Zenescope - Omnibusted #52: April Fool's Day
by Sean Article Wilkinson
Shakespeare once wrote that life is a tale told by an idiot. Tom Cochrane once wrote that life is a highway. I once wrote that life is a desert, so vast and disorienting and full of impossible things trying to survive in a place so inhospitable that even the persistent rainfall vaporizes before it can accomplish anything.
I was maybe six or seven at the time.
Now, over thirty years later, I wrote these last three sentences because I needed an intro and they were the first things I could think of. So, yeah; life is a desert highway told by an idiot, full of farts and stubborn raindrops, signifying that I'm gonna ride it all night long. [Insert Jaws beach-closure joke here], just like my sarcasm. Subtle. And hyphens and exclamation points. And justice for Mole! And Floppy-Hatted Redneck Guy! And without further adieu (except for when this post is over), let's get dangerous!
Grimm Fairy Tales April Fools Editions
If April Fool's Day hadn't fallen on a Wednesday, I don't know if I would have ever given these issues the time of day because they're not canon or meant to be taken seriously.
But having experienced them here for the first time, it's clear that they received a lot of love on the creative side (and enough on the fandom side to warrant a trilogy of collections), and as a fan of Team Four Star's Abridged content, I can respect the inspiration and the process.
There is no Trade Paperback compilation for the three April Fools Editions, either physically or digitally, but earlier scans of the 2009 issue have the credits pages seen above, as well as the following, charming foreword from editor Ralph Tedesco:
All of this was left out of the ComiXology edition for unknown reasons, but they greatly added to my enjoyment of the Abridged Zenescope Experience, so they're worth mentioning and sharing.
Like other yearly editions of their time, the April Fools issues are anthology collections, and like other content in the Abridged parody genre, they take existing art (and a few original pieces that are usually used as shock-value punchlines) and change the speech bubbles to have comedic dialogue.
Starting with "The Story About the Hussy Who Always Wears Red," a.k.a. "Red Riding Ho," the title is the joke, and it runs in the family. Moving on.
"The Story With the Boy Who Wants To Dance Like Patrick Swayze," a.k.a. "Hansel & Gretel 2: Electric Boogaloo," is a far better-written parody that does a lot more to flesh out its world and characters (think, "what if Shrek was Sausage Party?," and you pretty much have the world and maturity rating covered), goes absolutely random with the meta-humor (calling out its own paneling in a few cases), and includes several nods to the canon series for fans to appreciate (the mention of Bo Peep being a stripper like she was in the Vegas Annual, and the legion of cameos on the last page, come to mind). Great parody story, even though all it amounts to is Sela's fairytale self-insert character training Hansel to be a male stripper.
"The Story Featuring A Drug Dealer Who Has A Height Complex," a.k.a. "Reefer-Stiltzkin" (which, going by my original explanation of the name, translates to "Little Marijuana Postman," making him a pot-ergeist), is surprisingly really fucking funny. I didn't expect "make Rumpelstiltskin a horny drug dealer" to be as smart or creative as it was based on the title alone (the actual title or the "this sounds like a Friends episode" one from the contents page), but the parodies just keep getting better, and I hope it's an upward trend.
"The Story About the Bromance Between A Boy and His Giant," a.k.a. "Jack & the Bromance," is not that. Sure, the ending turns the original issue's tragic resolution into something darkly happy, and that's funny. But it's also the same, "two dude friends have to break up because one has a wife, and the heteronormative discomfort of the gay subtext makes it funny" "joke" that every sitcom in the 2000s did for an episode, and its too dated and predictable to be genuinely funny.
"The Story That Makes Carrie Look Like A Cheerleader," a.k.a. "Schizerella," pretty much takes the fairy tale from GFT's second issue and makes Cinderella an unhinged clean-freak who's at least fifty percent Cindy Monroe, and aside from it maybe not addressing mental health with modern sensitivity because it's from 2009, it's another parody with a unique direction that's really fucking funny.
Now, we get into the 2010 collection, which includes its credits/contents page in the ComiXology edition (as does the 2012 issue). Whereas the first April Fools Edition was laid out as a parody of Zenescope comics layouts (the intentional laziness, the Treehouse Of Horror-esque name puns in the credits, the satirical, sarcastic tone), Number 2 (because Ralph, Joe, and David are elongated children who love a cheap poop joke as much as the next me) does away with the alternate, Friends episode-alike titles and self-deprecation to present a more traditional anthology format: a twelve-plus-hour spoof movie marathon on their very own, fake parody channel based on See B.S. (the network that recently went into debt with several Middle-Eastern dictators and a predatory Chinese gaming company to over-pay for the gasping husk of a historically beloved media conglomerate), but in comic book form, so it doesn't take twelve hours to read.
We begin our evening with "Piper Fluberblunton Goes To Town," a four-hour epic (I'm kidding) that doesn't feel that much different from the original Pied Piper issue besides the anachronistic dialogue, stripping out the framing narrative, and ditching the moral in favor of a funny ending. At least I got a chuckle from the parody calling out Zenescope's unoriginal repetition of character names, though. Five-star joke, that one.
The same goes for the four-hour after-school special (remember those‽), "Drinking Beauty." The title is the joke, the context of the joke is the Tristan character plotting to bribe the kinky, promiscuous drunk into fractionally consensual acts beyond description (which is no longer funny, if ever it was), and the punchline image was predictable. I did genuinely laugh twice, but not at any of that.
"Golddigger & The Beast" (which my autocorrect filled in for me, so that was nice) feels half as long as the previous two stories, but more substantial, and probably handles the anachronistic dialogue substitution the best so far. But then the punchline is that after he rips a gay man's arms off, kills all of his friends, and watches Belle take her own life for crushing on a broke liar, the Beast becomes Kanye West (again, not funny through a modern lens, and you can see it coming from the title alone).
And now we end the second issue on "Snookie White & the Jersey Dwarves," a perfect example of why dated comedy is bad comedy. For most of the story, I felt like, "I might be laughing my ass off if I was a fan of Jersey Shore fifteen years ago," and the depiction of Snooki (yes, they added an "e" for legal reasons) as a child-hating fame-whore feels disrespectful to who Nicole has become since the show (a proud wife and mother of three who's battling cancer). There's some fun AFD crossover "lore" (name-drops, really), the dwarves' dialogue can be kinda funny, and the VH-1 bit actually made me laugh, but that's about it. April Fools Edition Number 2 really lived down to its title.... 💩
There wasn't another April Fools Edition until 2012 (I can see why) and wouldn't be another one ever...so far (let's see why).
The production humor seems to hearken back to the first issue, which is an immediate plus (and bonus points for reminding me that Shang is dead).
"The Sorcerer’s Cleaning Lady" just amounts to Belinda putting herself out of a job by inventing an army of magic cleaning robots, but it's timeless and funny for being so short (and Pat Shand co-wrote it), so we have a strong start.
"Clarinda's Mom Has Got It Goin' On" is another quick story (but not as quick as Stuart!), adapting The Juniper Tree issue into a cougar parody that draws on American Pie and 80s song references to extend its one joke (Clarinda's mother's name is Jenny Stiffler, for example).
And now, if you remember Tedesco's Editor's Note up top, it's time for the story that set the April Fools Editions in motion: "Pinocchio: One Creepy-Ass Puppet." I like the idea of taking a Zenescope character's "modern"/Nexus personality and applying it to their fairy tale version. It worked for crazy Cinderella in the first issue's final story, and it works for the Pinocchio parody here. There's definitely too much of a focus on rapid-fire pacing this issue, which doesn't leave much room for standout moments on the creative team's part (or meaningful critical analysis on my part), but "murder puppet becomes his own man and finds true love on a speedrun quest to become Chucky" is good enough (especially with those sick Seidman visuals I love so much) to be notably better than an MJF meme.
The issue closes out with "Stalker Mermaid," which is basically an Honest Trailers script read of The Little Mermaid that predicts Adele's "Hello" and the legalization of gay marriage (this is at least the second AFD story to have a gay prince in an arranged hetero marriage). But just when you think the punchline is going to be Ariel/Erica killing the prince and hooking up with his fiancé (because he's into guys and she's into girls), things go absolutely Cosplay Special insane, and I kind of love it. Strong contender and probable front-runner for best April Fools parody.
Now that all of the preamble crap is out of the way, it's time for the review to begin. So please Stay Tuned and remember to Become A Ticketmaster even if you have already, leave, comment at the bottom of every post anyone has ever written, help out my ad revenue before I publish this because life is demanding without understanding, and follow me on BlueSky, Tumblr, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube, and LinkedIn to like what you see and receive the latest restraining orders on my foolish content.
69+10
Zenebuster,
Omniscoped.
Go Ass!
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