This week's colourfully-covered submission is a black and white (on the inside), six-issue series from the late 1990s, "Morning Glory the Faerie", which as you can see is the story of a red-headed sprite, her boobs, and her quest to watch people have sex.
And nothing starts a comic book off with a bang better than walls of text in a hard-to-read font! Blabbity blabbity, long story short, European fairies, sorry, faeries, being nature-loving pagan folk, took a boat to the New World because Christians were making life unpleasant for them in Europe. Yeah, the same new world the Puritans were all ready shipping off to.
NO! NOT THE WITHERING!! That's either faerie talk for "Imma die now" or the title of a straight-to-video horror film.
Anyway, the story picks up in contemporary times, with our titular heroine, about to become the last faerie in North America, sits at the bedside of the next-to-last faerie in North America, where we are reminded for the third time in 4 pages that Christians are totally evil and hate faeries. For some reason.
She's wearing a pagan goddess necklace! She's either a "true believer" or she saw it in an Urban Outfitters and thought it looked cute! Well, I guess she could be both.
How very fortunate that the very first human Morning Glory comes across is not only a pagan, but a follower of the exact same deity Morning Glory worships. Given the huge variety of pagan gods and goddesses, not to mention the equally huge variety of different pagan religions, this is very fortunate indeed. Then again this takes place in northern California, which is pretty much Hippie Central so it's not a huge surprise that she self-identifies as a witch.
Also, faeries are heteronormative, even in Northern California.
Excellent, I was hoping they'd stop what little action has occurred to watch some TV.
See, Morning Glory gets energy by watching people have sex. I wasn't kidding earlier.
You know, if you're going to make a comic about people watching porn, the least you could do is show a little bit of the porn. I'm just saying.
Again with the heteronormativity! Sheesh, I've met professional yentas who ask "why don't you have a man" less often than Little Miss Goddess Worshipper here.
Well, okay, I've never met a professional yenta, but I'm pretty sure they'd ask that less often than Morning Glory.
In short, faeries can't get along with anyone. They probably kept bugging Huitzilopochtli about when he was gonna find a nice Moon Goddess and settle down. "YOU'RE NOT GETTING ANY YOUNGER YOU KNOW!!"
And nothing says "rugged individualist who exists completely outside of the mainstream" more than mass-produced bumper stickers on your car. Besides, in case the goddess necklace wasn't enough, we needed to remind the readers that Katherine is pagan, Wiccan, left-wing, and... owns guns. It wouldn't entirely surprise me if she's also a Libertarian but let's leave that aside for now. Or, even better, let's leave it aside permanently.
Anyway, Morning Glory decides if you're gonna go yenta, go all the way, and sets Katherine up with a date from an online dating service. Katherine responds with a Look of True Terror that is pretty much the same as all her other facial expressions, and an exclamation of "oh Goddess" in case you've forgotten she's Wiccan. Because she totally is by the way.
"Those nasty bad things that kill people"? So... he doesn't have guns? No, he's the self-insert author avatar of a northern Californian Wiccan gun nut, so that can't be it.
Anyway, Bob shows up and Katherine accidentally hits him in the head because cute meet. While she's dragging his body inside from her front door a high school student who looks like a generic "Teen Goth Girl" from central casting shows up to chat. It should be noted that while "wicca" is indeed an old English word pertaining to male sorcerers, it didn't come to be the word for the name of a religion until maybe the 1950s, which I guess is ancient if you were born in 2005.
This new character's function is to a) remind us all that Christians are bad and b) appeal to the black-clad teenagers who were presumably meant to be the audience for this comic. This type of teenager definitely hates the mall, unless it's to get their black dresses, expensive lace-up knee-length leather boots, and Manic Panic "Blacker than Doomsday" temporary hair dye.
Wicca is just "barely tolerated"? Wha? Didn't Colleen learn about it because Katherine was giving a fucking lecture on it somewhere? Plus it's not like Katherine hides her beliefs, since it came up like a million times in the first issue alone. It's practically all she talks about. Maybe that's what Colleen means; she overheard Katherine lecturing some random store clerk about The Craft and how it's all about love and nature, unlike that awful monotheism.
So Bob comes to, and being the great self-insert author avatar he is, immediately identifies the Venus of Willendorf on Katherine's shelf (I'm going to assume this is a reproduction and that Katherine is not in fact a master thief who specializes in priceless archeological specimens) and namedrops a famous female archeologist whose studies are popular in certain feminist movements. I know that if I was knocked out and came to in a stranger's home, the first thing I would do is comment on their knick-knacks, and attempt to show the person who hit me how much I know about said knick-knacks. "MY WHAT A LOVELY CERAMIC KITTEN-SHAPED PLANTER! DID YOU KNOW KITTENS DON'T NORMALLY HAVE PLANTERS GROWING OUT OF THEIR BACKS?"
At first I thought he was making a joke about having herpes since the Carter administration, then I realized he was serious. It's a good thing he doesn't have any of those nasty bad things that kill people; herpes is probably pretty unpleasant but it's true that it most likely won't kill you. It seems that if you're a pagan Baby Boomer looking for love that's the most you can hope for. Then again, according to this comic, if you're a pagan Baby Boomer looking for love, you probably have herpes yourself, so it's all good. After all, if you set the bar low, you'll never be disappointed. Hey, so we both have herpes! At least we haven't got syphilis!! Last time I checked, anyway.
After dinner, we find out that Bob is a super-great guy who helps out abortion clinics by obtaining half-price Kevlar vests for the doctors, plus he's Buddhist (though probably not a very good Buddhist) which isn't as good as being Wiccan but is still better than... you know. And hey, he likes guns, just like Katherine! Herpes, archeology and guns, is there no end to the things they have in common??
I know it looks like the focus is sliding off of Morning Glory and Katherine and onto Bob the Super Ultra Awesome Mulletted Beardo who knows lots about lots of stuff, but I assure you this comic is still called "Morning Glory the Faerie". Bob is definitely not the hero of this story.
Anyway, outside the abortion clinic, Bob, who is totally not the main protagonist of this story, heroically stops an abortion protestor from getting shot by sexy lady police officers, because after all sexy lady police officers are still ladies and need help from Neckbearded Baby Boomer Mullet Men.
Where's Katherine, you ask? Oh, she's around somewhere, watching passively. Much like when she was watching Morning Glory get off to porn. Morning Glory herself is around somewhere too, but you can't really expect either of them to do much, since they are after all pretty ladies.
So finally, we get introduced to the villain of this piece, who is, SHOCKINGLY, an evil Christian minister (the same one Colleen mentions earlier, of course) who speaks in a hard-to-read font. I wonder how that translates into actual sound? Like, if this were a real guy, would you hear loud static whenever he speaks, forcing you to miss half of what he's saying, or mistake it for something else entirely? "Huh? did you say Iephthah? Oh, Jephthah. That's a J. Sorry, could you just repeat everything you just said?"
And that's the end of issue 2!! This series is so epic, we're having to break it up into two parts, so you'll learn about the rest of the Bob the Wonder Mullet Morning Glory the Faerie story next week, so stay tuned!
(Special thanks to TW for the generous donation!!)
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