I Hate Fairyland #46 // Review
Gert is crying. It’s not often that someone with her particular psychological situation would find herself crying, but there she is. So naturally, the little bug that just might be her closest friend decides that he wants to ask he what she’s crying about. She’s crying about a book. That book is Frankenstein. She’s inspired. She can’t help herself. She wants to reanimate the dead in I Hate Fairyland #46. Writer Skottie Young and artist Derek Laufman continue their long, strange fugue of a comic fantasy comic book...taking the narrative in a direction that draws comedy from one of the most widely-appealing horror stories ever written.
Of course...if Gert is going to reanimate the dead, she’s going to need to kill a few people first. She DID try to find the stuff she needed from pre-existing dead people, but she just wasn’t patient enough and so she had to get out the axe and get to work. Of course...she couldn’t help noticing that something was missing when the whole thing was put together. It just so happened that the thing in question lacked a head. Oh well...this IS Fairyland. There’s a shop run by the headless horseman that just might have what she’s looking for...
Young isn't just spoofing Mary Shelley's classic novel. There's a lot more going on here than that. The weird thing about it is it never feels like it's anything more than a very dark and twisted cartoon that's moving in strange directions. But there's definitely a lot of depth through ethic goes way beyond the surface level. And it's just really fascinating while watching it run. It's just really fascinating watching it. Move through everything that it moves through in order to get where it's going. This really is about the nature of human desire. And the lack of foresight in human endeavor. There's a lot of thematic depth to all the darkly horrifying silliness.
Laufman does some really interesting work putting together. The silliness of cartoony exaggeration plays weird and whimsical, little games with all the over-the-top gore and horror that inhabit the page. It’s all very, very strange. Once again, Laufman’s strangely cuddly Fairyland continues to feel cute enough to overcome say...a multiple axe homicide by an otherwise lovable leading character. The strangeness of it all saunters across the page in a weird narrative rhythm that draws on a lot of different traditional horror elements to make it all work.
Things continue to develop. And there is actually some kind of a character development going on with respect to Gert even if she's not fundamentally different person than she might have been in the first couple of issues with this series. She's really definitely making some kind of progress. There's certainly something going on here. That seems to be a lot more interesting than it is going to appear at phase value to the casual reader. They're really interesting what they're doing. It should be interesting to see where it's going from here.
