Other Ever Afters makes fairy tales subversive, kinder, and a whole lot queerer
In Other Ever Afters, Melanie Gillman’s new graphic novel collection of fairy tales, queer people find happiness, community, and kindness. It feels almost revolutionary, updating fairy tales’ traditional mores, using fantasy and folklore as a space to imagine something better than the familiar good-versus-evil binary that often defines fairy tales as we know them today. Beautifully illustrated and wholly unique, Other Ever Afters feels like a heartfelt yet funny antidote to the usual straight, whitewashed happily ever afters. As Gillman told Polygon in an interview to celebrate the book’s release, that’s exactly the point.
Other Ever Afters began life in 2016, with a fairy tale created for 24-Hour Comics Day, an annual collective shared challenge for comics creators. “The first time I did one, it was kind of on a lark,” Gillman says. “There was a local group of cartoonists in Denver, where I was living at the time, and we were gonna get together and do a 12-Hour Comics Day, which is essentially the same thing as 24-Hour Comics Day, but cut in half, as we like sleeping and we don’t want our wrists to fall off.”
During the planning for that community gathering, Gillman began to visualize the first in their queer fairy-tale series, “The Fish Wife.” “I thought, I could do a 12-page comic in 12 hours! And decided to do a little short fairy-tale-style comic about a mermaid who falls in love with a depressed middle-aged peasant woman, and then they get married, and it’s great!”
Gillman’s comic went viral in comic book communities, and not just because of the dark, memorable, yet warm twist on fable understandings of mermaids and monsters. The way Gillman shared the story with their followers helped boost the response. As with
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