Fables: The Tales

About 80 issues of Fables have been released, and so much has changed from its humble beginnings. The series began by telling short stories about how the Fables were coping with living in the mundane world. The first few arcs each took on different genres and gave them a unique spin; the very first was a murder mystery, which perplexed a few of the characters because Fables are almost immortal. In addition to being a good story, it effectively set up characters like Bigby Wolf (the Fabletown sheriff), Snow White (the deputy mayor), and Jack of the Tales (a con man). We learned that Bigby is a gruff guy with demons in his past (he is trying to atone for all the harm he did as the Big Bad Wolf) and uncanny detective skills. Snow White is a bit of an ice queen who is willing to set aside her own desires for the greater good of protecting Fabletown. But the story also effectively sets up some of the "rules" of the Fables universe by incorporating them into the mystery.

As I said, Fables are very hard to kill because their strength and fortitude are based on their popularity with the mundies. Someone like Snow White or Cinderella would be nearly impossible to kill because of everything Disney has done for them. Kai, of Hans Christian Anderson's The Snow Queen, on the other hand, may not have it so easy because his story isn't as well known (I am not saying it is obscure, but I'm willing to bet that more people know of Snow White than Kai). Throughout the investigation, Bigby takes the reader to various places in Fabletown, where we see how different characters live. Most are rather poor and have to hold jobs in the mundy world. Some, like Bluebeard (not the pirate), escaped with their fortunes and are able to live fairly comfortably by buying magic glamours to disguise the more fantastic elements of their lifestyles.

The second story goes to the Farm to show the attitude of the Fables who live there. The Farm is almost a prison because none of the residents can ever leave, and it serves as a penal colony for human Fables who break rules; Jack has had to spend many years on the Farm doing hard labor to pay for his crimes against Fabletown. The next story showed how far the Fables are willing to go to protect their identities when a nosy reporter thought he discovered their secret (he was wrong, but the Fables didn't want any more attention on them than necessary).

These early stories were certainly good reads; they took interesting characters and allowed them to bend the normal rules of the genres they emulated. Having access to magic made various aspects of their lives and jobs easier, but it also comes with responsibilities that we don't have. Magic is not the quick fix that many children's stories portray it as, and high prices often come with using it.

But after these early stories, a much grander story started to emerge. The Eisner Award-winning "March of the Wooden Soldiers" (which remains my favorite arc of the entire series, even though many things that have come after it have been of equal quality) warned the Fables that the Adversary was beginning to set his sights on Fabletown and the mundane world. A group of the Adversary's psychopathic wooden soldiers showed up in New York to wage war on Fabletown. Fortunately for our characters, the Adversary made the classic mistake of underestimating his small band of opponents and did not anticipate a strong resistance. After the failed initial takeover, each side began preparing for war, with the Adversary amassing his grand armies and the Fables using what little fable power and any mundane abilities they could muster.

It was at this point that the juxtaposition of the fantastic and mundane really began to matter, because the Adversary wrote off the usefulness of mundy technology. He saw it as primitive compared to magic spells, enchanted war tools, and fantastic creatures. However, in the Fables' centuries in New York, they learned that not everything in the mundane world was so mundane.

Up next: Figuring it out...