Gert Returns To Comic Shops!
I Hate Fairyland #1 hits shelves today!
Today is the day! I HATE FAIRYLAND is back with an all new ongoing series from Image Comics, written by me with art by Brett Bean, colors by Jean-Francois Beaulieu and letters by Nate Piekos.
Today is so exciting for me and everyone here at Stupid Fresh Mess. Anytime I have a new #1 coming out, it’s a thrill, but this one hits a little different. I HATE FAIRYLAND was my first creator-owned project back in 2015 so it will always hold that special spot in my heart. While I wrote and drew that series, for 15 of the 21 issues I also played the editor role. (Note: Be kind to your editor/project manager, it’s a tough job!) After 3 years of creating that book, my family and I decided to move out of state to Kansas City. I was starting Middlewest and writing Deadpool and knew I needed to let something go. I felt it was a good time to put I Hate Fairyland on a bit of a break.
I figured a year would do. I’d write a few other projects to scratch different itches. Try out some different genres. And then, get back to IHF! As you all know, that didn’t quite happen. Jorge Corona and I co-created and finished 18 issues of Middlewest and 5 issues of The Me You Love In The Dark. Aaron Conley and I co-created the mini series, Bully Wars. I wrote 16-ish issues of Deadpool with Nic Klein and Scott Hepburn, and co-created Strange Academy with Humberto Ramos, where we’re currently on issue 22. Finally, co-created and finished the 5 issue Twig series with my buddy Kyle Strahm. Throw in a little thing called a Pandemic and it was quite a busy and stressful time.
Needless to say, that all took me more than a year! haha. It was more like 3.5. You know what they say, absence makes the heart grow fonder. This statement couldn't be more true.
It was amazing to be writing my girl again, but I had to make the hard decision to hand the art duties off to someone else. Lucky, I know some pretty talented people and eventually was able to bring on the incomparable Brett Bean on to take on the task. And OH HOLY SHIT did he meet the challenge, slap it in it’s smug challenge face and stomp it until there was nothing left but his eyeball-melty art! He is simply…AMAZING. Teamed up with my usual crew of badasses Jean-Francois Beaulieu and Nate Piekos, how can they not blow your minds?
I hope you all join us for Gert’s new journeys while we make some good old-fashioned, over the top fun comics! Run out to your local comic shop and grab a copy. Don’t have a shop? you can grab a copy wherever comics are sold. And if you are into collecting, swing over to my site and grab some exclusive variant covers before they’re all gone!!!
There’s also over 20 stores that did their own exclusives so get ready to hunt them all down!
Big thanks to Nate Piekos for his amazing logo and lettering, Jean-Francois Beaulieu for his beautiful colors, Joel Enos for wrangling us all together and making sure this thing actually got done and off to the printer, Megan Hodges for running the exclusives and the company at the same time, Casey McCauley for her videos and photos, and everyone at Image Comics for the huge amount of work and support they put in to make this comic a reality!
Most of all…thank YOU ALL! You make this all possible and I love making comics to share with you! Please, come back and share photos on you with he new issue, share your thoughts and get us pumped to keep making new ones.
GERT!!! Gert is special. I don’t get into comics if I don’t see your art in Fortunately, the Milk and then look you up, thinking you’re an amazing children’s book illustrator only to discover that you are in fact a super awesome, well-established comics artist/writer (my bad!) who just happened to be launching your first creator-owned comic I Hate Fairyland right around the same time I was figuring all of this out. I picked up Issue #1 and read it, then my entire family read it, and then we started fighting over who got to read each new issue first (me, always me!) and I’ve been a huge fan (the family too) ever since. IHF was my first comic and reading a new ongoing IHF is like coming home. I’m thrilled (we’re all thrilled) to spend more time with Gert and the gang. Thanks for giving us the Untold Tales to tide us over, thanks for writing great stories, and a huge thanks to everyone who played a role in getting new IHF out the door. I can’t wait to see what you have in store for us!
Absolutely canot WAIT to pickup my stack from my LCS! And I've already gotten shipping notifications on some of the exclusives I've ordered! Which is most but not all, as I see I've missed a few I didn't know about here. So time to track those down!
I'm absolutely fluffin' ESTATIC to jump back into the series! And I've greatly appreciated the shorts we've gotten here on Substack to keep me entertained. IHF is one of my favorite works from you and it's crazy to think it's been roughly 3.5 years since things ended off! But I'm so glad we other stuff like The Me You Love in The Dark, Middlewest, Twig, etc.