No Rest for The Wicked (webcomic)

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.

No Rest For the Wicked is a now-defunct Web Comic by Andrea L. Peterson set in a world where many Fairy Tales are true, in all their grim glory.

Some are Fractured Fairy Tales, but that does not prevent them from being as grim as the originals.

The main plot features the insomniac Princess November from "The Princess and the Pea" setting out to save the moon, buried as in the fairy tale "The Dead Moon". She gathers a Ragtag Bunch of Misfits about her from various tales, and they encounter more fairy tale characters along the way.

Other included fairy tales are "Puss in Boots", "Diamonds and Toads", "Little Red Riding Hood", "Beauty and The Beast", "Hansel and Gretel", "The Girl Without Hands", "Sleeping Beauty", "The Boy Who Set Out to Learn What Fear Was", "Bearskin", "Snow-White and Rose-Red and The Raven.

Characters:

  • November, the princess from "The Princess and the Pea". Suffering from insomnia ever since the moon vanished. (Not that she slept well at any time.)
  • Perrault the cat from "Puss in Boots" -- except that he's a Funny Animal, not a Talking Animal. Still working for his master, the Marquis, until November persuades him to leave.
  • Red from "Little Red Riding Hood". Has an ax. Uses it freely.
  • Jack-or-maybe-Hans, The Boy from "The Boy Who Set Out To Learn What Fear Was."
  • Clare, the Girl Without Hands.
  • The Witch, an old woman who's lived alone in the woods. For a long time.
  • Anna & Klaus, two children the witch has kidnapped.
  • Prince Ricardo, AKA "Picky Dick", the prince from "The Princess And The Pea". A Prince Charmless if there ever was one.

No Rest for The Wicked seems to have started in late 2002 or early 2003 on a now-vanished website called "icarusfalls.com"; in October 2005, Peterson moved it to its own domain, where she continued to produce installments until February 28, 2013. The comic abruptly ceased updating after that, with no further posts of any sort by Peterson explaining why, but the site remained functional for another seven years, until some point between the end of January and the beginning of February 2020, when it began returning a WordPress error instead of its content. Fortunately, the Wayback Machine kept an archive of it; you can read it here.


Tropes used in No Rest for The Wicked (webcomic) include:

Perrault: Now, if you were to bury this bird behind your inn...should you then find, say, a golden tree with diamond fruit growing upon that very spot three days later...well, that would be quite something, wouldn't it?

November: Well obviously she recovered!

  • Upper Class Twit: The Marquis.
  • Visible Silence: Often invoke.
  • Weakened by the Light: The Moon used to keep creatures of darkness at bay.
  • When All You Have Is a Hammer: When November, Red, and Perrault reach the Beast's estate's gate, Perrault, having gotten on the other side by himself, lays out a detailed plan of tricking the then-unknown-owners of the mansion into vacating the place and letting the other two in. Red just smashes the gate in.
  • Wicked Witch: Attributed to both Red and Clare. It's not true for either.
  • Word of God: The author provides footnotes for those who do not catch the allusions.
  • You're Not My Mother: November says this to the witch.
  • Youngest Child Wins: the Boy chose November because she was the youngest. This is lampshaded, when The Boy and the Marquis imply that the youngest implies that she is the most attractive.
  • Zany Scheme