Comic Book Review: I Hate Fairyland Volume 3: Good Girl by Skottie Young
Fairyland has a system for dealing with its visitors. Each child is assigned a guide and told to seek out the key to the door home. The visitor goes on an adventure, usually a chain of fetch quests, obtains the key and goes home. Next child! But that isn’t how it worked out for Gertrude.
Something went wrong on her quest. Maybe her guide Larry wasn’t quite the right match. Maybe Gert derailed too far off the correct path. Maybe Gert just wasn’t a very good little girl. As a result, Gert hasn’t gotten to go home…for thirty years. While she hasn’t aged physically, her mind is now that of a bitter woman on the verge of middle age and she’s developed a sour disposition. At some point, Gert decided to strongarm her way through the quests, killing anyone who gets in her way, in the hopes of forcing someone to give up the secret of the key to home.
In this volume, Gert learns that she has a fan who adores her. Which seems great at first until Gert realizes this fan is emulating all her worst behavior. Seeing it from the outside gives Gert the realization that her quest may be stuck in an eternal loop of failure because she’s a bad person. Time to do good instead!
But for someone with Gert’s habits, doing good consistently is more difficult than it would at first appear. She may not even have a functional moral compass anymore! So when she learns of a magical item that can strip away all wickedness and make a person purely good, Gert decides this shortcut might be a faster way.
For a change, Gert actually succeeds! But Fairyland isn’t ready to let her go that easily.
We also get an exploration of Larry’s backstory–which abruptly turns into a fantasy about him having never met Gert and instead assisting a more typical visitor. But in this twisted Fairyland, not even daydreams are safe.
Fairyland may be brightly-colored and fanciful, but it’s also shabby and sleazy behind the scenes, which is where Gert spends most of her time. The violence level, innuendo and some very creepy moments involving Gert being offered marriage by various supernatural beings (remember, she has the body of a small child) combine to make this a Mature Readers title.
The basic premise was wearing thin by the second volume, so Gert attempting a change of direction here was a welcome advance in the plot.
This kind of comedy is very hit-or-miss depending on the reader; try a sample at the library before splurging.
