I Hate Fairyland #9 (re-post)

I Hate Fairyland #9

Written and illustrated by Skottie Young

Colors by Jean-Francois Beaulieu

Letters by Nate Piekos

                After a crushing and humiliating defeat at the Tower Of Battle, tiny titan of terror and former queen of Fairyland Gertrude engages in conflict with dark sorcerers and foul creatures…in a card game. After losing her entire stash, Gertrude becomes indebted to Bart of The Blackness. The evil wizard threatens to feed her to his pet snake if she doesn’t repay the rest of her tab. Thinking quickly, she hops into Larry’s Hat of Holding to see if she can find a rare beast for trade. What Gertrude finds in the impossibly large hat may make her wish she let Bart’s snake devour her.

                Skottie Young’s I Hate Fairyland is what you get if Rocky and Bullwinkle’s Fractured Fairytales were told by Sam Kinnison. It’s what would happen if someone spent every day for thirty years in the happiest, sappiest place in existence and all that changed was your mental age. I imagine this is what working at Disney for decades would feel like. All of the forced saccharine attitudes, the welded on smiles, the almost sinister, dark underbelly of what such a world would have to have in order to balance itself out with.

                Gertrude is an incredibly flawed character and she very much knows it. The quest to return home drives her forward after it has driven her insane several dozen times over. It’s a testament to Young’s writing that he can make a character who’s gone through so much into a character you can rationally root for and/or against. A lot of Gertrude’s problems are as a result of her own bratty behavior and dumb decisions. A lot of what she goes through is due to her being an uneducated, entitled, uneducated kid.

Larry, a fly with a magic hat and gun, is Gertrude’s loyal but misanthropic guide through the ins and outs of Fairyland; staying by her side, regardless of the abuse he takes and the life he’s missed out on. He makes it known he hates her but at the same time does feel the obligation to help her get home, no matter what. Though, as with Gertrude, this has taken a heavy toll on him and it shows in his snarktastic remarks at his charge and general ambivalence.

The story in this issue takes a break from the usual questing carnage to give a one-off cursory glance into Gertrude’s journey. Larry’s hat malfunctions and she goes in to try and fix the problem. Once inside, she comes to grips with not only a major hoarding problem, but face-to-faces with the victims of her capricious whims. A group of people surround Gertrude and scold her for kidnapping them and keeping them prisoners of the hat; left to die or be forgotten about for years, sometimes decades. While stuck inside the hat, Gertrude engages in battle with Lynts, creatures spawned by Larry’s negligent upkeep.

Skottie Young’s art in this issue appears to base the designs of the sorcerers and creatures in the dark tower on the King of the Dead from Lord of The Rings, Death from Hogfather, and Doctor Facilier from The Princess and The Frog. It’s great to see hilarious liberties taken with such figures and Bart of The Blackness looks like a cross between Doctor Strange and Sinestro. The artwork throughout the series has been consistently good.

The sharp contrast of colorful, bright and cartoonish environments giving way to dark, violent mayhem is nothing new. This is an example of what TVTropes classifies as Art Dissonance. Having a cherubic, green haired little girl maiming, killing and brutalizing virtually everything in her path is farfetched enough without having her victims being cutesy, almost garishly colored fantasy creatures of a land where candy and sugary drinks are abundant and pretty much the only thing being served. Had this story been taken a less darkly comedic tone, this might have been a much less enjoyable series to read. Other good examples in comic books of Art Dissonance include the surprisingly twisted Archie vs Predator, comic book masterpiece Maus, and Eric Powell’s The Goon. Though, in Goon’s case, the art caught up with the series’s darker tone in later volumes though the quality did not suffer for it in the slightest.

What keeps “I Hate Fairyland” going in terms of longevity is something that, in any other story, would be a major drawback. Gertrude, for better and worse, never seems to learn from the mistakes she’s made and the people she’s hurt along the way. It almost seems to dawn on Gertrude the price her journey has cost not only herself, but everyone around her. However, she remains as single minded as ever and shows that while her mind may be that of a thirty-year-old, she never truly grew up. Though, to be honest, that’s kind of what would happen to a child in her predicament and it makes me sympathize with what amounts to a villain protagonist.

If random, crazy, blood-soaked carnage is your thing (and occasionally it is, for me), then I Hate Fairyland issue #9 will be a good tide over until the next issue where we’ll no doubt see more sugary savagery.