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...

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...