Zenescope - Omnibusted #51: The Lockdown

Article by Sean Wilkinson,

a.k.a. The Omnibuster.

Normally, I'd have broken this up into individual issue reviews, but Volume Thirteen of Grimm Fairy Tales comprises an entire story arc that I hold in high nostalgic regard.

Grimm Fairy Tales Volume Thirteen

The Lockdown

At this point in time, the main series was still getting Volume-original cover art

(here by Mike Capprotti) and doing the sepiatoned ancient tome thing with the Table Of Contents page (using the B Cover for Part Two by Tommy Patterson and Juan Fernandez and the A Cover for Part Five by Giuseppe Cafaro and Ylenia Dinapoli). There is no bonus material for this Volume, and no special effort was made toward making individual issue covers into title pages in any digital Trade editions I could find. As per usual, I lack the time and money to invest in acquiring a physical edition for comparison purposes here.

In 1974, writer/director Jonathan Demme and producer Roger Corman brought us the cult "women in prison" classic, Caged Heat, which I brought up not with the intent of taking the time to watch and review it, but only because The Lockdown story arc is a "women in prison" graphic novel with a Zenescope twist. About halfway through my first reading, I remember thinking, "this is kinda like that Caged Heat movie I heard about" (though I could have just as easily been thinking of Caged, or Chained Heat, or its sequel, or the Red Heat without Arnold Schwarzenegger that I accidentally rented as a kid because the Blockbuster clerk misfiled it, but I digress).

When we last saw Sela Mathers in The Return, she had just shown Venus' private school what the color Red can do, endangering its students in her rampage to rescue her kidnapped daughter from the Goddess, and ultimately surrendering herself to police custody, which brings us to where we are now. Sela has been in prison for terrorism for months (a coed prison, for some reason), having started a new pity party about how she's a bad person and deserves to be where she is because she's done terrible things and no one wants her, so all the fresh-faced charity workers like Deena Durbin can just go fuck themselves...until a riot breaks out that involves explosives that some gutter-dwelling rando was somehow allowed to mix together in his communal toilet or something, and Sela uses her four Realm Colors to pretty much quell everything herself and heal the wounded before locking herself up again like nothing ever happened (except the prison is still a little bit on fire). This was badass and a good "actions vs words" character moment to spend a quick issue on, but seeing Sela drown in self-pity for the bazingath time has gotten old, and with all the weirdness going on in Vegas (Annual, Halloween), people seeing a monster army suddenly appear in New York, a school getting slaughtered in Arizona, and Barr's skybeam, just to name a few examples, the aforementioned case worker not knowing what went down at Caredean Prep feels like a crane is required to suspend my disbelief. Or maybe a secret organization is using magic to cover everything up?

Also, did anyone else notice a distinct lack of Samantha Darren in Part One even though she's on the cover? Same goes for the Dark One in Part Two, by the way....

Cut to enough time later that the riot damage has been repaired, and we see that Eschue Corrections & Remand Penitentiary (which the inmates call "The Shoe," as opposed to the other Shoe slang that's most commonly used in prison fiction, referring to the Solitary Holding Unit) is not fully coed even though it totally looked that way in the previous issue, as things resume with Sela in female gen-pop, saving a girl referred to in this opening sequence as "Princess" and "Your Majesty" from a thug named Spyder (who doesn't seem to understand how spiders work).

So as the Spyder Gang plot their revenge, Warden Iona Garland (who is also a Police Academy honor graduate, Purple Heart recipient—from back when the President didn't just give distinguished medals to hockey players, dead racists, and political ass-kissers—and Olympic decathlon champion) begins to investigate Sela's actions during the "agitation," case worker Deena Durbin returns after seeing Sela use her powers to save lives, and Princess (turns out that's actually her name, because Zenescope) gets clingy after Sela saved her life at the beginning of the issue. But as for the ending, an opportunity presents itself for Sela to "fix" things so no one else will try to get her out of prison when Spyder and her lackeys attack Sela in the shower. Sela shivs Spyder and the guards catch her red-handed...but her hand and the shiv were coated in Neverland Green, so Spyder might not be bleeding to death after all?

With Spyder on the way to the infirmary and Sela in "the hole," a.k.a. "the Abyss," a.k.a. the SHU in "The Shoe" (by the way, Sela made reference to Warden Garland being "The Old Woman In the Shoe" last issue, and I feel really dumb because I just now got the joke), a new wrinkle gets introduced to the Lockdown storyline (well, it's actually several wrinkles, because it had me wondering on first read if Pan was back and skulking around the halls at night) when said Warden literally trips over "another" shriveled body.

Most of the issue, though, is devoted to a time-lapse of Sela’s month in the sightless, soundless Abyss. In the past, I've complained about how Grimm Fairy Tales uses psychological thriller bullshit to moralize and exposition dump without progressing the plot or characters forward. Here, I didn't mind it because the visuals were genuinely fun and interesting, the composition was creative, and it was the first head-trip issue where Sela was an active participant in learning about herself (including how she finds her own self-pity annoying, so extra credit there, Teach), rather than passively (or while she was dead) learning the history of her comic book Universe alongside the reader. Really good use of pages here.

After she saved a guard by stomping a mudhole in what looks like a Lost Boy in prison chic, Sela is returned to her cell to find she has a new roommate: Princess! I just remembered where this is going, but I can be a patient plot-spoiler when I want to be, so let's hold off on that for now. The arc has done a good job so far of setting up Princess as a thematic substitute for Sela's daughter, Ilys, right down to the hair color (though the colorist this issue decided to go with purple instead of raven-black for some reason), and this issue is a chance, after Sela's mad month of introspection, to explore their "I couldn't save her, so I'll protect this girl instead" dynamic.

Except, she isn't able to protect Princess because she's busy fighting and bonding with Spyder (who is a spider, duh, and can use the Green, too). I won't go into Spyder's backstory because she doesn't show up again after this arc, but she's apparently not the villain here (it's easy to guess the real villain correctly if you know what to look for, though, like counting characters and paying attention to the orientation of the room they're fighting in) and has been working with the Warden to vet Sela and identify the real soul-sucker.

It's kind of a sudden pivot, but right as the injured Princess is being escorted to the infirmary and Sela is dragged back into Pity Mode, the issue cliffhangers with Sela getting a surprise visitor...again! But it's not Deena this time‽

See? I held off spoiling the cliffhanger for, like, four sentences (five, if you count Sela's stay in prison so far)! And it's Ilys!

Yeah; that moment in the Abyss where Sela was chasing a figment of Ilys and fighting to save her from Death and hugging her? That was a psychic connection, and now, Ilys is here. Using Deena as a skinsuit glamour, but, here. And the verbal exchange between mother and daughter is so emotionally charged and tragic that words won't do it justice, so read it for yourself.

We also get a glimpse of something from Ilys that was hinted at back in Sela's mind-garden, and will be very important in the next few crossover events, so that's something to look forward to if you're following along with me.

But that's not the last of this issue's big developments, because now, the prison is overrun by zombies, leaving only Sela, Spyder, Warden Garland, and Princess (who was in the Abyss, not the infirmary; oops) as the last survivors. A fractionally decent effort is made to red herring the Warden, but shock of shocks and process of elimination, Princess was the villain all along!

Let the final battle commence!

Princess is hopped up on power after tasting the rainbow from Sela, Spyder and the Warden are fighting off her zombie army, and Deena is huddled in the crossfire of it all, trying her "very best" to not get killed like no one never was.

So how is our reluctant heroine supposed to stop a force of gluttony who can match or exceed her own powers? By reenacting the end of Return Of Cooler, of course! Yep, Sela now has a narrative justification for her "channeling borrowed power from the four Realms" moveset, because she overloads Princess with her bottomless reserve of magic, and instead of creating an unstoppable, Universal threat, it just...works. Princess is still alive, but will probably spend the rest of her life in a special containment unit, never to be seen, mentioned, or thought about ever again (until the Warden inevitably dies and things go from Return Of Cooler to Bojack Unbound, but to my knowledge, that never happens). I will have several more opportunities to reference Dragon Ball in the future, though.

For now, things end with Sela learning to be fun and snarky again, and to be patient and help rebuild the prison offscreen.

Her mood shift here, and several previous major developments in the arc, as I mentioned them above, are abruptly introduced and incongruous to preceding events, like something intermediate was drafted up but edited out of the final product to keep the page count down. The "hungry monster feeds on troubled extras in a secluded building" trope has been done in Zenescope’s works before, as well, and the whodunit aspect of the story was fairly elementary to solve, but I still enjoyed serving my time with it here as much as I did originally.

Tomorrow, I throw it back to some old TV show finales, Friday, it's another Goj-Year-ra review with Destroy All Monsters, Saturday, I outline what I'm doing in April, and next Wednesday, I decided to do something I never thought I would by checking out Zenescope's April Fool's Editions for the first time ever.

So please stay chill and Stay Tuned for all of that by remembering to Become A Ticketholder if you haven't already, leaving a comment at the bottom of this post and any others you have feelings about, helping out my ad revenue as you read so I can afford to bail myself out of any trouble I get into, and following me on BlueSky, Tumblr, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube, and LinkedIn to like what you see and receive the latest news on my content.

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Omnibuster,

Locked In.