10th Anniversary Alice in Wonderland

Spoilers for Grimm Fairy Tales’ 10th Anniversary Alice in Wonderland special. The ending of this one was completely unexpected. You go into an Alice in Wonderland story, and by the end you're finding out that the boy Alice befriended was John Wayne Gacy. I really wasn't expecting them to go there. The story starts in Chicago in 1952 with a little boy being abused by his father. He's terrified of the creatures coming out of his closet, and his father just makes things worse. Then the Tweedles drag him into Wonderland and nearly cook him before Alice saves him. That first meeting matters because Alice becomes someone he can actually turn to. She's lonely too. She's living in this place where she can't always tell which of her friends are real, and now there's another child who needs her. They become friends, and he keeps coming back to see her as he gets older. But you start seeing how different his life is from the version he's telling her. He talks about work, marriage and the things happening in his life like everything is going well. The pictures tell a completely different story. Alice is getting these little updates from her friend while we're seeing the violence and the things he's leaving out. And then he comes back one day and she's gone. The Jabberwocky takes advantage of that. He knows how badly this man wants Alice back, and he keeps that possibility in front of him. It becomes this obsession with finding her again, even though she has moved on and tried to bury what happened in Wonderland. Years later, he sees her at a carnival. He's dressed as a clown, introduces himself as J.W., and expects her to recognize him. She doesn't. She's there with her boyfriend, living her life, and he can't accept that she doesn't remember the person who has spent all these years thinking about her. From there it gets horrible. He murders her boyfriend and takes Alice back to his house. Being trapped there brings everything back, including the boy she once saved. One thing that matters here is what the Jabberwocky tells him toward the end. The man keeps trying to put what he's done on Wonderland, but the creature tells him that the madness was his own. So even in this fictional version of Gacy, the story doesn't let him put all of his choices on the monster in the mirror. He does finally let Alice go. He goes back through the mirror believing he's saved her, only for the Jabberwocky to point out that she's remembering Wonderland again. The place she had tried to escape is back in her life. Then the police arrive, Alice sees the news, and we get his full name. John Wayne Gacy. Looking back, the Chicago setting, the clown, the victims and the crawlspace were all leading somewhere. But getting that reveal in an Alice in Wonderland comic was still something else. It also makes that childhood friendship a lot harder to look back on. Alice saved a frightened little boy, and years later that same person becomes someone she needs to be saved from. That was the part I wanted to talk about with this one. The whole thing goes somewhere I really wasn't expecting at the end.