“Then you kissed me like before, I found myself wanting more, and you tell that little lie that kept me hypnotized”
Jeremy Whitley has turned “fractured fairy tales” into a bit of a cottage industry, gives us a pretty good one with The Cold Ever After (the significance of the name still escapes me), which is drawn by Megan Huang, lettered by Adam Pruett and Taylor Esposito, edited by Calum Collins, and published by Titan. 
Let’s have a look!
The story begins with the queen, Isadora, seeking out her former champion, Noelani, who’s been drinking heavily in a far corner of the kingdom for over a decade. The queen’s daughter has disappeared, which upsets Noelani because, as it turns out, she was having a torrid affair with Isadora and considers Noemi, the princess, as “hers” – she was the first person to hold her as a baby and she helped raise her, as the girl’s father, the king had no interest in it. So Noelani returns to the capital to help and becomes embroiled in a fraught political scene. She had been trained as the “Holy Champion” by the kingdom’s Church, represented by Father Werham, who was a cruel and sadistic teacher. Noelani’s replacement, Benazir, is jealous of Noelani’s intimacy with the queen and is also exceedingly cruel. Noemi was betrothed to Roderick Stonehammer, a barbarian who has conquered many kingdoms and has set his sights on Isadora’s, so she arranged a marriage to save it, but Stonehammer has said that they have a week to find Noemi or he’ll destroy the city. Things are not great, in other words. Noelani gets her old job back, which pisses Benazir off, and as she starts to investigate, Werham interferes by claiming the witnesses were performing witchcraft, which falls under his purview (to be fair, one witness who tries to explain what happened dies horribly and seemingly by magic, so Werham might be justified). Meanwhile, Isadora is seducing Noelani all over again, even though Noelani knows that she betrayed her once before. 
Will she resist? Of course not – she likes the sex too much!
This is a very interesting comic, because Whitley grounds it in realism even as we get magic and dragons and other tropes of fantasy stories. Isadora is very concerned about the future of the kingdom (her ineffectual husband is too involved in the Church to care), and her sense of duty is one reason why Noelani is no longer “Holy Champion” at the beginning of the book, as Isadora was unwilling to fight for their love if it meant the kingdom would suffer. Stonehammer is a vile human being who hates women, but Isadora sees no other option but to marry her daughter off to him. Father Werham also hates women, but he has to hide it more because his queen is so powerful, so he takes it out on the powerless, which angers Noelani but she can’t move against him without endangering herself. Noemi, when she shows up (she does), is stronger and cleverer than her mother, and she’s trying to figure out how to stand up to as hateful a person as Stonehammer, but that might lead her down some dark paths. Isadora is a good queen, but she’s not the best human being, and her devotion to her kingdom blinds her to other things, which leads to more tragedy. It’s a fairly complex comic, not only because the sides keep shifting, but because Whitley does a nice job making these characters three-dimensional, and they don’t always act wisely because they’re trying to overcome intense emotions. Even the men – Stonehammer and Werham – aren’t simply cartoon characters. They’re not admirable, certainly, but they are more complex than we expect, and it makes the story more interesting because they are more complete characters. 
Whitley doesn’t pull any punches with regard to the storytelling, either – some people have to do some nasty things for which we might judge them, but in Whitley’s world, they’re necessary, and he doesn’t allow morality to override necessity.
The biggest issue I have with the story has to do with those intense emotions, and it’s Noelani’s stupidity in the face of sexual desire for Isadora. I get that when she’s a youngster, she would be swept away with sexual longing, but in the present, she’s very bitter about her betrayal by the queen, yet she succumbs so easily to her again, and continues to do so even after the queen shows that she really hasn’t changed. I mean, come on, fool me once and all. Noelani is presented as quite smart, but while I can accept a blind spot with regard to Isadora, it’s hard when the same bad shit keeps happening. It’s a little bit necessary for the ending to work, I guess, but as it’s happening, I kept thinking that Noelani was just dumb, and it bugged me more than I liked. It’s just a “me” thing, as you might know – I get very annoyed when “sex” is the sole motivating factor in far too much fiction – but it’s still a thing. Other than that, Whitley does a nice job with the characters.
Huang is a decent artist, but I don’t love her work on this book, and I’m having a hard time figuring out why. She doesn’t seem well suited for action scenes, and there are plenty in this book, so perhaps that’s coloring my appreciation of the rest of it. 
At times, her perspective seems wonky, and it makes the action scenes more difficult to parse, and occasionally her figures look bizarre because the perspective work isn’t as good as it could be. It’s hard to explain. Also, very often she uses color instead of solid lines to “fill out” a character, which makes the work look sloppy, even though I know it isn’t. It’s more of a visceral reaction than an intellectually considered one, but it still bugs me. As she pulls back from the characters to give more long shots, her details disappear, which I know is common with a lot of artists, but it always annoys me a little, and here it seems particularly egregious. Her character work is generally well done – she gets across the roiling emotions in every character, even the minor ones, very well – and her world-building is quite good, so that’s nice. I wish I could be more articulate about why I don’t love it, because it’s not that it’s bad – it’s never confusing, and Huang knows what she’s doing in terms of laying out a page, and she designs things quite well – it’s just that … something about it puts me off. Sorry!
Anyway, The Cold Ever After is a pretty cool comic. It’s a good adventure with ethical complexity, which is nifty. I can nitpick it a bit, but overall, it’s a very enjoyable book. You can find it here, if you’re at all interested!
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ½ ☆ ☆
