A few years ago I began buying my wife comics I thought she’d be interested in, books like Marvel’s Wonderful Wizard of Oz and DC’s Batgirl. One day in my local comic shop she stumbled across Tales from Wonderland: The Cheshire Cat, so we picked it up thinking it was just a one-shot reimagining of an Alice in Wonderland character. It would end up bringing both my wife and I into the series dramatic vision of what Wonderland is really like. We’d find that the One-Shot we picked up was actually part of the larger miniseries Return to Wonderland from Zenescope Entertainment. We find ourselves caught up in the lives of the not-so-normal Liddle family. Alice is all grown up, married and with two children though life has never been normal for her since she returned from the world beyond the looking glass!
Alice’s daughter Calie finds herself having to babysit her psychotically depressed and almost comatose mother, dealing with a father who can’t handle the reality so he cheats on his wife, and a younger brother who is secretly on the edge of sanity himself. One night when chasing her mother’s pet rabbit into the basement, Calie literally falls down the rabbit hole and is brought to a world you may recognize as Wonderland at first, only to realize this place is much more dangerous than any version you have ever seen before. Calie is pursued relentlessly by the Cheshire Cat, a monstrous feline who is out to kill Calie in the name of the Jabberwocky. Along the way she will encounter the murderous Carpenter who has apparently killed his friend the Walrus just as they did the oysters long ago. She’ll also be taken in by the Mad Hatter, whose real motives for saving Calie are much more sinister and perverse than his initial appearance lets on. A plethora of familiar characters inhabit this twisted version of Wonderland.
The story is created by Raven Gregory (who also writes the book) and the team behind Zenescope’s flagship titles Grimm Fairy Tales, Joe Brusha and Ralph Tedesco who don’t disappoint in crafting this wonderfully bizarre book. The illustrations by Rick Bonk and colors by Nei Ruffino bring the characters to life in a style that carries well across the entire series. If you’re looking for realistic, modern woman and aren’t a fan of the “Power Girl look” in your female characters then you may want to pass on Return to Wonderland. The pin up style with which the girls are portrayed even carries over into the multiple variant covers, which my wife has hunted down and even paid hefty prices for. Our calendar for 2010 even featured many of the variant covers for the series. While Alice in Wonderland is a story that has been retold and reimagined many times over, I most definitely would recommend the series to any comic fan or any Alice fan for that matter. While Return to Wonderland is very much a new version of an old story, the one-shot series Tales from Wonderland as well as the two sequel series Beyond Wonderland and Escape from Wonderland expand on the story and the world to create an expansive history for the characters that will draw you into their world and make you want more.
