I Hate Fairyland #42 // Review
The Hellicorn is on a quest. He’s understandably upset. Someone has taken something from him. For him it’s power. For everyone else it’s a curse. There’s only one place to go to find what he’s looking for, but he doesn’t exactly know where that is. See: there’s this old lady and she’s come into possession of it. It might be a dangerous quest, but this is a grim-looking pink badass with powerful firearms. He’s going to find what he’s looking for in I Hate Fairyland #42. Writer Skottie Young delivers a really fun one-shot story with artist Derek Luafman and colorist Jean-François Beaulieu.
The Hellicorn arrives at a large, industrial castle with a pocketful of posies. Judging from all of the smoke coming from the smokestacks, the place is bust. Hellicorn’s contact at the factory knows what to do with them. He’s going to use them to help the big guy get back what he lost. It’s going to be a hazy nightmare of a journey, though. The two of them are going to have to carve their way through nightmarishly mutated nursery rhymes as they gradually find their way to the home of the old lady...
Young crams a hell of a story between two covers. The dark mutation of children's nursery rhymes is actually a fun idea. Theoretically, it would have been expanded from a single issue. However, these ARE brief, little nursery rhymes, and two weeks too far would be missing the point and so it's actually a really good thing that he kept it all to one issue. Expand on it too much from there and it becomes kind of a tired and overworked premise. Young knows exactly how much space he needs to tell this particular joke.
There are so many parallels between Hellicorn and Hellboy that the 42nd issue could practically be read as a spoof...but only tangentially. The clever bit about this is the fact that Laufman’s art seems to be channeling the heaving inking exaggeration of the post-1980s Mike Mignolla who created Hellboy. So it’s a fun visual departure from the usual look of the title. The Beaulieu’s color also does a solid job of mimicking the Hellboy style in what ends-up being a respectful and respectable homage to one of the more influential artist/writers in the history of indie comics.
Still, it would've been kind of cool to see the big switch over at the end. A Starker contrast between the aspects of it that are meant to be homage, and those that are meant to be the joke end of everything should really be a lit stronger to make for a stronger punchline, but it’s still a great deal of fun to watch the long and gradual quest to the back cover. The Hellicorn is a fun character, even if he’s kind of a one-note joke on Hellboy. In light of this, it’s a bit odd that Young and company managed to make it as entertaining as it is.
