Trip-Trapping Over Bridges: Reviewing ‘I Hate Fairyland’ #12

Tuck the children in, fill the water glass, dim the lights, and prepare them for a wondrous fairy tale delight. Well, wondrous might not be the right word. Twisted, sick, and bloody delight? Yes, that’s much better.

It’s a Gertrude-filled fairy tale in I Hate Fairyland #12, so you know what you’re in for: a rip-roaring interlude from Skottie Young, Brett Bean, Jean-Francois Beaulieu, and Nate Piekos.

From Final Destination meets a fart joke to a Billy Goats Gruff redux, no one can say this book doesn’t have range. All of that range includes lots of gory death, but it’s still range.

As stated in that paragraph right above, yet right up there, this was a Billy Goats Gruff story with a Gert twist. In a nutshell, it’s the typical goat story with the bridge and the troll but includes undercover Gert the assassin. If you’re a goat needing to get to the other side without being eaten, hiring the murderous Gert to off a troll is smart.

Visually, everything is up to the usual glorious whimsical meets gory work that Bean delivers every issue. Here though, as with a few previous issues, he gets to try something different. Some of the visuals take on a more formal storybookesque quality to them. There are wider splashes, parts of the page fading, backgrounds pulling back, and more.

We see it in the boxes for lettering that Piekos brings in, giving them that regal appearance. Shifting fonts both in captions and bubbles to appear like they’re from a book, a storybook in particular. Capturing all the very formal sort of language but with the edge, we expect from this book.

With the colors, Beaulieu still has things popping with the most vibrant of palettes. Splashy and bold, it always reminds us how much of a cartoonish fairy tale world this is supposed to be, without feeling too over the top. On various pages, those colors fade out a bit to match the aforementioned storybook page fade effect.

One can’t ever presume to know what Young will decide to write next in any given issue of this series. After over thirty issues, between the volumes, he’s finding ways to make sure the story stays fresh and fun, both for himself,  the creative team, and the audience as well. Sure, there will always be blood, guts, and gore in this series. That doesn’t mean it can’t shift focuses, genres, or storytelling techniques along the way.

After kicking off with two story arcs, that used their issue counts very differently, these more stand-alone-yet-connected issues add a new layer. It’s chaos. That ordered, purposeful-led chaos, as much as one can order chaos around a creature like Gertrude.

I Hate Fairyland #12 is now available from Image Comics.