'I Hate Fairyland Volume 1: Madly Ever After' – Skottie Young (Image Comics)

It's been one hell of a week and we're only just half way through... I won't bore you with the details but lets just say that reading 'The Dark Crusade', on top of everything else just made things seem a little more grim and unbearable. Have I told you that it's been one hell of a week...?

I don't know how you handle weeks like these but my way, last night, was all about eating what's left of the Christmas chocolate and cracking open one of my favourite comic books. I've still got Wednesday, Thursday and Friday to get through but suddenly it's not so bad after all because I've been reading the first volume of 'I Hate Fairyland'.

An Adventure Time/Alice in Wonderland-style epic that smashes it's cute little face against grown-up, Tank Girl/Deadpool-esque violent madness. Follow Gert, a forty year old woman stuck in a six year olds body who has been stuck in the magical world of Fairyland for nearly thirty years. Join her and her giant battle-axe on a delightfully blood soaked journey to see who will survive the girl who HATES FAIRYLAND.

'I Hate Fairyland: Madly Ever After' is now officially my cure-all for all of life's sneaky little attempts to knock me down. It reads like Skottie Young took some pills, thought 'the hell with it' and took the rest of the pills and then ate a whole bag of Skittles before getting started with all the writing and the drawing. What we have as a result is a book that pretty much jitters with energy which then earths itself in the plot and just sends everything crazy.

I love it. How could I not love a book that not only gleefully subverts fairyland tropes but then, just as gleefully, slices them into quivering chunks with Gert's massive axe. How can I not love a book where the life expectancy of the narrator is just as long as it takes to turn the page? You can include various planetary bodies in the last sentence but not Gert's faithful guide Larry, a fly who just wants it to all be over so he can go home. The beautiful irony, and what the whole story is based around, is that no what advice he gives, Gert just doesn't have the patience to stay on the path and follow the quest to its eventual end. Thirty four years in the sickening sweetness of fairyland has left our Gert a 'shoot first, then shoot later, just to be sure' kind of girl. Is Skottie Young saying something about the death of innocence and how you can never go back to your childhood, or is he just playing the whole thing for as many laughs as he can fit into this volume? My money is on the latter; all of my money in fact, it's a pretty safe bet.

The potential downside of this is that you have to have a particularly childish sense of humour and be happy with a constant flow of variations on the same joke. That's me all over so I was more than happy to stay the course and just keep giggling. If that's not you though, just be warned before you pick the book up. The constant jokes also mean that the plot is very lightweight and easy to miss if you're easily distracted. But face it, you're just like me and here to see Gert lay waste to another part of Fairyland, aren't you? Watching the Fairy Queen gradually lose her cool is also well wort the price of admission.

Young's artwork is just the right mixture of crazy and cute, for a book like this, while Beaulieu's colour's complement the art perfectly. The end result is eyecatching and it feels like there is always something new to be see that you missed last time.

'Madly Ever After' then is an irreverently superb opening to a series that is just having fun stuffing your childhood full of high explosive, then lighting a very short fuse. It pretty mucj goes without saying, at this point, but I'd highly recommend that you get on this series if you haven't already.