Fables: A New Look At Old Tales

Bill Willingham's Fables is the story of the fairy tale characters we read about growing up (or I guess it would be more accurate to say we watched their Disneyfied stories growing up) populating a small village in New York City. For centuries, characters like Snow White, her sister Rose Red, Prince Charming, Beauty, the Beast, and Pinnochio have lived in our "mundane" world after they were forced to flee from their Homelands by a despotic dictator. Known only as The Adversary, he raised an army of vicious mythical creatures like goblins, trolls, and dragons, as well as a group of highly trained animate wooden soldiers and began taking over the various lands of the different stories. Many parallels are made to Hitler and World War II, such as when, on the annual remembrance day, King Cole, the mayor of Fabletown (one of the two homes for the refugee Fables) reminds them all that the takeover is partly their own fault. When the first few lands started to fall to The Adversary (including Narnia), most people in other lands paid no attention because their own lands were safe for the time being.

The Fables have been forced to live out their immortal lives either in Fabletown or the Farm in upstate New York. The Fables believe that discovery by normal humans (referred to as mundies, short for mundane) would be catastrophic, and any Fable that cannot pass for human (including giants, tiny people, and sentient animals) is required to live at the Farm. The earliest exiled Fables arrived in Fabletown around the time the American colonies were being settled, so by the time the series begins, they are all well-acquainted with the mundy world. The first few stories are about various goings-on in Fabletown and at the Farm. So why is this series worth reading if it is just about Sleeping Beauty and Little Boy Blue in the real world? Well, partly because these characters are more "real" than they'd like to admit.

Most of us are only acquainted with the Disney versions of these characters, so it is quite a shock to see Prince Charming as a womanizer or Jack Horner (who is the embodiment of nearly every Jack from fairy tales) as a con man. Pinnochio, who has been alive for centuries, has mentally aged into a grown man, but retains the body of a child. And the Frog Prince... um, better leave that one unspoiled. These characters are much closer to who they were when they were originally conceived; the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Anderson had much darker characters in their stories than Disney wants us to remember, and the characters of Fables are a breath of fresh air for those of us who know that fairy tales are not only for kids (see: the works of Neil Gaiman and Guillermo del Toro).

The stories in Fables are based on real life problems, such as Bigby Wolf (the Big Bad Wolf) trying to solve a murder, or Prince Charming running for Mayor, but there are two things that complicate matters. First, magic and immortality play a role (characters that are popular are harder to kill than more obscure characters, so a murdered Fable can be resurrected if there is a resurgence in their popluartiy in the mundane world), and second, the Fables must do everything in such a way so as not to be discovered by the rest of the world.

There is also the conflict in the Homelands that becomes an issue in later issues, which certainly makes the second problem listed above hard to achieve.

Up next: the tale...