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*
So as it turns out, not every issue of I Hate Fairyland is borderline perfection. I mean, I’m still rating this one a 9.5 because I refuse to let that combo die—plus, dead horses must be beat lest they get lippy—but you should know that Issue #8 is more of an 8/10 than a 9.5/10. Sad day, but not really. It’s I Hate Fairyland, and there are no negative emotions when reading I Hate Fairyland.
Well, except hate. But that’s on Gert.
Our trio start the issue off with some good ol’-fashioned fortune telling, none of which is positive. Gert’s negativity is to our gain though, because the first six pages are pretty hysterical with the, “please kill me” back-and-forth we’ve grown to love between Gertrude and Larry. It’s pretty much their way of saying, “I love you,” only with more emotional abuse.
And then a few pages later, Gertrude is sucked into a [redacted for spoilers] and gets a makeover that can only be described as, “anime.” What follows is a bunch of hard-core violence.
I’m torn between the shift in art style. On the one hand, I love Scottie’s normal designs with as much love as I can and not come off like a creep, but on the other hand, the anime version of Gertrude is pretty amazing. I burst out laughing when it happened but then immediately got a PTSD-style flashback of The Claws that Catch by John Ringo which tried—and failed miserably—to do the same thing.
In a way, I do think both stories suffer from the same problem: This feels like a continuity break. In the poorly-written scifi story, it was just completely stupid, in this comic…well, I just don’t see how [redacted] can be a thing in Fairyland. It’s not whimsical enough, maybe.
Issue #8 of I Hate Fairyland ends up hitting a lot of beats as the first seven, but with a twist. There’s a lot of dark, dark foreshadowing here if you pay attention, and the whole thing really serves to remind us once again that Gertrude is not a hero. She’s a villain and a monster, and the sooner she dies, the sooner Fairyland can breathe easy.
I’m also torn on this. I love her as an antihero, and I laughed at her anti-hero antics here, but the step away, the thinking about it—it’s a sour dose of reality.
As of now, I’m going to hedge my bets that this is a good thing, that the darker Gertrude gets, the more interesting places this comic can go. But I am worried that I’ll one day stop liking her as a character. Being funny can only cover up so many sins.
