I Hate Fairyland #6 // Review
Fairyland has a new ruler. King Cloudeus wants to usher in a new era as he takes over for his late sister, the queen. He opens the meeting of the high council to hear their concerns...only to find himself overrun with a deluge of worries. On top of everything else...Gertrude has returned. She doesn’t seem happy about it at all. It won’t be an easy time for anyone in I Hate Fairyland #6. Writer Skottie Young continues a weirdly comic satire that is coaxed onto the page by artist Brett Bean and colored by Jean-François Beaulieu.
Gertrude really just wants to get home. That’s all. She’s been given a big offer by a very rich individual: get his son Wesley back, and he’ll turn Fairyland into an amusement park...which could make Gertrude very wealthy as well. Only thing is...things always end up being a lot more complicated than they first appear, and it’s really only a matter of time before this kid Gertrude has run into...a kid named Thomas...turns out to have been bitten by the type of thing that could turn him into a werewolf...well...a werewoodle, actually. (Mixed breeds evidently make their way into Fairyland in interesting forms.)
Young takes a while to get the story moving. Gertrude’s return to Fairyland has a long intro with a lot of dead ends. By the time Young finally gets to the point with the set-up to the new plot arc, the issue is already over. And so much of what Young had been filling the issue with on the way into that big revelation at the end is at least a bit weak. Thankfully, once the premise of the new story fully reveals itself in the final couple of pages, it’s actually an idea that should be fun as the series approaches its next couple of issues.
Bean’s art is as fun as ever. The weird mutation of overly sweet cartoony playfulness continues to be as appealing as it is rubbery. Emotions are applied to the page with all the subtlety and nuance of a nuclear warhead. And though it IS fun, it’s way too overwhelmingly weird to register much of a reaction once an issue makes its way across its midpoint. As cool as the style is, it DOES have a tendency to upstage Young’s writing at least once per issue.
Revealed in full on the issue-ending splash page, the basic idea of the story isn’t terribly original, but Gertrude IS an interesting character, so it’s actually got a lot of potential. The Gertrude from the past is being sent to the future, and she’s not going alone. There’s a rather large group of others going with her. And they all look really familiar. What could go wrong? It’s going to be interesting to see where Young takes it, but it’s going to be a real challenge to make it work.
