Written by: Scottie Young
Art by: Scottie Young & Jean-Francois Beaulieu
Publisher: Image
*SPOILER WARNING sort of. Because this is a comedy comic, talking about the plot means talking about some jokes. So if you don’t want to know any of that, then just go buy it already*
Another month, another issue of I Hate Fairyland. It’s like a way to tell time or something, except not a very good way since there are gaps every five issues. Also, my work week is best measured in curses and sighs instead of something more formal like time. I mean, imagine going into your day job on the 4th and saying, “We’re 4/30ths done!” That would be terrible.
It would also be 2/15ths because math!
Anyhow, IHF #7 mixes things up a bit this month by introducing a new character. His name is Duncan, he likes to dress up like a dragon and pretend its Halloween, and he also drinks a few too many frozen sodas and needs to pee. As it turns out, some bathrooms aren’t bathrooms but portals.
IHF #7 then smash-cuts back to Gertrude and Larry who are doing their normal thing: drinking, violence, and attempting to flee Fairyland.
The bulk of this issue is focused on our lovely antiheroes, and like normal, the bulk of this issue is fairly nonstop laughs with amazing artwork. What’s nice here is that the jokes really range in terms of…brow? There are low brow jokes like flammable dragon pee and violence as a form of slapstick–the usual–but this comic also hits some higher brow stuff. Gert’s and Larry’s relationship is expanded upon some more, and those yucks are straight character driven and really quite meaningful when you dive below the laughter.
See, ever since Issue 2, I’ve had a few questions I’ve not been able to shake. I won’t say what they are (not because spoilers are evil but because I can’t think of a good way to word them), but Larry and Gert do discuss them. It’s funny, yet the ramifications of that conversation are dark, perhaps darker than any place this comic has gone. And this comic gets pretty damn dark! This is a different kind of dark though, one not rooted in comedy but loss. There’s a reason Gert is a violent, drunken, sociopath.
Around Issue 4 or 5 I worried that this comic would eventually get old, that the humor style would outstay its welcome. Thus far, that hasn’t happened. Each issue has something new to it, some little slice of mystery or character development or world building that keeps me going forward. There’s way more depth here than you might realize by just looking at the cover of this comic, and IHF is way more clever than it has any right to be.
Until next month then! 1/30 to go.
