Zenescope - Omnibusted #36: Wonderland Volume One

Article by Sean Wilkinson,

a.k.a. The Omnibuster.

As I begin November in need of some downtime to consume more media, get ahead of my December content (I'm halfway through Rascal Does Not Dream Of Santa Claus, and drafting its review, which is why I've just started editing this Omnibusted compilation the Monday before publication), and prepare for the very real possibility that Presidential stubbornness and partisan warfare will take a chainsaw to my financial stability because the majority population of my county, and my employer's customer base (who openly support, and voted twice for, the Great Pumpkin—there are multiple prominent signs in my town to that effect that would likewise benefit from a good chainsawing) are on government assistance (which no longer exists because no one currently in power has ever won Jenga before), I once again find myself at a loss for words when it comes to a proper editing job that requires more effort than the average ComiXology Trade compilation.

I clearly am not at a loss for words about other things, though. But to jog my creativity in these seasonally (and...otherwise) affected times of disorder, I decided to start off this post by connecting the original Wonderland trilogy and Omnibus to this new era of Wonderland Retrospectives. So, to that effect, here's an edited reprint of some of my final thoughts on Escape From Wonderland: Following Johnny’s death by hanging, the story jumps forward. Calie has had white hair since coming through the broken mirror, perhaps to strengthen the symbolic connection between her and Johnny. This is something we saw again with Sela in Inferno: a heroine suddenly and inexplicably having grey or white hair. The only thing I can draw from this, other than some attempt at being smart and clever, is that magic in the Grimm Universe literally sucks. Sure, being in Wonderland can turn a helpless, clueless teen mom into a nigh-unstoppable killing machine, but once you leave Wonderland, no amount of leave-in conditioner can save your Samsonite locks from that kind of damage. My point in mentioning Calie’s hair color was that in the jump forward, she still has white hair, so the only obvious way you can tell that it’s a jump forward is that Violet is now a teenager. Calie believes, stupidly, that Wonderland is behind them, and that she can just run and lie and hide her past from Violet and have a normal life for once. That, above all things, has been her Achilles’ heel from the beginning, and is one of the most infuriating—but necessary?—aspects of her character. Some time later, we find out that the Queen of Hearts is still running her funhouse, and that she has come into possession of the Mad Hatter’s hat. She gives it to a boy who manages to survive the House of Mirrors (whom we learn in the first issue of the Ongoing series, is named Sammy), and Escape ends for real, while also promising something more to come.

That something would be a direct continuation of this post-skip Epilogue as part of the Dream Eater Saga, where Wonderland got the One-Shot treatment after the aforementioned 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 experience déjà vu while expecting a different result.

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 (counter to what had been established about fatal, non-Ebony Blade wounds up to that point).

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, which makes it an inequality) 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 the 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 67, Calie’s constantly backpedaling efforts to tell Violet the whole Wonderland story come to a head...in her head...in the 2012 Wonderland Annual. But first (because I already got political at the beginning of this compilation and I like the rhetoric of this next review's intro), some more commentary!

Remember, Ticketholders: the people and things in our immediate lives, and in the larger world, can only affect us (for good or ill) if we grant them the power to do so.

I know that I'm attributing a metaphysical philosophy to real, tangible things and that it sounds like I'm boiling broad, complex global issues down to "ignore it and it will go away," but what I'm really speaking to is our rights as people to reinforce what makes us happy, to make choices that benefit ourselves and those we love, and to withhold support from that which means us harm. Evil triumphs where good men do nothing, and the most insidious trick of evil is convincing the world that it doesn't exist.

The means by which my country came to be what it was may not have been the most noble, but the intent behind looking at the rest of the world and saying, "we don't want to be that because we've been on the bad end of it" was a thing to be admired at one time when I was growing up. Now, the leader of the country I admired until 2016 (and had briefly renewed hope for beginning in 2021 after his departure, despite a riot and his repeated evasions of justice marring the intervening administration's tenure) speaks of enacting a revisionist history while using the First Amendment as toilet paper, and we're not even out of his first year in office yet. People are being shot. People are losing their jobs for speaking their minds. People are being falsely deported. This isn't my America anymore, and I'm willing to bet it isn't your America anymore, either. Let's all do what we can to get our America back; otherwise, the madness will only get worse over the next three years, and take us all with it into a world that once only existed in fiction and nightmares.

And with that said, on to the review.

Wonderland Annual #4 (2012)

Perhaps the worst thing I can say about the 2012 Wonderland Annual is that there isn't much to say about it plotwise.

Following canonically from the Dream Eater Saga One-Shot, it's more of a bridge between the original trilogy and the ongoing series that was to come (which I will review starting next week and continue through the end of the year), rather than a story (or a collection of stories) in its own right like the first three Annuals were.

This fourth Annual continues the inner dialogue-heavy recap narration style that the One-Shot used so masterfully in between the horror homages, feline carnage, and school-set action. But here, the focus is almost exclusively on the surreal; what I lovingly call the Little Miss Muffet-ass Psychological Thriller Bullshit. Yes, the art depicting said bullshit (drawn by Mike Krome—misspelled as Crome on the credits page—and Dawn Schwartz—known professionally by her maiden name, Dawn McTeigue—with colors by Sabine Rich) is bursting with detailed, beautiful, gory imagery, but imagery is ultimately all that it amounts to. It is a literally graphic novel interpretation of every worst-case scenario that Calie Liddle can envision for herself and Violet (extradimensional kidnapping, murder, surrender to and corruption by Wonderland, the return of every horror she had previously overcome, thereby rendering her efforts pointless,...), and in serving that purpose, it is effective. The pointlessness of the illustration illustrates the point that I am using this review to make: that denial, deflection, and retreat are more damaging to reality and to one's own psyche than truth and action. I don't like that (within the Zene-scope and canon of a fictional work), almost nothing I am reading here is "real," but the message is one I can get behind, and I can appreciate the artistry of its delivery despite my biases.

Basically, the plot we get here is that, after fleeing from the Dream Eater and the soon-to-be-Dream-Eaten Cheshire Cat, Calie is putting off telling Violet about Wonderland as they drive through backgrounds that victims in road trip horror movies would drive through, and she almost runs their car off the road (twice) by falling asleep at the wheel, all the while recapping the trilogy for us in her mind and literally driving herself to the brink of madness, until she comes to the conclusion that she already came to at the beginning of Escape From Wonderland: that the best way to keep Violet safe and maintain her own sanity is to face everything like a badass momma and be true to what's real. I guess it's because she's traumatized and having to deal with the residual effects of Wonderland in a new, reality-based context with a daughter who is no longer the baby she was back then, and I have no real firsthand experience with raising children or suffering PTSD to be able to speak on the validity of what I'm about to say, but I find it annoying when characters are written to have to learn the same lesson more than once.

Again, the art in this Annual is beautiful, and the closing narration where Calie takes Violet to the ruins of her old house and has her first decent night of sleep in over a decade because she shared her burden and stopped letting her past fears define her present (until Wonderland does what Wonderland be doin' as of the new series) hits with a choking catharsis that makes the previous pages worth reading. But the repetitive moral was annoying, and the sheer deficit of any significant happenings beyond said conclusion was disappointing.

If you want to get into Wonderland, this and the One-Shot are decent recaps. I've even praised the One-Shot above for its action and storytelling, and would say it is the superior issue of the two.

I'd also say you're better off setting aside the time to read the original trilogy and the Tales, if not also the previous Annuals, if you're more interested in a complete story than artistic sophistry with a TL;DR paint job.

And with that, here we are at the true beginning of the Wonderland Ongoing series!

This first Volume is a standard compilation affair with no specially redesigned covers or in-between pages, and the ComiXology version and the scanned version are identical, so sorry if that doesn't leave me with much room to critique or complain about the overall TPB experience. However, this first issue has given me plenty to talk about....

Wonderland #1

The first thing you may notice about Wonderland's first issue is that the credits page doesn't feature any miniature cover art, which is something we haven't seen before from Zenescope...and that's because there are twelve of them!

Well, technically, there are only six that you could consider as unique; the rest are "rare" recolors or reskins of more "common" covers for those who want to see Calie and Violet dye-free or in different outfits or something.

It instead has text hyping up the "series every Zenescope fan has been waiting for" and explaining its placement in the franchise's timeline (which is surprisingly straightforward relative to previous entries, especially the Alice material).
I also like that, as of the 2012 Giant-Size and Call Of Wonderland, Zenescope had been utilizing forgotten plots and characters (like the Red Queen and Knight). This holds true in the ongoing series, as well, as the story proper begins by addressing Escape From Wonderland's cliffhanger.

Prior to being eaten by the Dream Eater to the tune of a scream that transcended time and space, the Julia/Bethany Queen Of Hearts worked at a carnival house of mirrors, where no one batted an eye at the sudden mass-child disappearances or the increasing staff shortage since she started (though the former did get press coverage, according to the clippings found with Calie's journal), and she handed off the Mad Hatter's hat to a boy named Sammy (whom I like to think is the boy in the ghost costume from the Monkey's Paw Halloween Special, though the reporter from the House Of Liddle Annuals was also named Sammy, so maybe it's just a common name in the Grimm Universe, like Eric or Cindy). And because reasons for sequels get less original over time and villains get quippier and more sympathetic at a similar rate (though, the original had a pretty sympathetic backstory that I like), we've gone from Jack the Ripper to Malec's Collection house to Drake Liddle (an abusive child-rapist)

to Johnny Liddle (Uncle D's favorite recurring victim) to now Sammy (who is just Johnny again without the sexual assault because Sammy's father likes to have "manual conversations" with Sammy's face whenever he feels like he isn't the center of attention). Sammy had too much fun at the carnival for his father's liking and his mother is a drug addict, so a "talk" ensues, after which point, Sammy returns (practically drowning in the hat, so he looks ridiculous), and delivers some...sharp...pointed rhetoric to his old man's throat that removes his ability to speak (or "speak") or do much of anything for the indefinite future.

In Wonderland, the Queen Of Spades reminds us of another obscure, featured character: her medieval underling, the Grey Knight. We know from Call Of Wonderland that its course of events are the beginning of the Queen Of Spades' efforts to take over the Jabberwocky's position as ruler of Wonderland by creating a Queen Of Hearts in her image with the power to counter any expected future threats. Which is sure to work out perfectly in Wonderland, just like my sarcasm. Anyway, she goes to the abandoned Cave Of the Jabberwocky "where the shadows themselves cannot be trusted" (the Queen Of Spades can manipulate and travel through shadows, by the way) to claim the remnants of the Jabberwocky's power for herself.

That was the cliffhanger ending for the first issue, but what's meant to be the focus (and Prologue even though it takes up all but two pages) of the issue, aside from the Hatter legacy stuff and the Spade Queen's plotting, is Calie and Violet moving into a new house somewhere called Daresbury (fictional in America, but an actual town in Cheshire County in England, so nice reference there), which I think is where Sammy just happens to live. It's basic "family on the run moves in with minimalism in mind" stuff with a Wonderland twist that made me think of The Skeleton Key both times I read this,

and flavored up with Calie's usual inner dialogue of paranoid logic vs. morbid pessimism and a warm mother-daughter dynamic. It feels at once like the writers don't know how to progress Calie as a character (because she's learned the same lesson twice but still doesn't want to share everything with Violet even though she already did) and are speedrun-contriving a reluctant heroine narrative similar to what Sela has already spent seventy-five-plus issues on. Enter the Innocent, who meets Calie in a dream to annoint her as the future savior of Wonderland. And just like those times Sela forgot fairy tales were real and that she can do magic, Calie calls bullshit on the dream-invading cosmic entity despite having been to, experienced, survived, and been haunted and hunted by, Wonderland.

This franchise makes very Liddle sense (been a long time since I used that one), but I like the effort that the series is starting out with in terms of continuity, tone, art style (V. Ken Marion & Thomas Bonvillain), and character usage (outside of the lead, of course).

The preview page reminds us that back in the day, Zenescope posted free comic book previews online, including the second issue of the Wonderland Ongoing series (which I will review next). 

I wrote this next intro the way I did because I had started watching and listening to a lot of anti-grifter essay videos on YouTube, which made me sensitive to moments where I seemed self-contradictory or misleading (a big one being the Chucky Razor Blade Debacle Of 2021—original and retraction), including my choice of banner (or thumbnail, if you want to get all social media preview about it, but the context of the banner being misleading no longer applies here), and the conflicting nature of this review's message and what I said in the Annual review.

But context and history are important, and historically, I've always been a "pick the middle even though it's hard because the hard thing to do is the right thing" rhetorician. A naive idealist. A "to make the business better, you have to spend money to make money" marketer with no significant capital and no established business. A human being with a moral code and a history of tame but self-destructive vices. And it pains me to realize that the new low bar for decent human beings is set to "not a completely shameless piece of shit." But I digress because I have a review intro to get through.

More to the context of the issue I reviewed next, the mini art on the credits page is back. I am still of the mind that reviewing consistent art is repetitive and pointless, so check it out for yourselves.

And finally, Wonderland issues so far seem to have a three-location structure

between the town where moving truly is the greatest terror,

Wonderland, and the new Liddle house (where ditto), so I think I'll keep using those Superfriends memes for now.

Wonderland #2

We begin with Sheriff Sands (so...maybe Julie's father or older brother?) of Dansbury (so the writers forgot the Cheshire County reference from the previous issue and the town is now named after a park in Pennsylvania?) receiving a domestic violence call to Sammy's house, where he finds the opening scene from the original Halloween with Sammy Daniels the former ghost cosplayer in the Michael Meyers role and wearing a dumpy, oversized hat instead of a clown costume. Then the issue turns into Invasion Of the Body Snatchers when Sands touches the hat and is infected by Johnny Liddle's madness (something that was foreshadowed—and probably caused—by Calie's hallucination of her omnipresent brother in the last issue).

As the town with two names is slowly consumed by the ghost of Johnny, we learn that the Jabberwocky's store of power was not simple energy or strength as we understand it, but a stockpile of uncorrupted (and naked) people he had been hoarding like a treeful of acorns (Jabberwock Deez Nutz, if you will, because it's low-hanging fruit, and I must stop now before my readers get two teste with me). The Queen Of Spades uses her powers to turn them all into her own army of card soldiers (legally distinct Anti-Venom approximations with Spade theming that look disturbingly cool and intimidating).

Life on the run is starting to (always did?) wear on Violet, with recurring, "scream and sweat yourself awake" nightmares and a nasty case of cabin fever, putting a Wonderland twist on the "overprotective mom vs. independent daughter" dynamic that culminates in a heated exchange of unmeant words and Violet being taken by the Hatter Collective as the issue ends. The dialogue here is emotional and realistic, even though it's predicated on Calie having still not told Violet that Wonderland kidnapped her as a baby and Johnny may still be targeting her a Stephen King number of years later (because nineteen) to turn her into that new Hatter design we saw in the Annual and will see on some of the covers for future issues.

Oh, and I don't think I've mentioned it before, but it's been mentioned a couple of times in the Wonderland material that the events of the trilogy (and some of the Tales) began when Calie was nineteen. In the span of a few years, Calie endured her mother's suicide, her uncle turning her into a naked sushi bar, her boyfriend being mutated into a parasite-infested lizard monster, her grandfather using her as a literal key in an interdimensional conquest plot, her perception of reality being ripped to pieces on a temporally regular basis, a living madness dimension trying to kill her in her sleep (and when she's awake), losing her mother a second time, and her brother killing their adulterous father, kidnapping her boyfriend and daughter, and fighting her to the death twice before unwittingly hanging himself. Violet is now also nineteen. Which means that Calie has been talking to herself and Violet has been present for, and aware of, Calie's behavior (if not also having her own scream-awake nightmares on the regular) for the past nineteen years...and they've never talked about it before‽

Like, I get the whole, "magic of writing" thing where it's boring to read about every minor incident and detail of a character's life (especially a nineteen year period of the same psychological thriller bullshit happening on repeat), so the author has literal creative license to just skip whatever they want for the sake of a theoretically good story. I also understand on a personal level the inclination to want to avoid mentioning one's own time of prolonged madness or doing a deep exploration of the why behind it because it can be hard to function on a daily basis or acknowledge your current worth while the abyss stares back at you. But as I suggested in my review of the Annual, waiting until the thing you dread most is breathing down your neck before you do something about it is just as bad of a coping mechanism as thinking about it every waking moment until it paralyzes you. And here, as real as it may feel relative to the context of the story being told, it also verges on being the worst-written kind of manufactured tension.

Share your burdens, be not afraid of judgment lest you allow your darkness the power to define you, and be kind to any female, cis-female, or female-identifying people you encounter because misogyny and conservative sexism are gross-to-evil behaviors. I will never not find it disturbing that basic human decency needs to be re-taught to grown-ass adults like they're primally hateful infants because the metric bar for humanity is rusting at the bottom of the Mariana Trench as we speak.

Speaking of speaking, the third issue of Wonderland didn't give me much to talk about in terms of plot or references.

In cases like this, I've previously pivoted and lumped multiple issues of a series together, but because that practice, too, is irrelevant and redundant in an Omnibusted context (which is important, just like history), let's continue....

Wonderland #3

Part of the third Wonderland issue being light on plot has to do with it starting out in a flashback that shows how Johnny took over Daresbury/Dansbury (which we already saw at the beginning of the previous issue, with the added bit of information here that contact with an infected person, not just the hat, is enough to spread the madness). The batshit dialogue for the maddened townspeople is impressively random and darkly funny, and we get a satisfying sequence of a chauvinistic fry cook hacking off his own ass-grabber and grilling it like a burger (a handburger, if you will) out of the flashback opener, but that doesn't change its elaborate redundancy.

More freaked out internal dialogue resumes in the wake of Violet's abduction as Calie becomes one of the few horror characters to use mobile technology in her favor, tracking Violet's cellphone to the condemned House Of Mirrors (which is weird because Sammy just visited it a week ago) where the Hatter Collective intend to sacrifice Violet atop a mirror altar to make Johnny "real" again in her body.
Thankfully, Calie got a one-year-advance copy of Miley Cyrus' Bangerz so she somehow knew how to operate a

and save the day just in time so she and Violet could go on the run. Again. But with a sentient spiritual epidemic following them this time. I suppose this new, pre-"Chucky learns a new multiplication spell on the internet" power that Johnny has (arguably, it's something he's had a version of since the 2011 Annual—my sarcastic-fantastic favorite) is a creative evolution of the original Hatter's skinsuit-wearing fixation, so points on for that.

The Queen Of Spades has finished making her card soldier army, and the sickly yellow coloring this issue doesn't do their intimidation factor (that I remember from future issues) any favors. They just look like mindless Hot Topic skeleton Chads here as the Queen tests their loyalty and announces that her next stop is the ending of Call Of Wonderland so she can make a new Queen Of Hearts before the end of Volume One. It's also important to note that the last page of this middle cutaway segment and the last page of the issue itself are basically the same shot.

And that's it. After three issues, the preview page for Wonderland #4 shows that Zenescope would presumably no longer be offering online previews of the next issue. But that's all I have to say until the next issue, where we find out whether or not the preview is lying to us.

It is, Ticketholders! It totally is!

I said in a previous review that Wonderland issues have a three-location structure that bounces between Wonderland with the Queen Of Spades, the new Liddle house with Calie and Violet, and the town at large (literally), and that I would probably be using the two Superfriends memes a lot going forward.
But since then (almost immediately into the next issue), this structure has begun to blur and waver with the encroaching madness. There's a lot to get into this week, so let's...get into it!

Wonderland #4

Though I don't much talk about cover art anymore, the Chen/Nunes cover featured here is kind of plot-relevant, as it's a bait/foreshadowing image of what would happen if Johnny successfully overtakes Violet's body (he doesn't) and what will become of Violet following a future miniseries.

Also, we get pseudo-confirmation on the credits page that Dansbury was a typo and that the town was meant to be called Daresbury as a reference to the English town in Cheshire County where Lewis Carroll (the namesake of Calie, her late adulterous father, and her loathsome Pappy) was born.

The issue itself picks up right where we left off, with Calie and Violet on the run; not once more into the great, wide open, but right back to their house...where Violet was just abducted from...and where the Hatter Collective knows they live. Why?

Well, if two final showdowns to the death weren't enough, the third time is guaranteed to end with a charm or a serial killer, right?

The story plays with our expectations a bit (family barricaded in a building with a single-minded horde clawing at the walls outside, bringing to mind George Romero's Dead films or the recent blues horror masterpiece, Sinners) before hitting us with the revelation that one of the Collective (a young man Violet was briefly smitten with in a previous issue, named Harold because that's such a sexy name) is already inside, waiting with a mirror. Which means it's time for the bullshit to ensue because after going to all the trouble of kidnapping Violet, taking her to the House Of Mirrors, and binding her to a mirror to stab her like it was some kind of necessary ritual, all it takes for Violet to be possessed here is for her to touch Harold while he's wearing the hat. And because plot armor suddenly exists, all it takes for Violet to not be possessed anymore is Calie smacking her and knocking the hat off her head (even though we saw several people stay mad without the hat on and watched a man stay mad after cooking and severing his own hand, which certainly would hurt more than a slap upside the head). Yes, Violet says she can still hear Johnny in her head, but this is still conveniently inconsistent writing.

Less bad, though, is that the writers finally made good use of the "Calie has been insane for nineteen years" plot point by making her immune to the Hatter infection because of Joker logic (the "horseshoe principle of hyper-sanity" thing, not the "there's a scientist in another dimension making clown-themed supervillains across the multiverse" thing), and she puts on the hat herself to try putting an end to Johnny's mad Collective because he'll execute Order 66 on them if she just burns the hat.

What begins as a reenactment of the last issue of Return To Wonderland quickly evolves into a psychological battle in "the place between dreams and dying" (so possibly Wonderland's afterlife sub-Realm, like Limbo or the Inferno?). The subtle transformation between panels (from Carroll-Anne to the Sexy Goth Alice outfit to Black Berserker to White Queen for Calie, and from Johnny to the Hatter to the self-proclaimed Nightmare King for her brother) hits hard once you see it, and the means by which Calie uses her worst nightmare (we saw this near the end of the 2012 Annual, as well) to put Johnny to rest is an emotionally effective but manipulative swerve that promises that even the worst of the dead can return.

Enter the Queen Of Spades and her Grey Knight, the former of whom is there to retrieve the hat and send Calie home after burying her in exposition about the Hatter's history (including that Drake was the Hatter before Johnny, which I thought she already knew...?) and the catastrophic consequences of destroying the hat (a global wave of madness resulting in instant, chaotic depopulation of the Nexus). Also, the end of Call Of Wonderland happens, and Julie and Salome come falling through the mirror at the Spade Queen's feet as we head into the final issue of Volume One, to be reviewed next week.

I'm not going to put the preview page here because I'll have something to say about the cover shortly.

Wonderland #5

So, um...Daniel Leister? Why did you make the Queen Of Spades look like Dr. Girlfriend from the Venture Bros. cartoon?

You'll probably also notice is that the credits page directly refers to Calie's final form in the previous issue as the White Queen. Unlike Black Berserker (which is a term I made up to refer to her outfit from Escape From Wonderland, as it was never named in the trilogy), White Queen is official Zenescope branding, and it was established in this issue first. This, like Violet's Hatter outfit, is an example of a common tactic in the comic book industry that I've referenced before, used to build hype and (deceptively by way of technicalities, so it's "okay" because spoilers are "worse" and speculation has never been bad for the comics industry, just like my sarcasm) attract readers with the promise of a new development in an ongoing story. Yet another difference between American and Japanese media, because Japan doesn't give a gilded testicle about spoilers.

DanDaDan reference!

Anyway, I'm glad the art has been somewhat consistent for the series so far; Sheldon Goh deserves props for his detail, action paneling, and body horror these past two issues, and his work on the majority of the first Volume, where he's also shown off some cool facial expressions and tense, dramatic atmosphere.

The fifth issue is basically one, long fight, which is why I felt this review would be just as lacking in substance.

As promised by the end of Call Of Wonderland, the Queen Of Spades uses her powers to smash Julie and Salome together in a two-page spread of body horror so dark and sticky that it was used for Volume One's Table Of Contents background.

Spades gets her Heart Queen, but because Wonderland is a mad cesspool of blood and irony, the fusion doesn't go entirely as planned (recall that she meant the new Queen Of Hearts to be a perfect union of logic and emotion with the powers of art and the written word at her command), and the two women's conflicting personalities are twisted and amplified into opposition with each other in the same body, morphing and contorting between the logical, agreeable Julie form (one of the original Queen Of Hearts' halves was also named Julia) and the violent, passionate Salome form, with even their heart-shaped speech bubbles gradienting from white to red and back. The middle lines of text during these transitions can be hard to read (grey text on pale pink), but I love the effect, pun intended.

Several well-paneled and -composed pages of bloody combat ensue (including a decently unique take on the "you and what army?" trope as the Salome Queen nearly gets the upper hand on the Queen Of Spades) before the issue suddenly turns into an NSFW corruption manga when Spades fills the Salome Queen with enough legally distinct Klintar juice to turn her into a low-level Supernatural demon (because black eyes).

It doesn't entirely make sense that Spades couldn't just control Hearts from the beginning (seeing as how she was created with Spades' shadow powers) aside from her one line about their fight being a test, and the "I used the Jabberwocky's powers to make you even though the readers were just told that his remaining power was the naked people he didn't eat or corrupt before he was killed and I turned them into my army a few days ago" retcon may just hold the new record for fastest instance of whiplash-by-literature. Fortunately, it's also a card (puns!) that Zenescope manage to hold onto for an impressive length of time (into the Age Of Darkness, I think?).

Well, it's less Hall Of Justice and more Car Of Fleeing To LA.

Once the brainwashed Queen Of Hearts has sworn loyalty to Spades, we're treated to that always infuriating transition phrase, "Elsewhere, on Earth—" (as if the Queens' battle in Wonderland took place on Earth, even though we know they are two different Realms; something a new reader would likely not know), and the issue ends with Calie and Violet packing their go-bags and making a beeline (which isn't as direct of a path as colloquial usage would imply) for Hollywood, because hiding from Wonderland in a busy metropolis worked out so well in Beyond Wonderland, and staying in one place worked out even better over the previous four issues, but neither were as effective as my sarcasm. On a positive note, though, the dramatic weight Calie is written with here (big tragic tiger-mom energy) is palpable and sympathetic, making me think of Escape From Wonderland and the Dream Eater Saga One-Shot, and draw parallels to Sela in her last appearance. When she says "I won't let Wonderland get you, too," it's unclear whether she's referring contextually to Harold (who died last issue) or mourning Johnny (ditto), but you can feel that it's both.

The Volume One Trade Paperback features the usual cover gallery and a preview of Wonderland #6, where "Wonderland goes Hollywood!," according to the preview page that I won't show or talk about any further because I want to save that for next week.

Stay Tuned, and please remember to Become A Ticketholder if you haven't already, leave a comment at the bottom of this post and any others you have opinions about, help out my ad revenue as you read so I don't get consumed by the madness of the modern world, and follow me on BlueSky, Tumblr, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube, and LinkedIn to like what you see and receive the latest news on my wonderful content (including tomorrow's TBT '25 push of my old B.R.I.D.E. character).

Here again is the release calendar for the rest of 2025, presented for your benefit, as well as my SMART-ness and sanity:

• November 12: GFT Retrospective #114: Wonderland #6
• November 19: GFT Retrospective #115: Wonderland #7
• November 26: GFT Retrospective #116: Wonderland #8
• December 3: GFT Retrospective #117: Wonderland #9
• December 10: GFT Retrospective #118: Wonderland #10
• December 17: Zenescope - Omnibusted #37: Wonderland Volume Two
• December 24: Zenescope - Omnibusted #38: Madness Of Wonderland
• December 31: Zenescope - Omnibusted #39: Down the Rabbit Hole (plus annual address)

Omnibuster,

Out.