GFT Retrospective #128: Unleashed #0 - The Game

Article by Sean Wilkinson,

a.k.a. The Retrospectre.

I suppose that when you're playing a Game of any kind, turnabout is fair play. So because last week, I reviewed (as much as I could, given its length) the A Shadow Falls prelude to Unleashed (which was first included with four seemingly random reprints as part of the Best Of Zenescope Special Edition) as an Omnibusted post, I'm reprinting that review, along with my thoughts on Unleashed #0: The Game, as a Retrospective post today.

Unleashed

Volume One

Unleashed is the second largest of the three Zenescope events I have read before (The Dream Eater Saga was a straightforward enough twelve-issue series with a few One-Shots, and that was it, while the Age Of Darkness will have more content to it than the Being has torso muscles), with several short stories and crossover issues, and five Tie-In comic series, as well as an intervening One-Shot that I'll probably get to next month, and a huge batch of character bios.

The cover for Volume One is the A Cover for Unleashed #0 by Anthony Spay and Nei Ruffino, the Table Of Contents background is a joining of Unleashed #1's B Cover and Unleashed #2's A Cover, both by Jamie Tyndall and Ula Moś (with a quote from The Being that we'd later see used by Slappy/Kanduu in the first season of Goosebumps), and A Shadow Falls got a special title page in the Trade Paperback version based on Unleashed #1's C Cover by Stjepan Šejić.

Unleashed

A Shadow Falls

Insert Double Dragon Animated Series meme here.

But also, insert the new roll call format that I think we also saw in The Summoning when Sela showed up with Marcus, and at the end of Wonderland #10. It's basically the entirety of A Shadow Falls, showing Sela (looking at a picture of Venus playing with Ilys), Ilys herself (mourning Venus after the events of Godstorm), Shang (having just returned from the grave at the end of The Summoning), Belinda (whom we haven't seen since her brief reveal in Quest), Robyn and Britney (sparring), Zeus (having gathered Heather, Athena, Neptune, and Hades in response to Godstorm, suspecting—correctly—that Venus is partnered with a greater threat), and Cindy and the Dark One (who are preparing to summon minions from Myst because even though every failure is part of the plan, the plan itself has become a failure in the face of increasing complications and stronger emerging threats). Unfortunately, the Being and his exposed brain have been observing them all with godlike omnipotence, and faster than Cindy can say "klaatu barada necktie," he shows up to kill all of the summons and kidnap her in the name of education, spreading word of a new world order, and...Himself, really.

There's nothing truly eventful going on in these six pages beyond naming the major players in the coming Game that is to be Unleashed, and even less for me to say, except that it somewhat reminds me of the Pawns Short Story from way back.

Unleashed #0

The Game

The event proper opens on the Being playing the titular Game (one he invented that has only three pieces, each of a different color, a board with limited, almost linear movement possibility, and only two players, but he can play it by himself, so it's exactly the kind of nonsensical bullshit a god would invent to cure His boredom and annoy lesser lifeforms) with Cindy, who still thinks she stands a chance against a...man who humbled her demon boyfriend, yeeted Death to another country with one hand, and murdered a goddess by ripping off her arms before he slaughtered an entire army by entering a room and easily kidnapped her. Considering what Cindy lives through later in Zenescope’s history, I like her chances, but fights aren't the important thing here. It's The Game that matters, and more than that, the story Being told during The Game.

Some time in Sela's distant past (after the Wild Hunt, because glasses), in addition to everything else we've seen her do, she was a Power Ranger.

Not literally (although that would be a cool crossover to read if it were to ever exist), but she has a Sword Of Power and led a team of five monster-slayers with attitude, so the joke stands. This team was known as the Hunters (also featured in the Hunters: The Shadowlands Tie-In series that I will get to next week), and in a time when monsters and humans shared the Nexus (and possibly the Realms Of Power as well), they protected the world against Demons (The Unseen), Vampires (The Eternal), Werewolves (The Hunger), and Zombies (The Cursed), each of which got their own Tie-In miniseries and short story that I will cover as the weeks pass.

In addition to Sela, there was Liesel Van Helsing (daughter of the vampire hunter from multimedia Dracula lore, who has multiple miniseries and crossover appearances, particularly on the street-level side of the Grimm Universe, and received her own very, very loose TV series adaptation that ran for five seasons on the SYFY Channel), Roman Asher (a brutal werewolf hunter), Masumi Yamamoto (an assassin skilled in magic and the demonic arts who will get her own miniseries and a crossover or two later, but has more narrative potential than I remember her getting), and Elijah (a former slave and zombie hunter with possible ties to Letitia from Salem's Daughter). Shang is also there, and seems to be denying my fraud allegations for a few pages (and for once in his Being-damned life) by actually guiding, protecting, and helping Sela like a good mentor and surrogate father should (I haven't mentioned it yet, but Pat Shand is writing this event). The Being says Shang has the Key, which will be important shortly and later in the event.

When the monsters gather together and decide to summon their god to Earth (who may or may not actually be the Being), the Hunters take the ritual as an opportunity to shoot all their caviar in one basket-barrel, and against Shang's advice, Sela uses the Key (basically a GS Ball of Provenance magic) to open a portal to the Shadowlands (which is implied at the beginning of the issue to be the interior of Pandora's Box), sucking the monsters, their god, and the Hunters (including Sela, which is a solid, "find out how she escaped...next time on Dragon Ball Z!" cliffhanger for the flashback) into the strange dimension.

Back in the present, the Being reveals his ambition of...being...an omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, fascist god to the masses, and sends a humbled and traumatized Cindy back to the Dark One with a message...as a message: "a shadow is falling."

The Game issue also featured character bios for the huge cast of Hunters, Monsters, Gods, Highborns, and Falsebloods who feature in the Unleashed event (printed again at the end of Volume One), as well as an issue release timeline (but not a canon chronology) that spanned from April to September 2013 across six issues and five miniseries. The art this issue (drawn and colored by Nei Ruffino) is the best interior work I've seen in a while, and Shand's writing is to the standard you'd expect, with deep, efficient exposition and quippy, personality-rich dialogue (Cindy, Shang, and Van Helsing being the standouts so far).

Stay Tuned for Godzilla: Tokyo S.O.S., the September Time Drops calendar, and next week, the Final Piece of Dressrosa. And please continue to support me and what I do by Becoming A Ticketholder (you haven't yet), leaving a comment at the bottom of this post and any others you have opinions about, helping out my ad revenue as you read, and follow 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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Retrospectre,

Out.