I Hate Fairyland: The Whole Fluffing Tale, Compendium One
by
Skottie Young
My rating: 3.25 of 5 Ω‘s
This is a humongous collected edition of the fully creator-owned and written+drawn comic from the mind of one Skottie Young.
Telling the tale of six-year old Gert (a.k.a Gertrude) who was sucked into Fairlyland and given a mission and a guide to find the key that will take her home – only to find that she just can’t seem to find the damned thing and literal decades pass until she is pretty much a forty year old drunken cynic who had not physically aged even a day. Her guide is the seemingly now dead-inside fly named Larry who seems to have a hilarious like-loathe relationship with his once-young-at-heart charge. There’s also Queen Cloudia who rules Fairyland and is frustrated beyond measure that this once-child just won’t be done with her mission and prevents any new children from coming to visit since only one can come through at a time and in the meantime, Gert has become a creature of pure mayhem!
The story is pretty funny and the endless substitution of swear-words with cutesy alternates and Skotties choice to use a cutesy font for each such word is a fun choice that does not get old.
The book being artist-driven really makes that the most consistent and standout feature to make me recommend this book because it is really well done and only gets better and better as the book goes along – clearly this book allowed Young to really dig into his crazier-creative side and let the goofy concepts find life on the page in the form of the various creatures and species and more that populate the environs of Fairyland. All of which by the way, Gert makes her way through with clubbing, stabbing, punching, burning, eviscerating, bludgeoning, hacking, kicking, biting and pretty much every kind of violent act and its synonym you can think of as either an intended or unintended result of her sometimes just being in a place. All this violence and the story as a whole are drawn in Youngs’ cutesy style with an overdose of the bright colours and even more cuteness because it is Fairyland – even the hell-like place we visit at one point has a cutesy edge to it somehow!
I wanted to note that there are moments where it touches on what feels like the need to be grosser than it needs to be and misses out cool opportunities. This stood out to me because there is a lot of action and such which I would have liked to see more of but (for example) we see the fight start and then we’re at the end and get to enjoy none of that. But at other points I get to enjoy some brutal vomiting or something that I would have been fine having an off-panel implication of and not needing to see it rendered for me to see. I’m not queasy on these things, I grew up having seen shows like Ren & Stimpy, Rocko’s Modern Life, Simpsons, Family Guy and more (not commenting on them or how I felt about them here) but to me, gross-out humour is normally a low bar when you go out of your way to stick it in ones face and can be more effective sometimes when its implied and even exaggerated rather than showcased up-front.
The part that made me not read the series through the first time around, was actually the story. But bear with me here.
The initial issues are amusing, but once the main concept is laid down, there is a kind of rinse-repeat feel to some things and it is cute and violent and the wierd contrast carries to a point but it is not either totally unique (Happy Tree Friends anyone?) or overly engaging if I wanted even a little more. BUT, this time I read a little further and somewhere after the initial issues, Skottie seems to have either planned it as such or it happened along the way, but the story finally finds some semblence of legs – Gert and Larry and even a few side characters start having character moments and the plot which moved fast from the first issue, starts to balance out as we go from a comic that started as if someone was just writing extemporaneously but now is combining that with at least some broader plan to guide that free flow. So yes, it does get better as it goes, narratively speaking.
I would not rate this book higher because I appreciate the chaotic crazy but either a book fully embraces its madness and hopes for the best, or it tries to have a flow and this one is somewhere in between – even as the story clips along with more coherence in the back half of the series, it is uneven between some well-told chapters and some things that just move so fast, from start to finish through the series, that at times it feels like a lot of ideas that did not get space to breathe and quite a bit felt rushed. Maybe I’m expecting too much but it did reduce my enjoyment of it as I was reading it.
It is definitely a fun book once it gets going and focuses more on story and finds a better stride, flaws and all. I don’t know if it was limited by print-run from the publisher or the creator or what, but I think it could have found a way to feel less rushed – as I understand it, it was a pretty hot seller and so should not have been kept to a limited run if they wanted.
If the premise catches your fancy, it is 100% worth a read because it is a fun book.
One Happy Monk 
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