Hatter M - or, to give it its full title, The Looking Glass Wars: Hatter M - is a very odd comic.

It's a four-issue miniseries, although you need to Google for interviews to find that out, because it's not mentioned in the actual comic or on the website.  And it's a spin-off from Frank Beddor's Looking Glass Wars trilogy, rewriting Alice in Wonderland.  Thus far, only one book of that trilogy has come out, and that's only in the UK.  It doesn't ship in America until autumn 2006.

Beddor, a first-time novelist, is actually a film producer.  Looking Glass Wars claims to be the true version of the story horrendously distorted by Lewis Carroll in Alice in Wonderland itself, and Beddor sticks firmly to that line in most interviews.  Other times, he claims (rather implausibly) that he was inspired to write a three volume reinvention of Alice because he hated the original so much.  I haven't read the novel, personally - despite the best efforts of its publicists to describe it as a more mature take on the characters, it was actually treated in the UK as a children's book.

So, we have here a comic book spin-off based on a world established in a novel that hasn't been published yet in the USA and, in any event, is aimed at readers several years younger than the average direct market reader.  Oh, and just to make it extra kiddie-friendly, it has art by Ben Templesmith.  The more I think about this, the more I wonder who on earth they're targetting.

Hatter Madigan is Beddor's loose analogue to the Mad Hatter.  He throws blades around and has a heavily armed hat.  The story has him arriving on Earth in 1859, in an inversion of the Alice in Wonderland set-up.  Princess Alyss has disappeared through a portal to Earth and, as the royal bodyguard, Hatter M is trying to find her.  Partly because it's his job, but mainly because he considers that he's screwed up rather badly by losing track of her in the first place.

Issue #1 has Hatter in Paris in 1859, where he spectacularly fails to understand most of what's going on around him, and ends up getting into unfortunate fights as a result.  Meanwhile, he tries to get his hat back, and track down Alyss.  Helpfully, he sees items from Wonderland and anything involving lots of imagination as glowing.  This means we get scenes where Hatter sees a glowing man, approaches him, and has a rather forced encounter with Jules Verne.

It's a weird comic, and I suspect I'd have a better idea of where Beddor was coming from if I'd read the book.  It's played largely for laughs, with Hatter trying to act like a straightforward action hero while wildly misinterpreting the world around him.  Templesmith's art works better than I might have expected, with the loose and sketchy feel fitting the oddity of the subject, although the colouring is too subdued, and the opening pages are largely impenetrable on a first reading.

Oddly engaging, in its way, but hard to get a handle on.

Rating: B

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