(courtesy Image Comics)
If you have read any of the I Hate Fairyland issues, collected or otherwise, you will know that the one thing, THE ONE THING, that the very angry, usually coated in blood protagonist, or is that antagonist, Gertie wants is to go back to the real world.
You know, the place where we all deal with life in a thousand chaotically shitty forms, a world which frankly could use a softer, kinder, more fairytale touch; that is, of course, if Fairyland was more Disney and less The Brothers Grimm meets Tarantino which is the version in which our mother-clucking (Gertie can swear but not like she wants to!) antagonist finds herself.
Yes, all Gertie all wants to do is to go home after decades trapped in Fairyland, growing ever more furious and murder-y by the instant and the last thing she needs is for the ex monarch of the land, Cloudia, to end up in the real world instead of her.
But that’s ———- SPOILER ALERT !!!!! ———- precisely what happens in this anarchically hilarious seventh collection of the I Hate Fairyland series which gives us not only Cloudia’s misadventures in the real world but a wholly brilliant and wildly, twistedly imaginative take on the classic Norwegian fairytale, The Three Billy Goats Gruff, which is way more blood-and-gusty than you likely recall.
In fact, while there are some fantastically out-there stories in this instalment, including Gertie having to become even more monstrous (is that even possible? The short answer is YES!) to beat a plague of the damn things, it’s that riff on the the Goats Gruff that makes this instalment absolutely shine.
That, and the fact the artwork by Brett Bean, is even more graphically colourful and blood-splattery amplified than ever before.
One of things that makes the I Hate Fairyland so much fun to read is how gloriously outsized and over-the-top all the drawings are; Bean goes all out and then some and then even more to make every single panel POP, and it results in a graphic novel which fairly leaps off each and every page.
You feel every feral emotion Gertie has, delight in all the monsters and corpses and innocent bystanders who do not fare well anywhere near Gertie, and feel absolutely immersed in every single manically hilarious plot twist.
You should, of course, feel like you are in the midst of every single graphic novel you read, and in the good times, you always do, but I Hate Fairyland, thanks to Young’s inspired storytelling and Bean’s gorgeously emphatic artwork, feels even more hyper and manic and furiously involving than anything else.
You are thrust into a story which absolutely takes no prisoners, narrative or artwork-wise, a wild ride which does not relent, does not stop and does not slow down for even a second, and you love every single last nanosecond of it.
It’s the wildest parody of fairyland you will ever have the great pleasure of reading, and we should thank the graphic ovel gods, assuming Gertie hasn’t disemboweled them first, that we have I Hate Fairyland and that Young and Bean continue to be at the very top of their gloriously demented and happily twisted game.
I Hate Fairyland is available from Image Comics.
