Zenescope - Omnibusted #45: Robyn Hood

Article by Sean Wilkinson,

a.k.a. The Omnibuster.

What would the Month Of Love be without an archer, right, Ticketholders?

She's the furthest thing from Cupid, but I'm excited to be looking back on Zenescope's next crack at the "gender-swap public domain folk character into legally distinct Avengers/Justice League archetype" formula, brought to glorious life by my favorite GFT writer of all time, Pat "Bolder" Shand!

Robyn Hood Volume One

Robyn Hood, as I'm reviewing it today, exists digitally in three forms: the individual issues, the Trade Paperback, and the trilogy Omnibus (sometimes marketed as Robyn Hood: Origins to avoid confusion with the Robyn Hood Ongoing series she would get later because she's an awesome character that fans love and she's still getting miniseries publications to this day.

The cover used for the Trade Paperback here is another awesome one by Stjepan Šejić, taken from the C Cover for the first issue.

The credits page is taken from the issue #4 B Cover by Jimbo Salgado and Sanju Nivangune, and the Table Of Contents background is from the issue #5 B Cover by Matt Triano and Nivangune. There is no bonus content in the Trade Paperback or Omnibus, but I mentioned the multiple versions because the Trade follows the mostly standard practice of appending the individual digital issues together (including preview pages, Digital Edition covers, and credits pages), but while the Omnibus appends the three Trade Paperbacks together, it also has special chapter title pages with repurposed cover art and integrated credits for that extra show of production effort.

The timetable on this starts out a little wonky because of the characters shown to be in play at the beginning. First and least confusing, Shang is alive (yay) and shown battling two members of the Horde (sexy ginger Mortal Kombat Shredder and a generic robed priest, later suggested to be the protagonist's birth parents) who intended to enact some kind of ritual in a building creatively called the Dark Chapel, where he finds a green-swaddled baby on the altar. He seeks advice from the Realm Council (of which Allexa is shown to be a member, so this predates Sela becoming Guardian Of the Nexus, which has its own chronological issues to induce excruciating headaches in the reader) and leaves the baby on a doorstep to be raised by an Earth family (because Shang is such a good mentor, right?).

We are also shown snippets of Bolder's time as an assistant to the oracle Delphina (first mentioned in The Fairy & The Dwarf, and later revealed to be deceased), where she tells a troubled villager of someone from another world who will save his kingdom when they are ready.

Many years later, on Earth, we are introduced to Robyn Locksley, a foul-mouthed, sociopathic delinquent with a sense of justice who takes blood money from the criminally affluent to support her ailing foster mother and provide alms to the poor. After stealing and crashing the expensive car of a corrupt millionaire's asshole nepo-baby (Cal King), he cuts out her eye and she winds up imprisoned by the King family's puppet sheriff and dragged into Myst by Delphina, who promptly dies before she can explain herself. She probably should have seen that coming.

Maybe she did see it coming because she's a water nymph now, which means she can deliver that exposition (minus the part where the villager asked her to drain his life force to isekai Robyn out of jail), except that Robyn doesn't care. I don't mean about the exposition specifically; Robyn doesn't care about anything but what her instincts want: violence, survival, and getting back to Earth so she can show Cal King what it feels like to have his spherical anatomy surgically removed by an amateur with no anesthesia. She's a born sociopath, which means we have to endure the trope where the impatient protagonist ignores or refuses critical information and constantly interrupts the messenger (which counterproductively makes the conversation longer than it would be otherwise) as a means of prolonging the plot and leaving the reader with half-promised foreshadowing (what some would call twoshadowing) to ponder in vain. But Robyn is also a badass who can take down five skilled knights with nothing but her bare hands and a bow-and-arrow (plus her eyesocket is seemingly a conduit for The Gold now, which, if you remember Winter's End, is that nebulous Mystic energy Sela had access to once that can purify evil and fix whatever the plot demands, but here it just lets Robyn use her bow like it has a magic laser scope that's bound to her eye and does the Wonderland Red AOE thing like she's a Dragon Ball character). Water-Delphina bribes Robyn with the (false?) promise that if she helps free the Kingdom of Bree

from King John's rule, they will reward her with a return trip to the Nexus (so she can put Cal's testicles where his eyes should be). There's kind of a Yojimbo quality to Robyn's process here, since she just picks a direction and starts walking until she meets either information or opposition and has to...respond, in her own inimitable fashion.

Five words: Šejić cover, literal straight fire.

Speaking of covers, a year after saving a Bree village from royal tax collectors in the previous issue, Robyn is now in her trilogy cover costume for the first time. No clue how she got something so overdesigned and elaborate by living in the forest for a year, but hey; costume! And everyone in Bree is calling her Robyn Hood ("that's not going to stick," she says...)! This issue is also where I start to recognize plot elements from Robin Hood adaptations I've seen before (the Disney animated one, Prince Of Thieves, Men In Tights, and the Russell Crowe one from 2010): the staff fight in the river with Little John (here testing and drawing out the legendary, elusive rebel without a shit to give, and making it subtly clear for the first time that Robyn has a thick Brooklyn accent—I can't take her seriously if I read her in a Harley Quinn voice, so nope to that forever), the announcement of King John's archery contest, and the introduction of the rest of the Merry Men of Sherewood (with whom she shares little connection, except maybe the beginnings of a romance with Will Scarlet? But that's all preamble; the real action (unless you count the cutaway where Cal King's father rearranges his face for being a thoughtless, entitled, misogynistic rapist nepo-baby who never learned what consequences are) is to be saved for the next issue.

While Cal King (that's obviously short for Calvin, but you might remember from yesterday that it's also the Nadsat word for shit, which is perfect) smugly delivers a eulogy for Robyn at his valedictorian speech (which he got to do not because he earned the GPA, but because his rich, powerful father handed it to him) and gets another dressing-down from his dad, Robyn is still in the Mystic Kingdom of Bree, winning the archery contest (which is misrepresented because it's also a weird capture-the-flag racing thing and a swordfight) pretty handily despite King John putting his ringer Champion, Sir Guy of Gisbourne, in the contest, too. But, instead of killing him and escaping (we saw her one-on-five a group of knights at the beginning of this series, so we know she can—well; she could, before putting on an elaborately slutty archer costume with a cape),

she decides to spare him for the sequel and distract herself from imminent victory by monologuing to the citizenry until a weaker knight one-shots her with a punch in the face (is Robyn the villain here‽) and she winds up imprisoned...again!

The finale issue marks the first time in the trilogy where we see the Zenescope Digital Edition logo on covers, as well as the first appearances of Robyn's Nexus costume. It looks badass, functional (no cape!), and comparatively more comfortable than the corset and gloved radial guards she's been walking around in for the past two issues, and it's basically what her character design will look like for the indefinite future of her appearances once she starts wearing it in the issues themselves.

Which starts now. Kind of. Robyn is in the middle of being executed by firing squad at the moment, so that has to change first. Unfortunately, Little John is killed for aiding in her escape, and I'm suddenly reminded that what makes Robyn such a cool and interesting character from the beginning (but not original, because it's basically "the Dexter factor" of a moral sociopath doing the quiet part out loud through preventative violence and having a tragic origin to justify the catharsis of her actions) is also what makes everyone else in the story either a narrative device in service of her character development or a narrative device in service of future threat escalation in the story at large (which feels more like Zenescope's business model than Shand's writing, to be honest). Little John was given a complex personality for his brief appearance (that's Shand's writing style for sure), but then he's dead and the story doesn't stop to give him a breath of dignity unless you choose to linger on the Moment that panel is emphasizing. No one reacts or mourns or dedicates their Leeroy Jenkins charge in his honor. We're just moved on to Robyn torturing the king to death (making him run and crawl in public view while she cripples and kills him with arrows). And I get that King John is written to be more of a symbol than a character (a generic, selfish king more present in the consequences of his rule than as a person, meant to embody abuse of power and a certain kind of person Robyn takes issue with, rather than her direct nemesis), but as cathartic as his death is supposed to feel to the reader, I, like Robyn, felt nothing from it; like it was something the story had to quickly check off its list to get to what we really came for.

Robyn's whole M.O. thus far has been "I feel almost nothing and I don't care about anything, but if it gets in my way or reminds me of something that happened to me, I'll make sure it doesn't happen to anyone else so I can feel okay, except that I was probably born to never feel okay because I think my birth parents were evil, and making evil suffer feels emptily 'good,' so I'll keep doing that until I'm satisfied and live with the memories." Except maybe that Will Scarlet guy; there's maybe some good feelings there, so hopefully Gisbourne and the king's bratty son (who's kind of like if Vegeta was a punk-ass bitch human because he's now Prince Regent John IV, his kingdom is gone, and he has a tall sidekick) don't kill him out of revenge in a sequel.

Anyway, with Bree engulfed in the literal flames of rebellion,

Will upholds his end of the "be our symbol and I'll help you get home" bargain by introducing Robyn to Maid Marian, who once stumbled across the remains of the Provenance Necklace from the Quest Giant-Size and managed to reassemble it (meaning that during Robyn's eighteen-ish years of life, Sela’s seventy-five issue run as Guardian Of the Nexus and prisoner of Myst—which lasted centuries according to some earlier issues and Short Stories—and the Quest Giant-Size played out in their entirety; I'm going to wear out the "2" button on my landline from calling all the bullshit on the chronology here), so now Robyn can return to New York and exact her revenge on Shit King! ...later.

First she has to stalk him and his rape buddies (thank God for "tell, don't show" in that regard because aside from a few lines of dialogue, we only know Cal cut out her eye and left her to rot, not that he or his friends did...anything else to her) in an off-page timeskip, and one month later, Robyn is in her Nexus costume.

Over the next nineteen pages, Robyn takes sadistic, empty pleasure in maiming and crucifying Cal's friends, killing his father in front of him (which he takes with a grateful smile as an act of freedom in his favor), killing and maiming the cops who did nothing about what was done to her, and pinning Cal himself to a table and burning him alive (unbeknownst to Robyn, she was being watched by Gisbourne, Prince John, and a new character named Avelia—so, along with Acacia the Voodoo priestess and Alicia the Limbo Queen, that makes at least three dark-haired villainesses whose names start and end with A to keep track of now—who will be important in the sequels, and they revive and heal Cal so he can be the new threat next time). Meanwhile, after collapsing in tears of catharsis and relief that her journey of revenge is "over," Robyn returns to her philanthropic, thieving ways and leaves New York behind to find herself.

This is where the first Volume of Robyn Hood ends and there is no bonus content for it in either the Trade Paperback or the Omnibus version, but along with another ad for the now-defunct Zenescope app (like what was in Neverland: Hook), the Trade features two different ads for the Robyn Hood vs Red Riding Hood One-Shot:

I was conflicted over whether or not I would review it here because, while it follows directly from the events of this miniseries, Britney makes vague references to participating in events that I have yet to cover in Retrospective continuity (the Bad Girls miniseries and later Volumes of Myths & Legends, if my middle-aged memory serves me correctly), and the One-Shot was collected in Different Seasons Volume Four but not in any Robyn Hood Volumes.

Since I "like" fixing things, here's the review:

It may be pure nostalgia, but I consider Robyn Hood vs Red Riding Hood to be one of the best things Zenescope has ever done.

Feeling aimless after she "fought alongside the Guardian Of the Nexus to save the world," Britney Waters has taken it upon herself to dress like a hooded Oktoberfest barmaid and hunt down Highborn and Falseblood threats to the Earth, and because all news media can be trusted to accurately report on events in an unbiased fashion, she believes that Robyn (having gone off the grid after murdering her rich rapists and the corrupt police official who allowed them to operate free of consequence, and then robbing a bank to finance the poor) may be one of those threats.

Meanwhile to all of Britney's half-true speculation, Robyn is on a farm somewhere, shoveling horse cal and otherwise earning her keep under the alias of Willow (because Buffy is an awesome show and the foreshadowing of Robyn's later friendship with a lesbian witch is a subtle Retrospective gem). We see for the first time in Retrospective continuity that Britney's Falseblood power that let her control wolves at the end of her Myths & Legends arc also works on horses (and later, birds and—hilariously—an apartment full of cats, so probably, all animals) as she makes it run wild to test Robyn's reflexes before engaging in a prolonged, close-quarters fight that spans a park, a zoo, and several apartments. The misunderstanding at play (Cal's last name being King and the late John III being a king, so Robyn thinks Britney is his widowed mistress out for revenge—I mean, the costume does scream "wench from Myst"—and Britney thinks Robyn is admitting to another murder) is cliché and less funny than I found it on first read ten years ago, but the fact that Robyn did what Britney is targeting her for and only the context is missing is just subversive enough to make their dynamic interesting and nuanced. And the power progression as they fight and pursue each other (ultimately with Britney transforming into a pseudo-werewolf and Robyn having to lead her in front of a speeding bus to knock her out so they can talk without causing any more collateral damage) is paced out and used really well to keep the action compelling. I imagine (as the case was for me on first read back in the day) that the "two kick-ass blondes in hoodies stop fighting and have a heart-to-heart" (of sorts) "because their inner demons aren't all that different" ending was a disappointment for some readers who wanted more action. But even back then, I appreciated the writing of that final couple of pages as much as (no, more than) the fight that led up to it. Great issue to close out this review!

Speaking of "wanted," though, the digital standalone edition of the Robyn vs Red One-Shot (oh; by the way, Britney makes several references to having trained with Asian monks to help keep her inner wolf under control—probably associates of Shang—one of whom used to call her "Red," so that's a thing in-Universe) has this ad on the last page:

I'll continue with that next week, but until then, please Stay Tuned and 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 to give to the poor, and follow me on BlueSky, Tumblr, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube, and LinkedIn to like what you see and keep an eye out for the latest news on my content, like the special piece I hope to have ready by tomorrow.

And here's my original summary/review of Robyn Hood and the One-Shot FROM June 8, 2014 (Cover Charge #3: Grimm Fairy Tales):

A child of one of the Dark One's followers grows up on Earth with a human family, thanks to Shang (Sela's mentor). She is a natural thief with a superhuman case of street smarts and a pistol for a mouth (this is a weird series, but please don't take that literally). Her smart mouth one day costs her an eye and whatever innocence remained inside her soul, but a sorceress from Myst draws Robyn back to the realm of her birth and sets her on a course that closely mirrors the traditional Robin Hood legend, save a few transdimensional plot twists and a heaping pile of bloody murder at Robyn's hands. The crossover with Red Riding Hood follows the events of the first Robyn Hood series as the two mistake each other for enemies and engage in a pedal-to-the-metal fight to near death that ends only when the two realize how similar their circumstances are. I'm half-glad they didn't decide to sit down and talk right away. 

104

Omnibuster,

Out.