddled at the mercy of the Cheshire Cat, we are soon reminded that this is a Dream Eater Saga issue as much as it is a part of the ongoing Wonderland narrative, when the being itself shows up to absolutely manhandle the big Cat and devour him.

The art and paneling (drawn by Novo Malgapo and Marco Cosentino, and colored by Vinicius Andrade) are near perfect quality work, particularly with the sensational gore and explosive action scenes, though there's one panel where they could have depicted the characters with more expressive faces. The character writing and dialogue that accompany it are peak as well.

See how the dialogue and expressions don't match‽

I think I was disappointed the first time I read through this that Calie and Violet didn't have more involvement in the Saga, but now I get that they have their own problems to deal with later. See, the Dream Eater notes that Calie and Violet "reek of Wonderland," but it can tell they are still human and it makes no effort to pursue them, instead reconstituting and resurrecting Cheshire's victims as the Liddles flee, with Calie promising to tell Violet everything and the issue calling this "The Beginning" (which you may recall is an ending reborn so it can later end with a new ending that begins something else, because Wonderland).

Perhaps it causes confusion by also promising to continue in the Neverland One-Shot (with respect to The Dream Eater Saga), but I like that this issue is more about setting up future miniseries and a Wonderland ongoing series than drawing Calie and Violet into a Creation-level, reality-ending event when they're just a couple of savvy, barely resilient, normal humans who have yet to fully wrap their minds around Wonderland ruining their lives.

Strong contender for the best Dream Eater issue and the best Wonderland issue so far.

Now that you've had your tea and realized I'm not entirely crazy, it's time to visit that dethroned vampire who lives in the sewer.

As I mentioned in my review of the Wonderland One-Shot issue of The Dream Eater Saga, if the focus issue's background lore is too dense to reprint, I will instead include a link to the most recent, relevant Retrospective or Omnibusted post to keep you engaged and avoid The Algorithm (a.k.a. the Analytics Eater) flagging me for repetitive content. Like Wonderland, Neverland falls into the "too dense" category. But once The Dream Eater Saga is behind us and I have finished reading and reviewing Neverland: Hook, I will include everything in another update to the chronological Neverland Omnibusted post, but that won't happen for quite some time.

The Dream Eater Saga #5

Neverland One-Shot

Though the Wonderland One-Shot claimed in its ending that its story would continue here, that turns out to not be entirely true for a few reasons: the Liddles aren't up to scale with the bigger players in the Saga and have their own future nightmares to deal with (before the Wonderland ongoing series begins, I will subject myself to the madness of compiling a chronological Omnibusted on the franchise, but that will also be a long time coming), and though that issue spent a lot of time on the Liddles, the hero of this event, for lack of a better word at this time, is the Dream Eater itself. So the continuing story here isn't that of Calie and Violet, but of the Dream Eater as it seeks out new targets and saves or restores collateral humans from certain death, as it was designed to do.

But of course, this is a Neverland issue now, and as we've seen in the "Once Upon A Time" issue, the Neverland character of importance here (for lack of a better word because he's a flat pile of self-important garbage founded on lies) is Pan.

I like that, after abandoning his unexplored path of vengeance (for his brother's murder) so that he can be a generic power glutton and puppet king under the Dark One, Pan is now reduced to a weak, wounded animal, living among, and feeding on the life force of, the homeless, and this has brought him right back where his journey truly began: the sewers of New York City. And I don't just mean that I'm deriving joy from the contrived suffering of a fictional character (which I am); I mean that Pan's suffering makes him thematically interesting for once.

Unfortunately, that interest doesn't last longer than its own setup because no sooner does Pan stop inner-monologuing about getting revenge on the people who took everything from him that distracted him from his original revenge, than we are introduced to Angelica the water nymph. Story-wise, she's Belle: one of the last surviving members of her kind, unable to return to her world, and possessed of a yearning for a time when she was important and needed. There's even a bit of lore where Pan reveals that fairies and elemental creatures like water nymphs don't have souls (add this bit to your cosmology speculations collection, alongside fairies being composed of Provenance energy, the existence of the Yaga Clan's Library and the white-robed observers, the Inner Sanctum Of the Nexus, and Belle's mention of a First Master in the Neverland series), drawing further comparison between Angelica and Belle.

And because this is Grimm Fairy Tales, where souls are up for exchange on the regular, Angelica is only important long enough to lead Pan to a powerful "Gypsy" (the technically correct term is Romani, but this is a comic book from 2011 and Angelica is a fictional character who's existed since the dawn of time in-Universe and somehow survived prolonged, direct exposure to the New York sewer system despite clearly stating that others of her kind were killed by much lower levels of pollution, so cut her some slack for not knowing that it will be considered a geographically incorrect ethnic slur nine years in the future, okay?) who may be able to help him regain his powers and return to Neverland...for a price.

Pan is pompous enough to think he can choke water to death, so Angelica is silenced for the majority of the issue while he engages the fortune teller Esmeralda (because why not throw a Hunchback Of Notre Dame reference in while we're at it‽) in a war of wits and wills...only to learn that he brought a dumbass to a gunfight and the dumbass wasn't loaded.

Yeah, despite her claims to be an ordinary businesswoman (who can accept American Express as payment instead of Mariken Xpriss now), Esmeralda is the genuine article of oracles, and has her shack warded to the hilt with power-dampening magic (because if you're going to be a power player in this Saga, you've gotta have a hiding place saturated in anti-magic magic so that the magic-sensing gluttony machine can't find you or hurt you).

Not that it matters, but Esmeralda also gives us a last name for Pan: his full, human name is Jacob Wiles. The issue gives an Editor's Note tying this to the 2008 Annual (the "Hush, Little Baby" segment focuses on Mary and Daniel Darling, not the Wiles'), which is wrong because we don't learn about Jacob until Family History, and there is no mention of Pan by name until the Neverland miniseries.

Pan is not only pompous enough to think he can choke water to death, but pompous enough to think he can drain the Dream Eater's power and claim it for himself, so in exchange for "anything" (the default price of desperate fools in the Grimm Universe), Pan is stripped of his youth and sent to the past to find "a being of incredible power, but one not fully aware of how powerful they truly might be" (and if you remember the part of "Once Upon A Time" with Anna and Braden, you can probably guess where this is going).

Surprise! Angelica is still alive because you can't choke water to death! But actual surprise! Esmeralda was Ursula the Sea Witch all along!

Or, it would have been an actual surprise if the covers weren't the comic book equivalent of a gratuitous anime OP. Both the selected Khary Randolph cover and the B variant by Alé Garza and Ivan Nunes give away the Ursula twist, and the Qualano/Nivangune convention cover has Angelica on it. All three are beautiful covers; I just take issue (comic book puns!) with how they spoil the twist.

The art in the issue is good for what it's trying to do, though. Maybe not on par with previous Dream Eater issues or the last two GFT Volumes in terms of realism or definition, but Jean-Paul DeShong's penciling achieves fluidity and expression by balancing defined, dramatic shadows and loosely lined facial boundaries, aided by the coloring of the Saga's powerhouse contributor, Jason Embury, allowing the characters to shift from sinister to vulnerable and back again with ease. On the other hand, the story is rather thin and simple, recycling a character type as a mere plot device to bring together the two characters who actually matter and facilitate a twist reveal that's spoiled before you even read a single word, which makes Angelica almost unnecessary. This issue can't even cite its own lore properly. Plus, I really hate Pan and the execution of Neverland as a brand so far.

My least favorite Zenescope IP in recent memory, and least favorite Dream Eater Saga issue, no question.

Last week, I struggled with whether to keep this as a Grimm Fairy Tales Retrospective or expand it into a Zenescope - Omnibusted, as well as whether Salem's Daughter fit into my "just link it because the lore is too dense" rule, especially since my original Salem's Daughter review was an Omnibusted post.

But I don't have to worry about that this week because this post is all Dream Eater all the way, so I'm leaving out everything else and letting the links do the heavy lifting if you want to know more.
Said links are up above, so let's go West...to Pennsylvania‽

The above character bios for the series' protagonists and the opening exposition/narration boxes in The Dream Eater Saga #6: Salem's Daughter (One-Shot) provide a brief summary of previous events.

As formulaic and predictable as those events were, I enjoyed the little blinks of chemistry between Anna and Braden, with her being the pragmatic, spiritual, but insecure one, and him being the stereotypical cowboy who drinks, wastes money, and boldly commits to his actions, whatever they may be. The later addition of Letitia in the second Volume was welcome, and contributed briefly to their dynamic. When not being forced by the plot to go places and solve mysteries, the three leads played off each other pretty well, with witty banter and hints that things could have developed into something more if the series had continued. When not rushed, the pacing was addictively perfect. The action was very clearly depicted and competently paneled, too. It's just a shame that we didn't get much more of it.

The same issues that plagued other short-lived Zenescope franchises, like Sinbad, also made their appearance in Salem's Daughter, such as placing more importance on formula than lore or character, not finishing an established story (because being too formulaic probably led to its cancellation), and having a bunch of name inconsistencies, continuity errors, and typos (which were early Zenescope problems in general). 

And with that, we arrive at the "not much more" that we did get, as part of The Dream Eater Saga.

The Dream Eater Saga #6

Salem's Daughter One-Shot

As we saw in the "Once Upon A Time" issue, Anna and Braden appeared during the "Dream Eater comet streaks through time and space" montage, where they encountered an elderly woman who claimed to be a teenaged girl before falling unconscious and/or dead. And it's strongly suggested at the end of the Neverland One-Shot that Ursula took Pan's power and youth and sent him back to the Salem's Daughter timeline, where he became the one responsible for the girl's accelerated aging.

The exposition boxes as the duo ride into Royersford, Pennsylvania make it so the audience doesn't have to have read Salem's Daughter or The Haunting, but you could draw the conclusion that Anna's mind-control powers are something she got from the mysterious entity sharing her body, as she seems genuinely surprised that it's something she can do. Also, she shows concern for Braden throughout the issue that suggests they've been traveling and fighting the supernatural together for some time following the events of those Volumes.

Upon reaching the limits of Royersford, Braden and Anna are informed of an epidemic in the town that presents as accelerated aging in the young and quick deaths for adult victims.

So of course, the duo act like 2020 MAGA Conservatives and force their way into town with no protection, plague be damned, where they meet Doctor Barrie (and Braden immediately contracts the plague and starts aging as soon as the doctor is introduced, so anyone with a brain can figure out that the doctor is Pan using a glamour) and his nurse, Charlotte.

Things progress as you'd expect, with the villain reveal being obvious and Anna immolating Pan's new Lost Boy puppets before sending him away through a portal (which reverses Braden's aging despite Pan still being alive because plot convenience)...but not before he's able to absorb enough of Anna's power to save his own ass because on the other side of said portal is the Dream Eater. So, using the same mind-control powers that Anna used to get herself and Braden into Royersford, Pan manages to barely endear himself to the Dream Eater as a "loyal servant" and bringer of sentient magical foodstuffs.

The story also cuts to Charlotte for a bit, who is revealed to be working for Darius, in secret opposition to Pan because he was interfering with Darius' plans for the town.

The first Volume of The Dream Eater Saga ends here, and I don't really remember if Anna plays into later events of the...event, so again, I'm disappointed that this might be the last we'll see of the Salem's Daughter world.

Also, why is Pan still breathing?

Despite still trying to get Pan over after all this time, this One-Shot was a good way to incorporate Salem's Daughter into the larger Grimm Universe while showing how Anna's and Braden's story formula would have worked in a more episodic format.

Perhaps the brand would have survived if it had gone with something more like Grimm Fairy Tales' initial, issue-by-issue, episodic format, rather than trying to follow in the footsteps of the more successful Wonderland, slightly longer-lived Neverland, and similarly ill-fated Sinbad.

But I've speculated and summarized long enough, so let's talk about the art style. Original Salem's Daughter penciler Roberto Viacava returns with colors by The Haunting's Roland Pilcz, and it's easy to recognize Viacava's simple but elastically expressive style from the first Volume's final issues. But I noticed somewhere around this panel

(and maybe a page earlier?) where the line work gets a bit sharper, more defined, and slightly more detailed, and I would guess this is from the second credited penciler, Tomas Aira (the Night Of the Living Dead comics). Neither style is bad; I'm just showing off that I noticed the change. As for the covers, Dream Eater Saga regulars Ale Garza and Sanju Nivangune (the latter of whom also worked on the two convention variants for this issue with Mike DeBalfo) handle the chosen cover shown above, and Pasquale Qualano worked with Studio Cirque (of the ninth and tenth Volumes of Grimm Fairy Tales) on a pretty brutal and dynamic B cover.

Next week, The Dream Eater Saga Volume Two begins with another Myths and Legends crossover, so Stay Tuned and please remember to Become A Ticketholder if you haven't already, comment at the bottom of this post, help out my ad revenue as you read, and follow me on BlueSky, Tumblr, Reddit, Facebook, YouTube, and LinkedIn to like what you see and receive the latest Grimm news on my content.

Omnibuster,

Out.