The next volume of Bill Willingham’s Fables, Homelands, does indeed return to nice juicy plot. Well, after a two-issue excursion into Jack Horner’s life, which I suppose is cute, but I don’t particularly like Jack, so I didn’t particularly care. (I believe this is the point where he spins off into his own series, Jack of Fables, for those who do like him).
In the title story, Boy Blue is on a quest in the Homelands, and before he’s done, he’ll have learned the secret of the Adversary’s identity—and so will have the reader.
As I said previously, I’d been spoiled about the Adversary and was doubtful that the revelation could be pulled off. However, I was satisfied with it, on the whole, and it does make sense in that fractured-fairytale way. This volume also explains why all the Fables seen so far have been of European origin, though not the relationship of Fables to fables.
Miscellaneous story notes: something dire had better happen to the magical item that features so prominently in “Homelands,” because it is vastly overpowered. I’m not quite clear on the timeline; the Jack story takes five years, but I think “Homelands” might end a couple years short of that. It’s not terribly significant, except insofar as it implies minor details about how Fabletown works in the interim, but it’s the kind of thing I tend to wonder about.
The art continues to be easy to follow and rewarding of a second look. The opening part of “Homelands” (an issue and a half, roughly) is very like, well, a fairy tale, and so uses full-page backgrounds of a single color and a minimum of panels. A historical tale is rendered in a simpler, slightly faded style. And the last two issues focus more on Fabletown’s characters and so go back to the page layout that seemed to have stabilized in the last volume: scene- or character-appropriate ornaments at the top and bottom, and narrow side panels that bleed out to the paper’s edge and show context, usually a location but sometimes a symbol.
The titles of the next volumes suggest more juicy plot to come; at present the library only has the next, and so when I’m done with that I’ll probably be making a large purchase from Amazon . . .