It’s been a spell since Gert escaped Fairyland and, lacking an edumacation, employable skills, or an understanding of the world, yeah… life’s not quite so peachy keen as she thought it’d be sans Fairyland. Basically she’s managed to look like a Face of Meth without doing meth.
Fortuitously, a billionaire’s son has been whisked away to Fairyland and the only ones able to get into Fairyland are past “guests” - the one thing Gert’s qualified for. Now she’s on a potentially very lucrative search and rescue mission to Fairyland - via Hell, because… er. Just when she thought she was out, they pull her back in - it’s Volume 5 of I Hate Fairyland!
Skottie Young returns to his most successful series for an unheralded fifth book, Gert’s Inferno (because of the whole travelling-through-Hell thang). And I’m fine with that - I do like the series and reading about what Gert done next and a return to her nightmare as an adult is an intriguing premise - except it’s not really a return to Fairyland. She does get there of course but this book is a lot of pointless preamble before Gert actually does do that and then the book ends - right where it should’ve started much earlier.
Why did we need to see an entire issue of “Gertlins” or her getting swallowed by a mutant whale or just a whole bunch of walking to a middling song by a band called Jack the Radio? We didn’t - it’s all needless filler. (The song part is a clever idea though - there’s a QR code to listen to a song specially-written for issue #5 as you read it.)
The opening issue isn’t bad - it’s amusing to see how bad Gert’s life is and how disappointing her happily-ever-after turned out to be. The book does occasionally throw out similarly slightly humorous moments as well, pulled off successfully in large part thanks to Brett Bean’s outstanding Ren and Stimpy-style OTT art. Bean’s immensely skilful art is a fine fit for the series, looking very similarly to Young’s style - it’s easily the best part of this book. Previous series colourist Jean-Francois Beaulieu also returns to colour the book as beautifully as he did in the preceding volumes.
I’m all in for seeing Gert revisit Fairyland as an adult and, as pretty and imaginative as it was to see, I just wish we’d bypassed the completely irrelevant side journey through hell entirely and gotten to that story here. As it stands, I Hate Fairyland, Volume 5: Gert’s Inferno is an underwhelming return and the weakest book in the series to date.
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