GFT Retrospective #119: Grimm Universe #1 - Eye Of the Storm
a.k.a. The Retrospectre.
Yeah, I'm trying out a new alias for my Retrospective byline today. Already don't know if I'm really feeling it, though, so suggestions are welcome. Maybe I should just let it grow on me?
Also, another milestone get as I just passed the fifteen thousand view mark for May, so let's move the goalpost again and try for the Road To 20k! Thank you all again for the support this month. Whoever you Ticketholders are, you're my heroes.
I said in my "Angel & Gods" post that I would talk about the Trade in "detail" here, so...let's do that. The cover is re-used from the Grimm Universe #4 (featuring the Dark One, duh) B Cover by Marat Mychaels and Sanju Nivangune, the Table Of Contents background is a panel from that same issue (hard to search out because this series loves to use "KRAAK!" as an onomatopoeia) by Matias Bergara and Francesca Zambon. The bonus content is also Dark One-related, as it's the zero issue of the Dream Eater Saga, which is understandable because his impact (becoming the object of Baba Yaga's revenge) is larger than his page count there (three out of eleven), and it makes decent marketing sense to grow the readership, but some new bonus content would have been nice, too. I will always miss the early days of Zenescope doing Short Stories for their Trades....
Grimm Universe #1
Eye Of the Storm
She's in this issue, but not for very long despite being on every cover, because the story is more about the complicated relationship between Neptune and Hades, with Heather getting caught in the middle for a few pages...and it's about Malec getting low-diffed by a mysterious new villain.
The Dark One gets an unexpected visitor (after Sela and the Innocent crashed his "stronghold" quite easily in The Return and Bad Girls, respectively, this makes Tic-Tac-Toe, and he wins a free Arby's Beef & Cheddar, which won't make a difference because he's about to royally shit himself anyway) who wants to join the Horde, but has a few points of curiosity he needs satisfied first. Things like, why the Guardian Of the Nexus is a Star Wars meme instead of...dead,
and why the all-powerful Dark One doesn't know that there is a god who wants to destroy the world. If we stop here, that choice of words invites a host of questions about Malec's involvement in The Summoning (which he had been aware of since at least the events of The Gathering), but thankfully, a turn of the page gives us context that the world-ending deity is Neptune, not Helios.
In flashback, we see the Olympians using the previously emptied (except for Hope, presumably) Pandora's Box to seal away "[their] nightmares" (primordial monstrosities that predate them, as well as cursed beasts and genetic aberrations of their own making) and lock it in the now-defunct Tartarus to be guarded by Cerberus, who just looks like the goodest good boy ever, like if Scooby-Doo had three heads. I don't like dogs, and dogs don't like me, but Cerbie is can be adorable.
Having spent centuries mourning the death of his love, Salicia (whom I think is meant to be the Roman goddess of saltwater, Salacia, but the spelling was changed for some reason), Neptune has fittingly run out of tears and turned nihilist, retrieving Pandora's Box and unleashing Scylla and Charybdis (the original "rock and a hard place") upon the world so he can let everything be destroyed and exist in...a kind of peace before he is consumed as well.
After a brief fight where Heather takes on Scylla and Neptune back-to-back, the sea god flashes back to Salicia's death during an ancient conflict at the hands of a man named Zagreus. And if you thought Hecate was convoluted, hold my wine because Zagreus is so obscure that his origins require a Maury Povich paternity/maternity reveal episode to figure him out and scholars have had such a hard time with translation and interpretation that he almost isn't a deity of his own (his name suggests that he is the "god of pitfalls," but that's about it). The most common myth about Zagreus has him as the son of Zeus (doing his shapeshifting bestiality man-whore thing) and Persephone, heir to the throne of the Universe, until Hera got jealous (because goddesses be jealous like women be shoppin', I guess) and tricked the Titans into dismembering and eating him (except for his heart—in some versions, it's his penis). Zeus later comes into possession of Zagreus' remains and reincarnates him through Semele in a new body...and that myth is actually about Dionysus (and extremely similar to a myth about the Egyptian god Osiris) because Zagreus is too archaic to be a god of his own. On top of that, Zagreus has been written of as being Hades and being the son of Hades (this latter being adapted into the Hades video games) by several different poets, scholars, and philosophers. And because I hate myself sometimes and don't care how little time I have to get this post ready, I also went looking for Zagreus' Roman equivalent, which is how I learned that the Roman plebians invented their own distaff counterculture deity (Liber [Pater]/Libera) so they could worship freedom by getting drunk (Liber is the origin of both "liberty" and "libation") and having sex...so naturally, the freedom god was later written to just be Baccus (the Roman equivalent of Dionysus).
Zagreus is so obscure that none of his lore could be said to have been any basis of inspiration for what Zenescope's version of the character is or does here. The only hint to his inspirations from the Zenescope side is that he calls Salicia his aunt before killing her, suggesting that he is either Apollo or Achilles.
But knowing what I do from Future Knowledge (plus there's an Editor's Note referencing the Godstorm miniseries—hence this issue's title—which was releasing concurrently with Grimm Universe), Zagreus is also Hercules. Jesus fucking snakes; I need a lethal dose of Advil so I can take bets on whether my migraine or the pain meds will kill me faster.
The only other thing of note that came out of my...fun...research is that Zeus banished the Titans to Tartarus for cannibalizing his son, providing possible context for the gods boxing up their nightmares in Zenescope’s mythology. I also searched for any human/god wars in Greek mythology, and Google spat out collaborative efforts like the Gigantomachia (the name inspiration for the My Hero Academia Villain, and it's a war between the Olympians and the giants where Hercules got involved) and petty proxy conflicts like the Trojan War (which involved Achilles), but what caught my attention was the Flood Of Deucalion because of something Neptune says in the issue.
The suggestion here to me is that after the battle that cost Neptune his lover (wife?), Zeus helped him flood the Earth (because every religion has a flood story), with the only survivors being Deucalion (the name inspiration for Dean Koontz's take on Frankenstein's monster) and Pyrrha (hence "Pyrrhic victory," and the namesake of RWBY's most tragic, beloved, badass, and sexy character).
Okay; enough with Wikipedia and Google for now.
Perhaps remembering the flood (we don't see it in the comic, but it's an easy assumption for a mythology nerd like me), Neptune comes to the conclusion that maybe unleashing a biblically accurate, Lovecraftian sea-drinker to destroy the world wasn't the best way to cope with his feelings, and so frees Hades to help him re-seal Scylla and Charybdis inside Pandora's Box (which Hades keeps for reasons I can't remember) because Hades is the god of monsters (ironically, a trait that was borrowed from a Zagreus myth).
Back in the framing scenario, the unseen villain forces Malec out of his demon form and takes a liking to the name, "The Being," as a final text box warns that a shadow is about to fall on the Grimm Universe.
This issue was...very blue. Fitting, given Neptune's prominent role in the story, but it led to a feeling of visual apathy (more irony, because it's a good tactic to get us to sympathize with Neptune) that I remember made me read in a state of bored detachment the first time around. Now, I can appreciate the depth of character here (Pat Shand is masterful at slow, subtle, efficient writing like that), and as a more mature reader, I can understand the visual theming at play (the past looking bright and heavily saturated in contrast despite the ensuing tragedy, and Malec's sections having a dramatic horror feel to them, for example). But having so much to say about an issue with very little to it (I could probably summarize it with sentences mountable on one hand) didn't feel worth the headache that was researching Zagreus.
Next week, things get Red (and other colors, because I'm also finishing the month with a Sentai anime), but first, Stay Tuned for tomorrow's TBT '26 mashup, and Friday brings more Goj-Year-ra with Mechagodzilla. My new view goalpost for May is to keep having to move the goalpost (thank you for continuing to be awesome by the daily thousands!), so 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 because I just got a look at how expensive coffee has become, and follow me on BlueSky, Tumblr, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube, and LinkedIn to like what you see, receive the latest news on my content, and get me closer to that new goal and every goal beyond.
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Retrospectre,
Out.
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