About Ken Lowery
Location: Dallas
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Bio: Ken Lowery is a freelance writer from Dallas, Texas, and right now he's starting to think his desire to work in print media is akin to investing in Betamax technology. You can find all of his archived movie reviews at ken-lowery.com, and his general commentary on movies, comics, and other stuff at his blog.
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I went into God Save the Queen looking to understand the appeal of fairies. I did not succeed.
Over the past ten years, I’ve encountered a lot of fiction that wants to tell me about the “real” fairies. They’re not “cute” like movies (what movies?) make them out to be. They’re exotic, magical, whimsical, and capricious. (Where “capricious” means “casually homicidal.”) They are humanoid but distinctly Other. They live a life of glamo(u)r, and their politicking is charmingly feudal.
It’s not a mythological hook that’s ever managed to snare me, but I can see (distantly, dimly) the appeal they have for others. God Save the Queen had that same distant, dim appeal to me: the story of (who else?) a capricious and bored young woman in north London swept up in the lifestyle of fairy slackers who don’t have much more to do than get high off “Red Horse,” a drug combining human blood with heroin. (The pain of the iron in the blood adds the kick, you see.) There’s also the cruel Queen Mab re-taking the throne from her usurper, the slightly less cruel Titania. Did I mention the young woman has a surprise origin? That’s not a spoiler; heroines in these stories are required by law to have a surprise origin.
The title implied a somewhat punk-rock approach to the proceedings, which was the clincher for me; maybe, put in a context and style I dug, I could appreciate the fairy concept more. Maybe, just maybe, I could figure out why jerks with pointy ears were so appealing to so many smart people.
I didn’t get my answer, but I got some pretty art courtesy of John Bolton and some mildly entertaining dialogue from Mike Carey, Vertigo’s current master of serviceable fantasy. The fairies here only come in two flavors: selfish drug addicts and coldly arrogant royalty. The royalty doesn’t matter so much, as they don’t seem to take up even a quarter of this volume’s 96 pages. It’s mostly on Linda, her lust for the head addict-fairy Verian, her disregard for her mother and her worship of her absent father. Oh, and her disregard for her doormat friend Jeff.
It could be I’m being a little harsh; Linda is, after all, a hardheaded teenager, and if there’s ever a time in your life to confuse sleaziness with allure and complex emotions with weakness, that is the time. But that attitude can be hard to swallow for such a prolonged period of time, and her growth isn’t much better. Linda’s eventual evolution and acceptance of her heritage occurs so abruptly that I actually thought I was missing some pages. No lie.
So there is some fairy, a tiny dash of punk rock, a good barrel-full of teenage angst and loads of beautiful painted panels from Bolton. What I didn’t find was any compelling reason to begin caring about fairy stories. God Save the Queen has its moments, but they are too often weighed down by so much that is frankly pretty dreary. Good if it’s your sort of thing, not so much if you’re standing on the outside looking in.
Writer: Mike Carey
Artist: John Bolton
Publisher: DC Comics/Vertigo Comics
