Zenescope - Omnibusted #61: Sleepy Hollow

Article by Sean Wilkinson,

a.k.a. The Omnibuster.

From what I recall, today's miniseries up for review has little or nothing to do with Zenescope's Grimm Fairy Tales canon beyond maybe having a mental gymnastics-heavy stretch of a connection to the Jack O' Lantern story from the 2012 Halloween Special (which is barely canon outside of a Dark One appearance anyway), and only features GFT branding for deceptively associative marketing purposes. I also recall from my first reading that its interior art was dark, dreary, unintelligible, joyless garbage. So why am I bothering with it again? Let's find out....

Sleepy Hollow

At the time I originally read this miniseries, my only vivid experiences with the Sleepy Hollow narrative were the Johnny Depp film and the supernatural procedural series from the 2010s where Ichabod Crane woke up in modern times to stop his cursed father from helping a secret society of Revolutionary War-era British proto-Nazis from reviving the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (the Headless Horseman was Death and Ichabod's father was War, by the way) for generic evil reasons. Also I think the series was canceled because half of the core dynamic was killed off and Crane spent the fourth season forcing a romance with a woman who was probably his dead partner/love interest sharing souls with their adult daughter or something. Even if I remember that wrong, I remember it feeling really gross and weird, and it made me drop off like everyone else did, especially after the first three seasons told such a satisfying and complete story.

But we're not here to talk about that; this is Zenescope - Omnibusted, people!

The cover for the Trade Paperback is also the A Cover for Part 2 by Marat Mychaels and Ivan Nunes, the credits page is an interior splash page from Part 3 by AC Osorio and Erick Arciniega (misspelled as "Arsiniega" on said page), and the Table Of Contents background is an earlier splash page from the same issue, both cropped and overlaid with the Trade's original in-between title pages to make them look extra-boned. Also, the bonus content consists of two first-issue previews: Madness Of Wonderland and Jungle Book: Last Of the Species, both of which I've previously reviewed.

In 1775 in Tarrytown, New York, British soldiers behead and discard the body of a Revolutionary named John, who may or may not become the Headless Horseman later, and it's treated as both a dream sequence and a historical flashback, jumpscaring us into modern day.

Meet American History Teaching Assistant Craig Marsters (who may or may not be a descendant of John's). He's late for a meeting with a student athlete at Tarrytown University, where it's apparently common practice for the jocks to buy test answers from the TAs because putting a ball in a net really good is more important than being smart. I love college.

Craig isn't as smart as he thinks, though, because he thinks it's okay to lecture his black roommate on the best way to stay off the streets, and Brian (the aforementioned student athlete who's too lazy and stupid—or maybe just knows his lane, because labels, even hurtful ones, have causes—to be both of those words at the same time) knows that Hessian is the word for both German mercenaries and a type of counterculture skateboarder, whereas Craig (or more correctly, the writer) conflates the Hesh shorthand slang with the full word and spells it as "Heshian" (which is not a thing).

Anyway, Craig is apparently such a workaholic geek that his girlfriend is thinking about committing suicide, and so principled about not taking a payoff that Brian and the rest of the basketball team (including Craig's roommate) decide to Snidely Whiplash him into the path of an oncoming train until he changes his mind (or loses his head; whichever comes first).

Well, even though the team chickens out, panicked shenanigans result in Craig still staring down the tracks, and it looks like a ladder; I mean, the latter.

So now, Sleepy Hollow is I'll Always Know What You Did Last Summer. Yay.

Also, his girlfriend Katie wasn't going to kill herself, after all; she just copied Wendy O's suicide note from the internet for an assignment and he never got the chance to ask her about it because, you know, "death by choo-choo."

Also yay, this actually is canon because in addition to being the literature professor at a Boston prep school, Sela is also the Mythology & Folklore professor at Tarrytown University!

And the subject of today's lesson is the "local legend" of the Headless Horseman, as depicted in Washington Irving's The Legend Of Sleepy Hollow, but based on true events in-Universe that provide context for the opening sequence of the miniseries and mirror Craig's fate (John Marsters, and the Continental Army at large, was betrayed by his double-agent best friend, Abraham, for being a Revolutionary cuck).

So of course, now the team are all scared that Craig will come back from the dead for revenge. 

Maybe they have a point?

And they definitely do. Or at least, a sharp edge.

His roommate (whose idea it was to tie Craig to the tracks—his name is even Ty—because they didn't expect that route to be in use that night and thought a blindfold scare would be enough) is dreaming about Craig and his girlfriend Katie having a sexy intellectual conversation about whether or not her Princess Bride fandom makes her a nerd, and if nerdiness has a positive connotation in the modern context, because supernatural guilt makes sense. And Ty reveals himself to be kind of a villainous asshole, like, Barry Cox but evil and worse. Also, one of the guys is found beheaded and ruled a suicide, and Brian seems to be next. That's it. Time for the finale issue already.

Every white guy looks the same in this art style, so it wasn't Brian, it was an extra named Steve. But that matters even less than the story as a whole, because the Horseman quickly works its way through the rest of the jocks from this point on. The only thing of note that could be considered remotely compelling is the reveal that Katie was in on the plan that led to Craig's death, and there was some decent foreshadowing throughout the previous issues. The art was also not as bad as I remember. But Sleepy Hollow is just a rapid-fire slasher movie in comic book form (akin to The Piper miniseries) with slow, plagaristic buildup and the barest justification for its own canon necessity.

Friday will apparently bring more crap to the table as I review Godzilla vs Megaguirus for Goj-Year-ra. Wish me luck, Stay Tuned, and please continue to support me and what I do by Becoming A Ticketholder (you haven't yet), leave a comment at the bottom of this post and any others you have opinions about, help out my ad revenue as you read so I can afford to buy intelligence but already have enough of my own to know that you can't cheat your way to a better world, and follow me on BlueSky, Tumblr, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube, and LinkedIn to like what you see and receive the latest pieces of news on my content.

28

Omnibuster,

Out.