Fear and Loathing in Fairyland, Patreon reward for nuclearcore14 · 2:04am Jul 24th, 2018

Heya readers! ~~Rather than let things build up until I’m in a mad-dash to get my back-pack of Rick and Morty reference together,~~ Yeah, I wrote that line over a month ago and didn’t get back to finishing this until now. So... oops. I’ve decided to go ahead and get my Patreon reward for nuclearcore done!

Once again, I find myself embarking into the strange world of comics. Specifically, Image comics! You know… The peeps that brought us all the COOLEST and most AWESOME comics of the 90s like Spawn… and uh… Well… ~~XTREME X-Man~~ Savage Dragon! And ~~SUPER-MEGA AVENGERS+JUSTICE LEAGUE~~ Ultrafroce! That’s okay though! I’m sure they’ve come a long way from their gory and edgy roots.

Welp…

Hey, though! This could be fun! Maybe it’ll be a good ultra-violent thing to prime the pumps for Matt Groening’s upcoming Disenchantment.

I gave the first arc of six issues a go. Basically, Gertrude is a cute-as-a-button 8-year-old who makes a wish and is sucked into Fairlyland where she immediately crash lands, breaking a few bones, and is put on a magical quest to find her way out. But that was… Eh, I’ll let this page sum the rest up:

Her sick to death of this fluffing stuff fly companion here is Larrigon Wentsworth III, or ‘Larry’ for short. He’s been her guide since the moment Gertrude arrived.

First off, the art is gorgeous. No complaints there. In fact, the comic deserves a ton of praise for its style and mixture of cute and gore. Most the settings and characters really do feel like they’re out of some sugary-sweet fairytale/care-bare/Candyland place so major props to the designs as well.

However, all is not well in Fairyland, and I don’t mean the fact that Gertrude has seemingly been on a rampage for two score and seven years.

Wait a minute...

On second thought, that’s exactly what I mean.

There’s a couple issues I have with this as an overarching narrative. For starters, at no point did I determine there was a… well… point to what I was reading aside from the opportunity to draw lots and lots of grotesque art with a cute fairytale setting as the medium. At first, I thought this might be something of a deconstruction or parody, but I find I can’t really define it as either.

The underlining problem here is we’re not given a very cohesive motive to the main character for why she acts the way she does aside from the fact that she doesn’t want to be in fairyland and the whole thing seems to be an ill-fit for her personality wise, but we’d have no way of knowing that when we first meet her. She WANTED to go to this magical land at first.

I mean, I’m sure if I was trapped in Disney’s “It’s a small world after all” ride for a long time, I’d start to go nuts too, but step one would be try to find the nearest exit, not smash the dolls. Also, I’m already about the age Gertrude is mentally in the comics so one gets the impression Gertrude might’ve made for a pretty messed up adult, anyhow. It kinda feels like she’d have grown up Goth if Fairlyland hadn’t come a-callin’, but this isn’t totally clear. Honestly, though the cute-image dissonance would suffer greatly if Gertrude had gone all Wednesday Adams on us, at least as far as looks, I think I’d understand and appreciate her more.

This behavior might somewhat be excusable if we knew what set Gertrude on this path aside from just being sucked into the land, but the time skip happens immediately. Sure, we know Gertrude’s intro to the world wasn’t as cheery as it could be, but we don’t know what followed immediately after. It’d be one thing if she earnestly tried to play along with the games and riddles for like, an issue, but quickly found out she was a crazy bad fit or maybe a kid who just wasn’t into all this fairy stuff and say… pleaded with the Queen after a day of making a go of it to just be sent home because, when you get down to it, this is basically kidnapping and imprisoning, but instead we skip to twenty-seven years in the future which is apparently just day 9,861 of Gertrude’s unstoppable rampage and the Queen finally has had enough.

Another angle would be if Gertrude quickly realized that her position basically meant the entire land was her personal playground and rather than search for the key she just ran around doing every horrible thing that popped into her head. I mean… have you ever watched a small child play Minecraft on creative mode for a reasonable length of time?

It can get pretty fluffed up.

Hell, the SIMs works well enough in this case as well.

But we don’t get either of those scenarios from Gertrude. Despite her grizzly and depraved antics, she seems to actively hate her time in Fairyland and wants to leave but is unwilling to put in the barest of effort to work out riddles with Larry or any of the other denizens… or like… think for a moment that any of the things that grant wishes in the realm could help her or wrap up her problem in a jiffy?

This leaves us watching a crimes spree against people who don’t seem to really deserve it committed by someone who somehow thinks an endless string of violence is the only answer. Basically, it feels like there’s a low-level idiot ball field in effect keeping the entire cast from seeing obvious solutions to problems and instead of going through whatever bizarre, convoluted motions are necessary to present the reader with more ‘wildly inappropriate images’ for the setting.

Again, the culprit here is Gertrude herself and just how one dimensional she is. When confronted with a problem, she gets angry and commits a murder or however many murders she needs to make the problem go away.

Giant beast that are many times her size?

Murder.

Riddle?

Murder.

Someone is annoying her?

Murder.

This brings me to my second problem with the story. At no point did it feel like Gertrude was in any danger from…literally anything. Sure, she could be hurt and sure she could be captured, but she eventually kills her way out of any bad situation and she’s SO good at it that the issues often build up to a ‘major’ conflict just to have Gertrude resolve it off-page before the next issue starts.

One might think Gertrude is in actual trouble here… she’s not.

It’s like Gertrude is a mary sue but her sue-ness can’t solve the one problem she actually cares about even though it seems be most accounts it could but it doesn’t because if it did how would we get more pages of a deranged 8-year-old killing police from the mushroom kingdom and getting high from eating them?!

On the plus side, I liked Larry as he was dragged along, seemingly somewhat against his will. He has some great lines and the best visual gags center around him.

So yeah. If you like good art, are angry about some saccharine sweet media or another, and are tickled by the macabre, do I have a rec for you! If you want a story that’s well written, clever, or really just out to have a message of any sort… maybe give this one a pass

We do get some baller extra art like this, though.

Okay, that’d about does it! Thanks again to nuclearcore for the interesting read. And remember, for as little as $5 a month you can force me to review the media of your choice!