Zenescope - Omnibusted #57: Bad Girls

Article by Sean Wilkinson,

a.k.a. The Omnibuster.

It's finally here, Ticketholders!

Ever since the Limbo arc concluded, the combined forces of Venus, the Goblin Queen, the Limbo Queen, the Queen Of Spades, and Baba Yaga (whom I had trouble thinking of for some reason) have been scheming on and off the page to amass power for a coming war, and raising their pack of Flesh-Reaving Wrath Beasts to one day unleash upon the Nexus, and in today's five-issue miniseries up for review, the alliance between the five titular Bad Girls (because "titular" sounds just a little dirty, and Zenescope just had to name their all-female Legion Of Doom facsimile like it's a special, industry-focused issue of Penthouse or a Barely Legal knockoff or something) is put to the test.

Written by Joey Esposito (Batman: Urban Legends), Bad Girls is a minor event that I don't remember in that much detail beyond what I wrote in my Cover Charge Quickie collection on Grimm Fairy Tales because it was surrounded by things like The Summoning, Unleashed, and Ascension (which felt much closer together when I was bingeing Zenescope comics daily rather than reading them monthly or reviewing them weekly like I do now). But in terms of the Trade compilation, it's among the most solid efforts I've seen on ComiXology. While I miss the recap credits pages and preview pages that are present in the individual issues, I like when a Trade Paperback is produced to consistently project the impression that it is a graphic novel with chapters, rather than a series of individual issues smashed together with a gallery slapped on the end of it. And whatever I end up reminding myself of going forward (because at this point in the writing, I've just harvested assets in accordance with fair use and not begun my re-read yet), Bad Girls is at least a graphic novel in the best presentation sense I can currently think of.

The Trade cover is the same as the first issue's A Cover (by Alfredo Reyes and Sanju Nivangune), and the Table Of Contents background is adapted from the third issue's A Cover (by Pasquale Qualano and Milen Parvanov).

The "baddest series in the history of Grimm Fairy Tales" begins in the immediate wake of The Lockdown, with a typical, "we seem powerful and coordinated and omniscient, but we have no context for why the heroine is doing what she's doing, so this looks like the perfect opportunity to strike while she's at her lowest" villain monologue (if you recall, Sela chose to stay in prison to help rebuild, serve her time like an honorable badass, and actually learn from her mistakes for once—but also bitch about the quality of prison food—fueled by her newly discovered heroic patience and the possibility of a positive reunion with her daughter, not because she's still in self-pity mode, but the Bad Girls don't know that), and throws in Venus completely mischaracterizing the relationship between Alicia and Jack because she views all men as hormonal love-slaves, which is an intelligent way to use one-dimensional character writing in a subversive, foreshadowing context.

Meanwhile, back in the Shoe, Zenescope probably finally got enough fan letters about Sela's pity problem that she promises to work on it...but then Flesh Reavers.

Yeah; all over New York (including the Shoe, which they smashed into and Sela broke out of, so Warden Garland is probably dead and Princess is probably on the loose somewhere), an army of ravenous, brutal scorpion-lizard humanoids are mindlessly exploring how many dis-words can be done to a human body, and their trail of carnage brings Sela to the aid of Nathan Cross!

Amazing fight (and flight!) paneling this issue, and the dialogue between the villains, and between Sela and Cross, is a fun time no matter if it's your first read or not.

The battle with Sela and Cross being surrounded by Flesh Reavers continues, now with Samantha Darren coming to their rescue and upping the battle quips, but also not having learned her lesson about dragging random people into the Inner Sanctum Of the Nexus.

I mean, it was clear which side Cross is on because of Sela and the Flesh Reavers providing context, but I'm going to review a story arc next week that wouldn't have happened without Samantha teaming up with Baba Yaga in the Dream Eater Saga, the ripples of which came into play in The Gathering, and yet she's still yanking a guy she just met into her Inner Sanctum (phrasing).

Thankfully, Samantha's extradimensional biblio-vaj (because the portal is pink and vaguely yonic in a couple of panels, and when I'm sufficiently caffeinated, my mind likes to go dirty, hard, and deep with the metaphors) has all the answers, including a book that identifies the Flesh Reavers by name for the first time in continuity and provides a solution for defeating them (an allegedly draconic monster called the Mandersoon—it will end up looking nothing like a dragon despite being pictured as a dragon, so maybe between the dozen artists and colorists working on this series, somebody forgot or retconned something...or maybe the Flesh Reavers were misidentified, too, and our heroes just happened to be right by sheer luck?—that can only be awakened once every twenty years by someone with the power of all four Realms Of...Power—so, Sela). The problem is, Baba Yaga is batting for the Bad Girls and her oracle powers are functioning as Nintended, so now it's a race between our three heroes and the Flesh-Reaving forces of the Bad Girls to retrieve the Mandersoon's egg from Mt. Fuji (where's Godzilla when you need him?).

Part of the solution is that one of the things Samantha learned from Shang is to mentor through delegation, which is why Britney is wearing sword & sorcery lingerie in Japan and living with Shang's old monastic order, the Michi No.

I was going to comment on how "all Asian people are alike" it feels to have monks with Chinese names like Shang and Ming belonging to an order with a Japanese name (translating to "of the road," according to Google) in Japan, but there was apparently a lot of cultural overlap in Buddhist history, so I'd rather be a mildly informed source of information than a smug, uninformed, racist asshole, and here we are.

The Flesh Reavers come in different shades of green now and only have four limbs because maybe I was right about the art team before(?), and we get our first glimpse of the true scale of the Bad Girls' invasion (in a nod to the Quest Giant-Size, we see the Warlord Of Oz, Blake & Bolder, Tiger Lily and Wendy, and an army of Heart Soldiers engaged in battle with the Flesh Reavers in each of their respective Realms), but the majority focus is on Britney joining the fight as the action flows into the next chapter.

Even in fiction, Barack Obama was a cool President. He doesn't get named explicitly here for obvious legal reasons, but this miniseries came out the year he began his second term, and the presidential figure is drawn with dark skin, so make your own conclusions.

As it turns out, the action doesn't exactly flow because this issue begins with confirmation that the U.S. Government (in the Grimm Universe, I feel I must clarify for the sake of the...mentally unstable scholars of communal breathing theory among us, so to speak) has been covering up the destructive activities of Highborns and Falsebloods on Earth, and the President makes an executive decision (but Steven Seagal is still alive...barely) to stop the cover-up and make powered beings public knowledge. Like I said, coolest modern POTUS, even in fiction.

When the action does resume, Britney looks a badass as she hacks through one Reaver after another until she gets surrounded and the three heroes we've been following so far come to her rescue. I don't remember why (aside from the plot needing to go differently) she doesn't try using her powers to control some of the Reavers against the others, but I do like the dramatic irony of her dynamic with Sela (not knowing of the person who had the first major impact on her life in the first GFT issue ever) and how it's juxtaposed with Sela and Samantha's dynamic (our resident Good Witch has been blasted into Wonderland, by the way) because Ming's lesson of "restraint can be more effective than attack" hasn't set in yet (though I feel like this character trait is less a part of who Britney is and more in service of the plot, but I could be wrong). I also kind of like that the Michi No monks are offscreen gag manga characters who can handle anything with deadpan grace, and that Sela learns that literal main character energy cannot sustain individual importance in a crossover event like this. All she can do is hatch the Mandersoon egg with said energy and let Britney take care of the rest because the Mandersoon is an adorable little four-armed Mogwai thing with a ravenous appetite who wants Britney to be its mama, and it's the best non-presidential thing in this issue.

There are other things I forgot to mention above because I couldn't work them into the copy naturally, like how Baba Yaga and the Goblin Queen are teaming up to attack the Dark One (because anyone can just come knocking at his Vegas "stronghold" and blast his ass for any reason now—phrasing), which will be important here; and that, between the second and third issues, Sela’s new costume (the blue singlet with cutout shoulders and red thigh-highs combo that we first saw in The Return) changed from "the sleeves are also gloves somehow, so good luck getting into it without magic" back into its original fingerless look that I think will be her finalized default design going forward, but still...good luck putting it on without magic.

So while Samantha is proving she's not just "another blonde lost in Wonderland" by fighting off the Flesh Reavers there and outsmarting and almost incapacitating Spades (until the Goblin Queen steps into frame and clubs the Good Witch over the head, that is; also, Spades is wearing the control crown even though Baba Yaga is at the Dark One's home and also wearing the control crown—except for the panels where it intermittently looks like she's not?), Sela and Cross are doing more research and banter until she realizes that the Grateful Beasts quests were for the lost components of the crown and momentarily forgets her New Year's Resolution to stop hosting her own pity parties.

Speaking of the Dark One's home, it turns out that his pet dragon is canon. But only for a few more pages until Baba's Flesh Reavers kill it and Sela and Cross are forced to team up with him.

I kind of enjoy Hero Of Convenience Malec here. He reminds me of Uncle Phil Shredder from the classic Ninja Turtles cartoon mixed with the persona he put on at the end of Hansel and Gretel, and his face when the dragon croaks is unexpectedly sympathetic for "the most evil being in all the Realms"—until the next one shows up.

And speaking of something more powerful showing up, the Mandersoon (which is a Zenescope-original creature and not derived directly from any real-world folklore I could find by Google search) is now the size of a large wolf, just with six limbs...until the Flesh Reavers show up and it eats enough of them to achieve small kaiju size as we head into the final issue.

I don't remember if it ever gets followed up on, but the theme of the Bad Girls finale (and most "villain Dream Team" comics and their animated adaptations) is that the heroes can work together and the villains ultimately lose because they can't, starting with Alicia trying to take revenge on Venus for killing her parents and cursing her to be a personification of Death.

Throw in the conflict of interest of Baba Yaga having to delay her revenge on Malec (who will get his own Grimm Universe focus soon in Retrospective continuity) for the genocide of her family, and the reveal that the Goblin Queen (who will also get a Grimm Universe One-Shot) was the only one with a real crown (so her "death" at the hands of Venus frees the Flesh Reavers from any kind of coordination, making it easier for the Mandersoon to eat them all and force the villains to retreat).

Sela's gloves return for a panel, it's hilarious and surreal to see a six-legged wolf-kaiju coo like it's still a cryptid puppy, there's a subplot with the Bad Girls stealing Samantha's Guardian powers (because she still can't stop letting villains into the Inner Sanctum) to weaponize it against Sela that goes nowhere if you don't blink fast enough, and Sela ultimately decides to wander the Nexus like Caine in Kung-Fu, saving people and hunting things instead of going back to prison, just in case some other apocalyptic event happens to be...Unleashed. And that's it.

I don't remember what happens to the Mandersoon beyond this series, but for once I don't mind that it just ends and resolves itself in the gutters because I know there's some follow-through coming. Aside from the art being inconsistent with character design, I didn't have much to gripe about. The Trade was well-produced, the story was mostly solid, the action kept a fairly consistent pace, the dialogue was snappy, the Mandersoon was adorable and hilarious and terrifying (and therefore enjoyably surreal), and Legally Nondescript Obama Standee was on-page just long enough for the reading public to withstand the barest fraction of his awesomeness. With or without Fauxbama (because I don't want to be considered a biased collage of empty but derogatory, MAGA-approved buzzwords by the kind of people I don't want engaging with my content), Bad Girls is among Zenescope's best miniseries. Here's my excerpt FROM Cover Charge #3: Grimm Fairy Tales (June 8, 2014):

"After the events of Lockdown, Sela is smashed out of prison when an army of monsters called Flesh Reavers come to reave her flesh. United (kind of) against her and the Dark One, we have The Queen Of Spades, The Goblin Queen, Alicia the Limbo Queen, Baba Yaga, and Venus, using items and energies Sela acquired for them in past GFT issues to feed the Reavers and construct a device that controls them. Sela ultimately teams up with Red, Hook, and Samantha to defeat the Reavers and the five Bad Girls. Basically reads just like the last two "stop an apocalypse" story arcs, but it was cool to see Red riding a giant magical wolf-thing."

Speaking of extra limbs, Stay Tuned for tomorrow's TBT '26 on another old HeroMachine character. I gave the new Phoenix Edition a crack on my birthday and have already designed a basic version of one of my characters for the big milestone project. You can expect a first impression review of the program to come by the end of the month. But also, Friday means my delayed Godzilla vs Megalon review is on its way down the pipeline.

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Omnibuster,

Obama-booster,

Out.