Fables: Thankfully, not for children.
I was hesitant to start this series. I thought the premise - fairytale characters like Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty living a shadowed life in modern day New York - would be too gimmicky and the story would just be one big in-joke.
As it turns out, Willingham never goes for the obvious plot, and these well-known characters are more human (even the inhuman ones) then they ever were in their own stories. Snow White, for instance, is a put-upon workaholic who serves as the Deputy Mayor of Fabletown. She works side by side with Bigby (the reformed Big Bad Wolf) to fight the uphill battle of maintaining order amongst a group of otherworldly citizens who have been kicked out of their mystical lands by a threat only known as The Adversary. Snow and Bigby’s interesting relationship is just one of the reasons that the “Fables” universe gets deeper and more complex with every issue.
While the series features characters from stories we read as children, they are more along the lines of how the Brothers Grimm envisioned them rather than Walt Disney. This is a noir-ish tale, with plenty of blood and brutality. I know I’ll never think of Goldilocks in the same way…
As of now, I’ve only read the first five volumes, but from my experience, this tends to be the time in most graphic series when the whole world shifts on it’s axis and things start heading in unexpected directions. For this reason, I’m reviewing the series up to this point. We’ll see where it goes from here.
March 10th, 2009 at 8:39 pm
I *love* this series. I’ve just polished off the 12th TPB and I just think it’s awesome. Having wrapped up a major storyline, I can already see a great deal of potential as far as where the story goes from here. I can’t wait to see what happens next, personally.
March 10th, 2009 at 9:58 pm
Oh, cool. I’m glad it’s still showing signs of greatness that far into the series. I just picked up volume 6 in TPB tonight…