Review by Frank Plowright

By 2011 the world of Grimm Fairy Tales had expanded beyond fairy tales to incorporate the fictional worlds created by others such as Neverland, Oz and Wonderland, and The Dream Eater Saga is the first crossover story.

A basic familiarity with the cast from other sources means The Dream Eater Saga can be read as a sample of the massive and sprawling Grimm Fairy Tales franchise, offering an interesting cast reconfigured for the horror genre facing an original threat. After a decidedly shaky start the series writing generally supplies a good hook, the characters are understood and the situations work, but be warned the art is often poor. That’s not the case here, where the artists have different styles united by the lurid colouring of Studio Cirque.

Grimm Fairy Tales Volume Nine presented a clash between the forces of good and evil, with both sides taking casualties. The primary purpose was access to Earth, the only realm connecting to all other dimensions, which was prevented, but an attempt to aid weakened forces releases the Dream Eater, an entity attracted to those with supernatural abilities.

Raven Gregory scripts a plot created with Joe Brusha and Ralph Tedesco, and the opening chapter skips across realms and times confident readers will pick up on featured characters being Alice Liddell from Alice in Wonderland, the Pied Piper and Sinbad. Some will feature more than others going forward, but from the start the Dream Eater is an interesting creation, masquerading as an elderly man, but drawn undergoing terrible transformations.

The quality, though, is very dependent on the art. Alfred Trujillo is the class act here, but only draws the single chapter. So does Jean-Paul Deshong, who’s the opposite end of the scale with limited imagination and inconsistent people. The sample art is by Roberto Viacava, who draws both the opening chapter and most of the final chapter, and is definitely among the better artists, with variety and personality to his pages.

There is a formula to most of these chapters, coming in two varieties. One scenario has a fearsome menace manifesting in the vicinity of the leading personalities who’re unable to defeat them only for the Dream Eater to be untroubled and restore the dead to life. The alternative is the machinations of Baba Yaga, who’s set herself up as the only person with a slight chance of defeating the Dream Eater. Why this is necessary isn’t revealed, because as portrayed here the Dream Eater only targets bloodthirsty menaces, and the world would surely be better rid of them. We’ll find out in Volume Two.