‘I Hate Fairyland, Volume 5: Gert’s Inferno’ – Skottie Young, Brett Bean (Image)

 


Page Count: 128 Pages

After a long hard slog through the battlegrounds of the Siege of Terra, I needed a real change in direction, for my next read, and change doesn’t get any more emphatic than by moving from original Grimdark to ‘I Hate Fairyland’ . So, here we are :o)

We very almost didn’t end up here though. A lot has happened since I last read Volume 4 (‘Sadly Never After’) and I’ll be honest, the book ended so well that I didn’t even stop to think whether any more books would follow it. Sometimes, an ending is so final that everything just stops there. Doesn’t it?

Well…

Not so long ago, I bought a blind bag of comics and was pleasantly surprised to see that the story didn’t end after all. I still wasn’t sure whether to pick up the trades though; I learned a hard lesson with ‘The Goon’, an awesome series that has never quite hit the heights of the original ‘Labrazio’ storyline. Could ‘I Hate Fairyland’ be headed along the same path? I didn’t hold out for long, I found myself a copy of ‘Gert’s Inferno’ and yesterday was the day I finally got round to picking it up. And…

Gert is back in the ‘real’ world and trying to get her head round living a normal life, something that forty odd years in Fairyland has left her singularly ill-equipped for, especially as far as holding down a job goes. In fact, there is only one job that Gert is qualified for but it’s going to send her straight back to the one place that Gert hates more than any other. Guess where…?

A hundred and twenty eight pages, that’s all it took to change my view from ‘does this story need to continue?’ to ‘of course it does, why did I wait so long to get back into Fairyland?’ I’ve already thanked ‘past me’ for having the foresight to buy the next two trades; I’ll be into those sooner rather than later.

I’ll be honest, a large part of this is all about revisiting old friends and making a few new ones along the way. Skottie Young’s finger never left the pulse of this tale and it really is a case of picking up where we left off. Gert is a chaotic force of nature who is capable of acting out in ways that even she doesn’t expect. Anyone caught in the blast zone, friend or foe, is in trouble and that includes the plot. Anything can happen, for better or much worse, and that powers things at a frantic pace. Just the way that all the best ‘I Hate Fairyland’ tales do. There is always something happening both with the plot and artwork. While Bean’s artwork doesn’t quite hit the heights of Young’s for me, it still does a great job in the meantime, really capturing the mood and feel here.

That would be enough for me normally (and still is) but it’s a real bonus to see Young make it clear that the story absolutely had to continue. There is a reason to go back to Fairyland but what’s more poignant is how we’re shown that Gert has been left a person out of touch with two worlds now, at home in neither our world or Fairyland. And if that wasn’t bad enough, imagine dealing with ‘Fairyland induced’ PTSD while going through a traumatic reintroduction to the real world… That’s where Gert is right now and I’m definitely keen to see how this works itself out over the following books (three, I think).

There’s a lot going on here then and while I’m kicking myself for not being on it much earlier, I’m just glad to be back in Fairyland myself. I should never have left.

If you haven't read my other 'I Hate Fairyland' reviews, just follow these links...

Volume 1 Review

Volume 2 Review

Volume 3 Review

Comments

  1. Anonymous9 October 2025 at 01:22

    Volumes 6 and 7 are terrible. Without giving spoilers away, by volume 6 the new run abandons its original premise and becomes a worse version of the original.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Bookstooge9 October 2025 at 10:18

    Looking at that cover, I can see how this would be an anti-dote to SoT :-D

    ReplyDelete

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