Broken Frontier

Reading about Alice's Wonderland, turned inside out in infectious and grim ways, has been a true, yet dark pleasure for some time now. Zenescope Entertainment has been letting Raven Gregory have a field-day with his twisted version of an old fairytale... and the enthusiasm of his writing has captured the audience male or female alike. None are spared!

The captivating tale of the daughter of Alice -Callie- who gets sucked up in the weirdness that is Raven's brain, knows truly and utterly no bounds, since Callie discovers the hard way how crossing boundaries can be quite upsetting.

But just to spite the dark forces on the other side of the Magic Mirror, she manages to be a true daughter of her mother and she escapes Wonderland, just like her mother before her...and just to spite Callie, the entities cross over to the real world. But that is something for another time..

This time shows the dark mirrored reflection of the characters Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum. It is the story of a father and a father's father, both mirroring their own fears, ignorance and lack of commitment and success on the bodies of their offspring. The thoughts of this abuse are written most effectively and portray a sick brain capable of hurting one's own sons, who only want to be loved and not broken.

In the end though, this tale is one of vengeance and of recurrence and about how little boys grow up and eventually make their own choices. And maybe live to see another day...that is; if they are not sucked into Wonderland, where a former nightmare lingers and flourishes and eventually finishes what was started.

This harsh tale of children and their fathers is drawn effectively by Axel Medellin and Salvador Navarro. They are not top-leaguers, which is shown by some short-comings in postures, panel-layouts, crowds and some big panels and splashes could be made into smaller drawings. Their gore however is just well done, which is pleasing for this story (insert dark laughter here).

The strength of this story however is not at all diminished by the art team. Coloring is done aptly and the lettering even deserves extra credit (Crank!!) for its use in schizophrenic thought-panels!

This tale of Dee and Dum leads right into the first story-arc of the Wonderland-trilogy, via the last (this time awesome and deserving) splash page, which was a nice surprise.

As a one-shot, it really depends on the new Ravenized myth to stand on its own, but not one time is this story superfluous and it truly deserves its place in the rest of the saga.