Written by & Art by: Scottie Young
Colors by: 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*
It’s probably really immature of me to go into Issue 5 of I Hate Fairlyand thinking, “Well you have a lot to live up to!” instead of anticipating joy, but I’m Tuesday drunk so bugger off. I’ll worry about any and all consequences tomorrow morning when I get ready for work.
And let’s be fair, this comic has gotten nothing but 9.5’s from me; it does have a lot to live up to. You can’t churn out quality after quality after quality and then fumble the final episode of the whole arc! That would be madness, and not the good kind (which is normally found in this comic book).
Thankfully, there are no fumbles. Not so thankfully, this issue is a bit different. The four leading up to this season finale were hilarious first and everything second, but Issue 5 turns that around. Instead of laughing hysterically by the end of page one, I didn’t utter my first guffaw until around page seven.
(Side note: the narrator of this issue lives longer than any of the others, so bonus points to him.)
This isn’t a bad thing though. The goals have been shifted, but the characters here are deep enough for that to work. Yes, I do think the likes of Queen Claudia and Gertrude are deep characters. Larry too! They’re wonderful, and forgetting that would be doing a disservice to them.
Issue 5 does not do a disservice to them. Issue 5 is, honestly, really tense in its first six pages. I only harp on this because it’s an odd feeling to have given how every issue before it started with the tension gone, replaced with slapstick and crass humor.
The jokes don’t stick around either. After the first few, they taper off a bit, replaced with a very crazy battle between Gertrude and Happy. The battle is all kinds of fun, and it felt really, really strange rooting for Gertrude and screaming, “GET FUCKED HAPPY” when the big explosions were going off.
Happy, as we all know, is not the villain of this comic book. Gertrude is.
I wanted Happy to die so hard you don’t even know!
Issue 5 might be the first time we really get a big action sequence from Scottie Young and Jean-Francois Beaulieu, and they tackle it with some impressive skill. Prior, the fights ended quickly or off screen, but here we get a big one. It flows well, is easy to follow, and works on every level you’d expect a great comic book fight to work, though it has more flowers with faces and unicorns than your average comic book climax.
More fire too, I’d imagine. So much fire. All of the fire!
The ending is fitting and basically perfect given what I Hate Fairyland has delivered prior.
My biggest complaint is that the comic as a whole isn’t as funny as those that came before it, but really, that’s not a bad thing. The gimmick here is great—foul-mouthed killer set in an adorable landscape—but I don’t know how long that can realistically last. It hasn’t grown old as of these five issues, but this is a comic that will go on well beyond that. The joke won’t hold out that long. It’s a big joke, one with all kinds of options, but when you reduce it down to its parts, it’s always the same joke. Sooner or later, it will get old. That’s just a sad fact.
Mr. Young proves with this issue that I Hate Fairlyand has some range to it, that it doesn’t need to rely on its gimmick to be good. It can be tense, it can be crazy, and it can be somber.
Because these characters are deep, and not allowing them to breathe would be doing them a disservice.
