The Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde, Vol. 5: The Happy Prince by P. Craig Russell

This is the end of the series - Wilde wrote nine fairy tales and Russell adapted eight of them into comics format between 1992 and 2012, and it doesn't look like he's going to go back to do "The Fisherman and His Soul" at this point.

I made a little project of reading all of them this year (I'm writing this at the tail end of 2024) - The Selfish Giant/The Star Child, The Young King/The Remarkable Rocket, The Birthday of the Infanta, and The Devoted Friend/The Nightingale and the Rose.

So now I've come to The Happy Prince, the fifth and final volume. The prose is just as deliberately didactic, as let-me-tell-you-a-story-young-lad, as the previous tales, with that jeweled Wilde prose that comes right up to the line of being too ornate but veers back at the last minute. And Russell still uses great wodges of Wilde prose, as he tends to do in all of his adaptations: Russell, I think, adapts things where he loves the words and not just the underlying story, so he wants to keep the words as much as possible.

The Happy Prince himself is a statue, on a tall column in the center of some unspecified town in Europe. It may be the "now" when Wilde wrote the story in the late 19th century, or a century or three earlier; in the usual fairy-tale fashion, a lot is vague. The Prince was once a living person, but he died young and now his soul inhabits the statue, for unspecified reasons but presumably so Wilde can have a plot.

The other main character is a swallow, a migratory bird that is tarrying in this city on the verge of winter for no good reason - he should be going on to Egypt to join his fellows, but was dallying with a reed in a river somewhere. (No, literally, he was flirting, over the course of weeks, with what seems to be one of the few non-sapient entities in a Wilde fairy tale, which is some kind of achievement, though not one speaking to his intelligence or discernment.) Anyway, the swallow swoops into town, perches on the statue, and meets the Prince.

The Prince is sad.

He is sad because some people are poor and other people are rich, mostly. So he induces the bird to take his valuables - first the ruby in the pommel of his sword, then his sapphire eyes, and finally the gilding covering the statue - and give those to specific, deserving poor people so that their lives can be better.

This delays the swallow long enough that he's killed by the frost, and makes the statue shabby enough that it's removed by the authorities and melted down. But both of them ascend to heaven immediately, on the direct orders of God. Yay!

It is just as didactic and middle-Church as the previous stories, as expected. These were improving stories for boys (and maybe girls, though Wilde didn't care much for girls) in the 1880s and 90s, and will always be that, no matter how many years later it now is. If you're in the mood for Victorian improving stories with Wildean prose and Russell art - both of which are gorgeous - there are five books available.