Graphic novel review: I Hate Fairyland – Volume 5: Gert’s Inferno

(courtesy Image Comics)

Welcome back MUFFIN FLUFFERS!

That’s the aggressively return encouragement we’re given on the back cover blurb and if you were afraid that you can’t go back to back to something as sublimely and manically perfect as I Hate Fairyland‘s first series of stories, then think again because Gertie is back and she’s as good and full-on as ever.

If you recall, and how is Gertie in all her yelly-screamy green-haired fury not searing gloriously for eternity into your f*ck-the-world brain, our intrepidly foul-mouthed protagonist finally found her way out of the nightmarishly colourful confines to the real world from which she’d disappeared some thirty years earlier at the age when she innocently wished she could live in the, she thought then, make-believe world of Fairyland.

A sweet wish of the innocents but oh the repercussions, and while Gertrude, to use her full name, stayed in the form of a six-yer-old girl, she grew into a badass fighting machine that Fairyland feared for the most part because she was so damn, furiously, endlessly angry.

And could you blame her?

She’d lost the world she knew and the people she loved and had to fight in a place she thought was all sunshine and light only to find it very much wasn’t, and she’d have to fight tooth and bloody nail to return back home where she imagined, like we all do, that everything will suddenly be all right.

Which brings us to I Hate Fairyland – Volume five: Gert’s Inferno by Skottie Young and art by Brett Bean – previously Young pulled writing and illustrating duties but Bean slips in so seamlessly, you don’t notice the change which is credit to the new artist in town – where an axe-wielding (or not since that’s frowned upon in this reality) Gert is in a grown-up body in an adult world where she’s finding coping a challenge of epically infuriating proportions.

Robbed of all those formative years where we learn all kinds of skills from social to professional, Gert is, to put it mildly, not in a good place, losing job after job because she reacts like you would in the maniacal madness of Fairyland and that doesn’t fly in a world where you’re expected to smile and tell a**holes they are correct because politeness wins over justice every time.

It’s hard not to feel deeply sorry for Gert as she tries, she really tries to fit into a reality she is simply not prepared for, and which, at every turn, mocks her inability to do anything other than react with impotent anger and a cute way of saying swear words that her therapist, who believes Fairyland is a construct Gert created to cope with an unwelcomingly world (we feel you, Gert, we really do), says is another coping mechanism GERT has employed to get through life.

(courtesy Image Comics)

Only thing she’s not coping well, at all, and so when the opportunity arises for Gert to return to Fairyland to do what she does best in a story that is spot on described as “Deadpool-meets-Alice-in-Wonderland”, she has no real choice but to accept it because what the hell else is she equipped for?

Not much, alas, but even this new adventure, if you can call it that with a coldhearted, ruthless billionaire playing on the empathy that Gert surprisingly possesses for anyone in her previous I Hate Fairyland predicament, make life difficult for a woman who’s now in her late thirties and who’s feeling, quite justifiably, as if the world really has it in for her.

It’s hard to give away too much of the storyline without wading into giant, razor-teeth-fitted, three-eyed fish dwelling spoiler-y waters but suffice to say that Gertie, who’s natural inclination is to act first, and figure out the messy consequences later, is well up against it.

With artwork that leaps chaotically and twistedly up from the page in a fun-filled but heartfelt orgy of riotous colour and manic emotions – and honestly, the way everything, including the trip back to Fairyland which makes the disorienting light-filled portal used in Stargate SG-1 looks like a walk in the metaverse-travelling park, pops out at you is fantastically overloading and technicolour brilliant – and a story that really nails the Gert of old while holding fast to the Gert of now, I Hate Fairyland – Volume five: Gert’s Inferno is a welcome return to a character we love because she’s so damn human.

You might not expect that in a fantasy world full of expletives and a manically askew way of sardonically looking at the world, but it’s there and in gut-filled spades, and it adds real richness to Gert’s adventures where the weirdness of map-hobbled goat demons and talking rats with eye issues, is leavened out with some really affecting humanity, the kind that makes you identify with Gert which, to be fair, may surprise you.

After all, what do you have in common with a disaffected woman who visualises killing all the people who piss her off and who’s only skills are killing and graphically dismembering characters whom we like to know as pure fiction but who, in the alternate world of Fairyland, are very real, very deadly and only able to be dealt in the bloodthirsty way that Gert knows all too well?

Actually more than you might think as Gert struggles to adapt to the real world with no adult skills to speak of, landing in jobs that leave her empty and cold and then when she catches a break – a dubious one, admittedly, but a break nonetheless – it turns out to be nothing like she thought and yet sadly everything she cynically imagined.

We’ve all been there, and while we might be more equipped to dealing with a world that challenges us and rips us apart at every turn, the truth is we’re barely more ahead of the curve than Gert (although we don’t have to face of fire-breathing dragons in hell or giant birds incapable of going where they know we need to go, so there’s that at least).

I Hate Fairyland – Volume five: Gert’s Inferno is a brilliantly over-the-top return to form, full of vibrantly manic scenes, artwork that POPS off the page with gore and fury and a ton of fun, a protagonist who is accessibly human with dilemmas with which we can identify, and a storyline that mixes the fantastical and the mundane to winning effect, and leaves us with one hell of a cliffhanger that intimates that Fairyland is not finished with Gert yet.

Not good for her but great for us, and we can only look forward to diving into the blindingly colourful insanity once again where the fantastical and the human meet to ingeniously inspired, soul-satisfying and brain-splattering effect.

(courtesy Image Comics)

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