Nice to be Scared Again: Talking I Hate Fairyland with Skottie Young

Until now, Skottie Young has has been best known for his work for Marvel—his cutesy Little Marvel covers are iconic, and earned critical acclaim for his work on a series of adaptations of L. Frank Baum’s original (weirder than the movie) Oz stories. His art graced the interiors of Neil Gaiman’s Fortunately, the Milk, which is nice work if you can get it. And he’s doing more and more writing these days, with a run on Rocket Raccoon among his most recent work.
His latest, creator-owned endeavor is called I Hate Fairyland, out in trade paperback this month from Image. It’s a completely over-the-top fantasy about a little girl named Gert who falls through a portal into a magical realm of riddles and magical creatures. She hates it. It’s a completely deranged story that does the old Looney Tunes cartoons one better when it comes to violence and silliness. It displays a deep love of classic Alice in Wonderland-type adventure tropes, even as it takes bloody delight inmercilessly skewering them. I had a chance to chat with the writer-artist Skottie about his new book, the challenges of being both writer and artist, and the state of modern entertainment.
This book is really out there. I’d love to hear your elevator pitch for the book.
I would say it’s really like if you took the hyper, over-the-top, juvenile, violent world of Deadpool and smashed it really hard with a hammer into Alice in Wonderland. I Hate Fairyland would be like the weird, violent child of that marriage. That’s the picture I always had in my head when I was developing it. What if Alice, or Dorothy, or Sarah in Labyrinth, or any of the protagonists from these kind of classic stories that I grew up reading and loving, and still love, what if they found themselves in those [fantasy] worlds, but at some point were just like, “this is so annoying.” Which it kinda would be, right? That’s really where the idea came from, and it wasn’t until later I started to realize that was probably me manifesting a little bit of my actual day-to-day life. So that’s my elevator pitch. Deadpool/Alice in Wonderland Mash-up.
That’s part of what I liked about it: I like those stories too, but especially as I’ve gotten older, those worlds start to look more exhausting than anything else. So you did all the Wizard of Oz stuff for Marvel, which did very well  with the critics. Was this borne out of that at all? What were the other inspirations?
I started to develop it while I was working on that, but I wouldn’t say it was directly a reaction. It had seeds of the idea laid in. Some people were like: “Were you so tired of working on Oz that you wanted to take an axe to it?” It really was not that. I really consider Oz kind of the start of my career, even though there were seven-odd years prior to that. It was the start of who I really am as a cartoonist. So I love those books, and I loved working on them. While I was working on them it was also occurring to me that these characters that she would come across on her path in each book, it just got progressively more bizarre and abstract. I just kept thinking…the wrong kind of person up against this would just flip out. Somebody who’s slightly impatient, who’s waiting for a real answer and all they’re getting is riddles or doublespeak or backwards-talk. You would be so mad. Just tell me what I want to know so I can move on with this situation. That’s where it kinda started to form a bit, thinking how would somebody with a little bit more mature view of life deal with characters that are this annoying.

It was also mirroring that time where we had our first son. Those who have kids will get this: these kids sit in bouncy seats and swings and they lay on these things with stuff hanging over them, and they all have this terrible compressed audio on repeat, these sweet saccharine kiddy tunes. While a television’s going. Dora the Explorer on television, a jungle tune being repeated on the Fisher Price swing, the house is filled with dog toys and colorful stuffed animals. It’s this weird, childlike labyrinth of a world and you’re an adult living in it. I was in my mid-30s surrounded by that all day. Then I come to my studio and I’m making little cute versions of Spider-Man and Wizard of Oz. I’m a grown-up entrenched in this kid world.
Sometimes it’s amazing, and sometimes it’s cute, and sometimes it’s maddening. It started off as just a funny image in my head of a character that goes off to a fantasy world and instead of being cute and innocent and meek becomes very powerful and insane and kinda psychotic. It’s like an interesting cartoonish representation of the world I live in.
That’s funny, because even as a kid, too much of that stuff…even as you’re describing it, I’m tensing up a bit. I don’t know if I was overly sensitive or just grumpy. So, you’ve done a ton of work with Marvel. This is your first creator-owned work. What’s that been like?
Making a comic book is not as scary as it used to be, because I’m somewhere [near] 15 years of doing it. The making of it is similar, but I definitely prefer creator-owned in that there is no barrier. With Marvel, the barriers don’t feel like that much of a challenge because I’ve been there  so long that I know how to prepare for them. Because I’ve been there so long, I know how to fit the brands and the characters and everything that entails when you’re working in a corporate environment. I love doing it and I’ve learned a ton.
With creator-owned, aside from proofreaders, whatever I make that day is what somebody’s going to read. That to me has just been that next level of paradise working in comics. I wake up in the morning, get my kid on the bus, come to my studio and I make it up whole cloth that day. And that’s what exists. I don’t have to ask permission. I don’t have to be protective of someone else’s interests. It’s just putting myself on paper.
The challenge there is that you’re completely exposed. When I write and draw Rocket Raccoon, there are a lot of cloaks over me to protect me. It’s not the best thing in the world, but if I had a rough time with that storyline or whatever, there’s a bit of a barrier between me and the reaction. With my own book, it’s a little scary at times. Here’s my idea, I kinda think it’s funny, I hope you do. If you don’t, there’s not that 40-year-history of Spider-man to protect me. It’s just me, and the book, and the reader. But it’s all the more rewarding if it pays off. It’s really exhilarating. It’s nice to be sacred a bit again.
Writing and doing the art sounds really hard. What’s that process like?
For me, once I started I was like, “why wasn’t I doing this long ago?” I know the things I like to draw, the tone that I like to draw, the expressions, so it just lends itself to writing that exact story. To just aim at my targets: talking animals, silly situations. I didn’t find that to be the challenge. The biggest challenge was just getting over caring about what the perception would be. I think there’s a perception that if an artist is an artist for too long, people just take for granted that they could never write. Only people credited as writers can write. I was nervous that people wouldn’t accept me as a writer. And sometimes you overwrite, because you think “I’ve gotta prove to ‘em.” So the biggest challenge was letting go of that. As an artist, I had built up the callouses over years of drawing. I’m just about having fun on the page. Writing was a new line, and I felt like I was brand-new again.
Do you sit and write out a script?
Yeah. When I first started doing things I thought maybe I would try to write a simple plot and then just start drawing it, but I found that I was too deep in it. I was drawing a panel for every single motion. Art was driving the car. For me, it works best to sit and write a whole script, just like I was writing for somebody else. If I get too deep into drawing something, I might not go back and change it because of the amount of work I just did. But writing, if I’ve gone too far down a rabbit hole, it’s not as much work to go back and rework three pages of text. The great thing is, because I’m drawing it, I can also add. I write 20- to 22-page scripts, but eventually they become anywhere from 24 to 28 pages once I’ve drawn them.
I’ve found lately there’s been a ton of a ton of girl-/woman-/female-led books that seem to be actually doing well. Even if they’re not selling in huge numbers, people are talking about them. Was that any part of the consideration with the lead character, Gert?
There are a lot of great conversations going on with regard to diversity and gender, and trying to build our industry and fanbase. And character base. And creator base, into the new era. I would love nothing more than to jump in and say, “ I wanted to be at the tip of that.” But when I started writing this four or five years ago, for a couple years into it, [Gert] was a guy who came into it as a boy and grew up. He looked a little like Lobo. He was a big, hulking guy that still dressed like a little kid. That was the initial concept.
Really, it changed because I just thought it was funnier as a little girl. A big guy being really violent in a kiddie-cartoony world is funny for a couple panels, or one or two gags, but I think after a while it just looks brutal—a very big guy who is bigger than everybody else and is really brutal with them. I went through all these options, and I went with visually what was the funniest. I got the most mileage out of the little girl who looks [embodies] all the tropes: the frilly dress, the Goldilocks hair. All the tropes that we know instantly. That iconic comic-strip-esque girl—I don’t know that I ever have to remind you what she represents. In these 20-page bursts, anything that you have that the reader already has in their bag to help tell the story is good to grab onto. If something is so completely original, sometimes it can be amazing, and sometimes it can be tough to grasp.
It just so happened that by the time it got written and pitched, the conversation came to the forefront. All the main characters in my book are women or little girls, but these are just the counterparts that I think work well together. Most of the men in my book get dealt with pretty swiftly, and are also not very good at what they do. I’m not trying to hit that over the head, but I do feel that I am contributing to that conversation by saying, here are some, I think, really great female characters: some funny, some flawed, some strong female characters that help add to that conversation, and hopefully give people a couple different, interesting characters to follow in the cool landscape of comics right now.
I think you can take credit for your instincts on that. I’m picturing it now with a middle-aged man running around doing the same stuff, and it instantly becomes a much uglier story. Much less funny.
Yeah, the initial idea was just a little 48-page story, and that was going to be it. You get three crazy gags with a big, bulky guy chopping up mushroom people, and you think that’s fine and funny, and you walk away. Once I started thinking that this thing maybe has legs to go longer, that’s when I started thinking it was a little too…brutal, is the only word that keeps coming to me. The violence is a little bit of a commentary on how dark and gritty some of our art has become. As I’ve had a kid, I’ve let go of my ability, weirdly enough, to consume a lot of dark and gritty entertainment. In some ways, the level of ketchup-like blood and over-the-top gore that I’ve put in this book is just me commenting on what we do with entertainment now. I almost like to make it so silly that it loops back around to being fun, in the same way [that] Daffy Duck getting shot in the face with a shotgun [is fun].
I used to be a complete horror, gore-hound guy. But as I’ve gotten older, even without kids…I don’t know if it’s that entertainment has changed, or if it’s just my tastes, but I don’t have quite the stomach for it that I once did.
I agree. Maybe entertainment hasn’t changed, but as I’ve gotten older, my capacity for it has. When I was younger and worked less, and had more free time, I could switch gears. But now, I work all day, I’m tired, there are kids. And that little time left at the end of the day, right before I go to bed, I don’t necessarily want to go to bed creeped out, or depressed, or sad. So it’s much easier for me to end on a high note. It’s weird for me to say that, where every single issue you’re seeing someone’s insides on the outsides. I’m trying to make it as campy and funny as I can.
What’s next for you?
I Hate Fairlyland is my focus right now. I’m still doing Marvel covers. I illustrated a Neil Gaiman book a couple of years ago, and I’m looking to do some illustrated novels. So it’s another thing to scare me, another side of publishing that I haven’t fully tackled. I’m lucky enough to have a name and work in this world where I get to make things up and play pretend for a living, so I don’t ever want to get comfortable with that. I want to keep challenging myself and take on new challenges.
I Hate Fairyland, Volume 1:  Madly Ever After is available April 26.