Jack of Fables V2: Jack of Hearts Review

Brand extensions can be tricky things. Sometimes you end up with Lucifer, but sometimes you get Witchblade Takeru Manga instead. Jack of Fables, from DC, was a clear attempt to extend the brand identity of the Fables series, written by Bill Willingham and mostly penciled by Mark Buckingham, with a companion series about one of the more interesting characters from that world. As far as brand extensions go, it hews most closely to the Sandman Mystery Theater model: the writer of the main series is involved (though it’s always difficult to tell, from the outside, just how much involvement that is) and the tone and style is very close to the original.

I wasn’t completely thrilled with the first Jack of Fables plotline (which I reviewed on my personal blog), finding it a bit too heavy-handed and dark. Jack is an unrepentant rogue, and to care about a rogue, he has to either not be too nasty to people, or mostly run into much worse folks than himself. Either way, he has to have a lightness of touch – the story can’t focus on his worst impulses. (See Jack Vance’s novels The Eyes of the Overworld and Cugel the Clever for one of the best examples of the form.)

Jack is mostly acted upon in the title story of this volume, which is good: a rogue off balance is more interesting, and his scramblings add a feeling of urgency to the proceedings. But that’s actually the second story in this volume, so I have to backtrack.

Jack of Hearts, the book, starts with a two-issue story called “Jack Frost,” framed as a tale Jack tells some of his fellow escapes from the magical prison from the first volume. They’re hiding high in the mountains from those who would recapture them, and Jack mentions that he was once Jack Frost…and so of course has to explain.

“Jack Frost” is Jack in full-on jerk mode; it’s set back before the Adversary’s conquest, in a world ruled by four queens representing the seasons, who rotate to each of the four lands quarterly. Jack arrives, seduces the Queen of Winter, and, as usual, all hell breaks loose. There’s a knack to writing a womanizer who doesn’t come across as a jerk, but either Willingham and Sturges don’t have that knack or they prefer to make Jack despicable. So this story is entertaining, though the reader is just waiting for Jack’s bad decisions to catch up with him once again. (As, of course, they do – he isn’t Jack Frost anymore, now, is he?) The problem with Jack of Fables, over the long term, is stories like this: the reader can’t really sympathize with Jack, since there’s very little that’s good about him. We’d prefer not to see him meet a messy death, but that’s an awfully slim thread to hang a continuing series on.

The main story is longer, and sees Jack traveling to Las Vegas to rebuild his fortune with the help of The Pathetic Fallacy. Things go wrong, in ways that are roughly similar to how things usually go wrong in stories about Vegas, with some magical differences courtesy of Jack and a new local Fable in a position of power. As I said, this story is more successful, since Jack is off-balance and scrambling almost from the first page. He’s still not a nice person in the least, but that matters much less when all of the people he’s dealing with are at least as bad. (So my advice to Willingham and Sturges – for whatever use that is – would be to keep Jack as far away from nice, normal people as possible if they want to keep the series going.)

The art is still solid mainstream professional, with panels that flow cleanly and characters who are always identifiable. And this is a series with a lot of dialogue scenes – as people explain long, complicated things to each other – which generally flow well. It’s not the kind of art that draws attention to itself, but it’s working quite hard.

Jack of Fables, Vol. 2: Jack of Hearts
Written by Bill Willingham & Matthew Sturges; penciled by Tony Akins, Steve Leialoha, & Andrew Pepoy; inked by Andrew Pepoy & Steve Leialoha
DC Comics, 2007, $17.95

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