Author: katenepveu

Fables: 1001 Nights of Snowfall is a prequel volume to the series, published after volume 7, Arabian Nights (and Days). An original hardcover, it contains ten stories of widely varying length, mostly about characters already met in the series. (The two exceptions are also the shortest, just three and two pages, and thus are unsatisfactory on two different levels.)

On the whole, I thought this was a solid prequel. My favorite backstories were of the Frog Prince and Frau Totenkinder, which illuminated new aspects of the characters. I felt the other stories were less revealing and thus less interesting, though I’ve no objection to reading about Snow White, Bigby, Reynard, and King Cole.

In the usual way of prequels, I think it’s more interesting if you already know the characters, though it may be easier to find in libraries and thus convenient even if you haven’t read the series.

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Unfortunately, I was gravely disappointed in Arabian Nights (and Days), the seventh volume of Fables. Finally the non-European Fables come on the scene, and what is the story? A treacherous, power-hungry, backwards-looking vizier! So much for the reinterpretation of fables into something more complex and three-dimensional. Pah. And the faux-humorous mangled English was just insult to injury.

I did quite like the side story included at the end, “The Ballad of Rodney and June,” which is the epistolary tale of two loyal subjects of the Adversary. It had all the recognition of characters as people that I wanted and didn’t get in the main story.

I’ll see how the prequel volume 1001 Nights of Snowfall goes down, and then decide whether to wait on the library for the next volume of the comic proper (the preceding entry was written a day before this one, while I was without Internet access).

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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 . . .

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The Mean Seasons, the fifth volume of Fables, is a highly transitional volume, and therefore somewhat unsatisfactory when read by itself. I have a hunch that the subsequent storylines will be such that a temporary pause to set things up was necessary; but it doesn’t much reconcile me to having set off for an overnight trip without the next volume in hand.

The Mean Seasons collects three stories: a one-issue tale of what Cinderella really does with her time; two issues about Bigby in World War II; and four issues of the title story, which spans a year. It’s this last that’s the transitional bit; the others are fine in and of themselves. Fabletown’s Mayoral election is held, and as a result, various characters start down new paths in their lives.

To the extent that there’s a uniting thread in “The Mean Seasons,” it’s Snow and Bigby’s relationship, which is another reason for my dissatisfaction with this volume. I rather liked the two of them before this, but this story feels as though it’s just tossing up obstacles to prolong the drama, like a soap opera or a bad romance novel—by making the two of them annoying. Bleh.

I have every reason to believe that more meaty plot is just around the corner, however, so watch this space.

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Volume four of Bill Willingham’s Fables, March of the Wooden Soldiers, ramps up the action with an invasion of our world by the Adversary’s forces. I thought it was a strong, tight volume with an exciting story and some good development of secondary characters, including Boy Blue and Pinocchio. To my surprise, I continue to be amused by Prince Charming; and I liked the riffing off the Matrix‘s Agents through the wooden soldiers of the title.

I will note that I was spoiled regarding the Adversary’s identity. (Wikipedia link immediately redirects to that identity. I should’ve known better, but I really I thought I’d get an intermediate page that would have spoiler warnings. I’ve left a note proposing that.) Despite the clues in this volume, I have a healthy amount of skepticism that the eventual revelation will work.

(When it happens, I’d like to see the revelation bring some of the complexity to the political that is present in the personal. Right now it’s very black and white, which is an odd contrast to the reimaginings of the Fables.)

This volume includes an introductory one-shot, penciled by P. Craig Russell and Craig Hamilton, about the last stand in the Homelands. Hamilton’s art is not to my taste, as it has bulging anatomy and oddly garish faces. The main story’s art is by Mark Buckingham (pencils, some inking) and Steve Leialoha (some inking), and continues to have a lot of features I like, including carefully-designed page borders and numbers.

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Fables is a comic series written by Bill Willingham and drawn by various people, mostly Mark Buckingham and Lan Medina (pencillers) and Steve Leialoha (inker). Its premise: fairy tales are real, but happened in a number of different worlds (how they got into our stories isn’t clear yet). Hundreds of years ago, those worlds were overrun by the Adversary, and the surviving Fables escaped into our world [*] and eventually set up two underground communities: for the human-appearing members, Fabletown in New York City; and for those who can’t pass, the Farm upstate.

[*] There’s a suggestion that they arrived in Europe specifically, which may be why all the characters are of European origin, but I can’t sort this out either until the relationship of Fables to fables is clarified.

Generally speaking, there are two intertwined things at work in the first three volumes. First, there’s the now-usual application of modern patterns of thought to the fairy tales themselves—Goldilocks continues to unhesitatingly break whatever rules and norms stand in the way of her desires, for instance, and Prince Charming is divorced from Snow White, Briar Rose, and Cinderella. Second, there are the tensions suggested by the premise, people having been forced into a world where their true natures must remain hidden.

Volume 1, Legends in Exile, is structured as a murder mystery, which is a handy way to introduce a bunch of characters and their tensions. In the second volume, Animal Farm, a revolution is brewing at the Farm. Most of the third volume, Storybook Love, is taken up by an arc of the same name, playing out repercussions of the first two volumes. (It also has two standalone stories, and a two-issue arc about how the Fables deal with a reporter who’s discovered their existence.) Chad felt that these volumes were too ad hoc for his tastes. I can see how he got that impression, but to me the looseness feels more fun and energetic than sloppy; and I’m interested enough by the characters to keep reading, even if an ongoing plot didn’t apparently start next volume.

I had wrongly gotten the impression that the art was really static in this series; I may have seen pages from Animal Farm, which is the volume that’s the most boxes-in-regular-rows. The first and third depart from that, with things like panels laid over full-page bleeds, or pages shaped like shields that show Prince Charming taking a more active role (I particularly like these), or a sword fight across the bottom of several pages, to show that it’s running parallel in time with events shown at the top of the pages. (Boo to Vertigo, by the way, for not preserving the even-odd arrangement of pages in the trade paperbacks. This is especially bad in part four of “Storybook Love,” as pages 163 and 164 were obviously designed to face each other; but the pages tend to be united by color themes, which also get broken up in a sometimes-disruptive fashion.) There are also nice little touches like ornamented panel borders, and the location of the page numbers in parts two-four of “Storybook Love.”

ETA: you can get the first issue in PDF format from Vertigo.

I had sufficient fun reading these that the next day I went to the library and got the next five volumes, and I fully expect to end up buying them all. I don’t expect it will have the focus of Sandman, as it’s not a fixed-length series, but if you like this kind of playing with stories, you might see if your own library has it.

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