Review: New ‘Fables’ & ‘Jack of Fables’ Volumes
[[[
Fables]]] is one of the big successes of the current version of the Vertigo line, where every book has a Hollywood-style high concept: all males on Earth are killed – except one!; New York’s mayor can talk to machines!; Refugee fairytales live in the modern world! And, in another Hollywood-esque twist, Fables even has a spin-off of its own, like Diff’rent Strokes
Last month, both the parent and spin-off series had new collections, with titles that implied a connection. So let’s look at the two of those books together:
Fables, Vol. 10: The Good Prince
By Bill Willingham, Mark Buckingham, and others
DC Comics, June 2008, $17.99
Fables, as you might know, is a series in which all of the folkloric and fairy-tale characters that you’ve ever heard of are real, and originally lived in an array of alternate worlds. But “the Adversary” – whose identity was revealed a few volumes ago – led huge goblin armies to conquer nearly all of those worlds, sending a few (but mostly very well-known) Fables to our world, to live in secrecy in an enclave in New York City.
More recently, the cold war with the Adversary is beginning to heat up, with Fabletown’s leadership striking alliances with the “Cloud Kingdoms” (you know, where the beanstalk led?) and with the as-yet-unconquered world of the [[[Arabian Knights]]]. (There’s also an unsubtle parallel between Fabletown and Israel that Willingham is a bit too fond of.) As we hit this tenth volume, we know that the Adversary is building for a major attack three years from now, and the characters of Fables learn that quickly as well.
The last storyline, [[[Sons of Empire]]], served to ratchet up tension, but [[[The Good Prince]]] goes the other way; Flycatcher – Prince Ambrose, the Frog Prince – has finally regained his memory, and is grieving over the loss of his family centuries before. But Red Riding Hood goads him out of his misery, and he rushes off to get fighting lessons from Boy Blue.
Flycatcher hopes to have his own turn as a one-man army rampaging through the Adversary’s worlds – as “Bigby” Wolf and Boy Blue did before him – but his fate will be somewhat different, and involve a rusty set of armor hanging in Fabletown’s business office. It also involves some very major victories against the Adversary, complicating the situation and defusing some of the tension that Willingham spent half a year building up in Sons of Empire.
Fables is still telling a gripping story about interesting, larger-than-life characters, but oscillating back and forth in this good news/bad news fashion raises the suspicion that Willingham might be milking the series to avoid getting to an actual ending. It’s still rare for a big-publisher comics series to tell its story, take a bow, and get outta Dodge, but that is the Vertigo model, and I’d hate to see Fables dither itself to death in pursuit of eternal periodical life.
This volume is more diffuse than the last few; Flycatcher’s story is fairly simple and doesn’t hold any major surprises. The art and dialogue are still sparkling, but the overall plot of Fables needs to kick back into high gear and stay there.
Jack of Fables, Vol. 3: The Bad Prince
By Bill Willingham, Matthew Sturges, Tony Atkins, and others
DC Comics, June 2008, $14.99
[[[Jack of Fables]]] has an entirely different set of concerns to juggle – it’s a much younger series, and its overall conflict has Jack (of Giantkiller, Beanstalk, and various other fame) on the run from a Fable “retirement home” called Golden Boughs that forcibly drains its inmates’ magical power to make the world more mundane. And Jack himself is a glory-hounding unreliable bastard with a need – and a magical knack – to be at the center of every story he encounters.
The “Jack gets captured by the Page sisters from Golden Boughs” plots are beginning to get repetitious, so I hope Willingham and Sturges give us a break from them for a while – or actually wrap up that plotline and move on to something else. (Jack of Fables is more clearly episodic – the [[[Sandman Mystery Theater]]] to [[[Fables’s Sandman]]] – and can run for as long as there’s an audience for the adventures of a smooth trickster…with a bit of luck, that means indefinitely.)
This time, the capture leads to a crash, and turns into a frame for the true story of Jack and Wicked John. Jack thinks John is a cheap knock-off of him, which is not quite true, as Jack’s sidekick Gary (the Pathetic Fallacy) explains at great, but entertaining length. Interspersed with that are some scenes back at Golden Boughs, where more facts are revealed, but not linked up to form anything coherent yet.
The flashback-heavy structure of Jack of Fables can give it a stop-and-start feeling when read as a collected volume (like here) – it moves as smoothly as can be expected, but there’s still a feeling of gears shifting every few pages. (This kind of headlong, one-thing-after-another adventure might be best read as monthly issues.)
Jack comes across as less of an arrogant jerk in this volume; I’d found him hard to like in the first two books, but he’s growing on me now. As usual with characters like this, the more Willingham and Sturges keep him off-balance and scrambling, the more likeable and engaging he’ll be.
Oh, and that “connection” between [[[The Good Prince]]] and [[[The Bad Prince]]]? There’s one panel in Good Prince that “explains” the events of Bad Prince. It would be yet another example of those bad old red-sky crossovers if it weren’t for the fact that nearly everyone reading one title is reading the other as well.
Andrew Wheeler has been a publishing professional for nearly twenty years, with a long stint as a Senior Editor at the Science Fiction Book Club and a current position at John Wiley & Sons. He’s been reading comics for longer than he cares to mention, and maintains a personal, mostly book-oriented blog at antickmusings.blogspot.com.
Publishers who would like their books to be reviewed at ComicMix should contact ComicMix through the usual channels or email Andrew Wheeler directly at acwheele (at) optonline (dot) net.
