Alice Ever After
Dan Panosian, writer & artist (Wonderland); Giorgio Spalletta, artist (London); Fabiana Mascolo, colorist
BOOM! Studios, 2023
The publisher's blurb describes this as a sequel to the Alice in Wonderland stories. While technically true–since the heroine is indeed the Alice of the stories, all grown up–this story presents a gritty, mostly realistic version of an adult Alice largely out of her element in Victorian England. Alice is struggling to obtain drugs to feed her addiction, which is the only way she can escape to Wonderland. While this makes for a dark, realistic explanation for that fantasy world, it also robs it of most of its characteristic whimsy. There's certainly nothing whimsical about the real world, either. Alice's father is a dentist who makes his living replacing teeth rather than fixing them, and he is not particular about where he gets them from. When she has herself committed to the asylum Sacred Heart Hospital for the un-well, she discovers all kinds of corruption. After those discoveries get her enrolled into an experimental treatment (which has the look of a frontal lobotomy), her sister and a friend attempt a rescue. But they are too late, so the story has an extremely bleak conclusion. This is an odd one. It is fundamentally a story about Victorian society with its rigid social class divisions, but the Alice connection is an undeniable hook.
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Sounds wonderful.