MYTHS & LEGENDS QUARTERLY: JACK & JILL, from Zenescope Entertainment on March 30th, 2022, begins a new origin for the characters of the Myst realm. Jack the Giant Killer faces his reputation as a killer, and Jill seeks revenge for her fallen giant family.
The Details
- Written By: Jenna Lyn Wright
- Art By: Eduardo Garcia, Ricardo Osnaya, Andrea Errico, Dario Tallarico, Massimiliani La Manno
- Colors By: Maxflan Araujo
- Letters By: Taylor Esposito, Elizabeth Sharland
- Cover Art By: Al Barrionuevo
- Cover Price: $8.99
- Release Date: March 30, 2022
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Was It Good?
What better way to introduce a story about giants than in a giant-sized quarterly issue under the Grimm Fairy Tales line. MYTHS & LEGENDS QUARTERLY: JACK & JILL takes the classic nursery rhyme and blends it with the old fairy tale for a completely new adventure where the line between good and evil is not quite clear. Is it worth the hefty cover price? Maybe.
Let’s start with the art since it’s the easiest peace to review in this quarterly. The art is generally great. Whenever you see multiple artists on a comic, that’s usually a red flag for inconsistency. Here, you can see where the art style shifts significantly but Zenescope takes the wisest approach by tying the art changes to different points in the timeline via flashbacks and dreams. Inconsistency isn’t great, but if you’re going to have it, the creators made it make sense here, so it works out.
Within each art style, the quality is fairly good. You can see the change from one style to the next but the styles suit the context of each scene. The styles are not so radically different from one to the other that the transition felt jarring.
As for the story, it’s a lot. And by “a lot”, I mean convoluted.
The fun of Zenescope’s Grimm universe is discovering original characters that are twists on classic characters from literature. Here, you get the impression Wright didn’t have much to go on and struggled to fill pages by making the story super complicated (read through to the next section for more plot details). Jill is a giant (but not really) who wants revenge on Jack for killing her mother (who’s not really dead) after Jack changes his mind about giants as killers (who aren’t really all killers). In fairness, the first two-thirds of the story flows well and keeps the narrative straight. However, once the twists, turns, and red herrings start to dominate the story, you feel like the issue should have come with a scorecard to keep it all straight.
Wright deserves credit for taking a teeny sliver of a story and building it out into something big enough to fill a quarterly comic, but there’s more artificial filler than meat on this bone, and it leaves an odd aftertaste. It’s not a terrible story, but it’s too convoluted and complicated to be enjoyable.
Keep scrolling for a closer look at the covers, or Click Here to jump right to the story description with some spoilers.
What’s It About?
[SPOILERS AHEAD – Click here if you just want the score without spoilers]
We begin with an introduction to Jill as a young child in a dream. The dream turns into a nightmare as she believes she witnesses her mother’s death by a hooded figure. Now, Jill searches the woods on a hunt to bring back to her village of giants. Jill is of giant blood but her body is the size of an adult human.
During the hunt, Jill is spotted by outsiders. She reports being seen to her village leaders behind the magic wall that hides the village from the human world. The leaders choose to send a scout to determine if the town has been discovered. Soon, the peaceful giants find the severed head of the scout at the entrance to their magic gate and vote to relocate or go to war with the nearby village.
The issue proceeds with a hidden plot to instigate strife, finding Jack as a complicated character, and the hunt for Jill’s mother has more twists and curves than a 1,000-piece jigsaw puzzle.
Keep scrolling for a closer look at preview images of the internal pages, or Click Here to jump right to the score.
Final Thoughts
MYTHS & LEGENDS QUARTERLY: JACK & JILL adds a new twist to a classic duo with a completely original backstory for the titular characters. Despite a small army of artists, the style transitions are smooth and make sense for the structure of the story. That said, twists and turns overwhelm the last third of the issue making for a ponderous and convoluted resolution.
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