Sword Meets Axe — Reviewing ‘I Hate Fairyland’ #44

A trail of blood, bodies, and chaos litters just about every single portion of the magical realm known as Fairyland. This trail has one thing at its center in most cases, the crass, deadly, and terrible Gertrude.

About time someone decided to show up on a quest for revenge to end this threat. Good luck to them, they’re going to need it. I Hate Fairyland #44 brings some samurai heat from Skottie Young, Derek Laufman, Jean-François Beaulieu, and Nate Piekos.

There are a number of things that I like about this series. Having been covering it for years now, it’s never the same thing when I open an issue. There is a comic book classicness that is being delivered here in one respect. That’s the beauty of a string of single one-off issues.

Sure, there are plotlines that are carried over and continuity to mine, but each of the issues since the series being number-relaunched a few months ago has been something standing alone. That followed a full arc that was about war in the land. This balances the longer-form arc driven standards of today with something arguably more fitting for the monthly structure of the medium.

Soft whimsical textures are very familiar to this series. Laufman has picked up that baton so smoothly since taking over the artwork, bringing some rougher and tougher textures to play with as well. He delivers a more nuanced and beautifully crafted duo of feelings. Alongside that, he has a really great eye for dynamic kinetic action and movement on the page.

The fight sequences here are lively, really bouncing and standing strong through the panels. Just as compelling are the character shots of more soft or talkative moments.

Also meeting that solid middle ground are the always wonderful colors from Beaulieu, adding depth with all the very hard and weighty darker tones, which stand firm alongside the more vibrant flashy colors that work best for this fairytale world. In the middle are color tones that slide between the two that give the world more of its signature flavor.

I just know that Piekos must have so much fun with the way that lettering is done in this book. He really leans into the colors, the shifts, and ingenuity that makes the books dialogue, SFX, and captions so out of the box. This nails the character voices after all this time and giving them distinct little bits, so they are never routine. I’ll never tire of the colorful substitutions for curse words in this series or world.

They tickle me every time.

Everything about this particular story just works. The interplay between the two characters, both when fighting and not, is funny but also serious. Young knows how to lean into comedy and bits without sacrificing the more serious character developmental sides of things, wrapping them tightly together so that neither one overpowers the other and this isn’t just joke after joke after joke as a story or series.

Nice call on the ending, shifting from the usual bloody ends that Gert is part of. It gives us something more fitting and different, while finishing it, just the way one would expect for a Gertrude relationship to go.

I Hate Fairyland #44 is now available from Image Comics.