Author: Jon Kirby
Prince Charming is really a duplicitous, womanizing scoundrel. Goldilocks is a gun-toting political firebrand. And the Big Bad Wolf has reformed his bloodthirsty ways, becoming a chain-smoking, hard-bitten gumshoe.
These are just a few of the changes wrought by Bill Willingham’s Fables, an ongoing series published by DC Comics’ venerable Vertigo imprint. Vertigo is a much-beloved subdivision of DC, responsible for such enduring works of mature comic storytelling as Neil Gaiman’s Sandman and Garth Ennis’ Preacher. Fables continues this esteemed tradition, having won seven Eisner Awards since 2002.
In Fables, the mysterious Adversary and his marauding armies have chased the many heroes and villains of folklore and myth from their worlds into ours. They gather together in New York City to build a tenuous community, secreted away from the prying eyes of “mundies” (short for mundane, natch) who are unaware that they actually exist. Over the centuries, they adapt: Snow White becomes a civil servant dedicated to running the fragile community, while Jack Horner becomes a roguish con man who at times skirts dangerously close to revealing the Fables’ existence.
What makes Fables so compelling is Willingham’s perfect pitch with his characters. While knowledge of their storied origins enriches the series, in Fables these characters become something wholly original and captivating. The repentant “Bigby” Wolf is at the center of the story; coming across like a fusion of Wolverine, Firefly’s Mal, and John Constantine of Hellblazer fame, his bravery and self-sacrifice shapes the story even as his murderous past never disappears entirely into the ether.
Like Bigby, the cast of Fables is believable because all of them are flawed and three-dimensional. While Prince Charming is a self-confessed cad and a narcissistic manipulator, when the community is endangered he acts selflessly and without expectation of reward (although he’ll no doubt return to his scheming ways once the threat has passed). And Snow White’s neglected sister Rose Red eventually sublimates her jealousy over her sister’s fame into supervising “The Farm”-an upstate community for non-human Fables such as Reynard the Fox and the Lilliputians.
But Fables is more than an expertly drawn character study: it’s a grand saga with an overarching design. Unlike some comparable series that slow to an almost glacial pace, Fables continually moves forward the epic tale of the Fables’ exile at the hands of the Adversary-and the possibility of their eventual return. Willingham delivers the tale through story arcs that often take dramatically different forms: the initial “Legends in Exile” is a murder mystery, “Animal Farm” is a tense tale of political upheaval and “March of the Wooden Soldiers” is a war story. Both “Legends in Exile” and “March of the Wooden Soldiers” won the Eisner for Best Serialized Story, in 2003 and 2005 respectively.
For new readers, there’s no escaping it: you’ve got a lot of catching up to do. But the earlier stories of Fables have been reissued as affordable trade paperbacks and on April 11th a new arc begins concerning Flycatcher, the frog who became a prince when kissed.
Like the stories handed down over generations that form the inspiration for Fables, Willingham’s world only seems to grow richer as time goes by. Don’t be afraid to visit and leave the mundane behind.
This article has been archived, for more requests please contact us via the support system.
