I Hate Fairyland #7 // Review
King Cloudeus wants to kill Gert. The only way to do that is with...more Gert. Lots of her. Gerts from all over the place. He’s going to assemble every Gert in existence and send them all...against Gert. What’s the worst that could happen? What could possibly go wrong? He’s about to find out in I Hate Fairyland #7. Writer Skottie Young continues his weird, surrealistic tale that is brought forth to the page in all of its weird, cartoonishly rubbery glory by artist Brett Bean and colorist Jean-Francois Beaulieu. The weirdness continues. It’s kind of silly, but it’s not ALL formless strangeness. There IS some degree of depth to it all.
Before Cloudeus can harness the skills of half a dozen different Gerts of different sizes, shapes, and temperaments, he’s going to have to feed them. It’s okay: they like to eat. (They do.) They eat rats and ribs and ice cream. (There’s even a particularly delectable bubble fuzzle bisque.) There are a few things to negotiate over the meal. There are a number of questions that might have to do with the reliability of Cloudeus and whether or not he can be trusted. They SHOULD be able to work it all out, though, right? How difficult could it be to negotiate with a roomful of Gerts?
Young has some sort of weird existential thing going on in this particular issue that seems to actually kind of reach for something deeper than the silliness that rests on the surface. Once everything passes through and the final panel hits the page, it's really apparent that there is something to be said for the deeper meaning of one person struggling with all of the rest of themselves. Other than that, it's just really silly fun. Then, there is so much more to it, as it's just hard to not find it charming. But it's hard to find a whole lot to cuddle up to after all of the killing and the death and everything.
Bean playfully snaps and slaps the action across the page with a gradual increase in tension and intention until everything bursts out in a big, goofy, gory combat sequence. The gradual build-up to the big combat is actually kind of gracefully achieved. Bean’s energy might seem silly and over the top. (And it is.) But there is a solid understanding of the emotional kinetics of action that squirts out from the edges of a very exaggerated physical conflict between a whole bunch of people who all kind of look alike.
Beyond all of the surface-level silliness, there's a really deep somatic thing going on with I Hate Fairyland, which somehow manages to peekaboo out from the end of the strange game of hokey pokey that Young has been playing with Gertie over the course of the past seven issues. It’s taken a while to build up momentum, but there’s definitely...something going on in the pages of the series.
