The Edge of the Internet

Robert who I address as the Burning Scorpion here showed up at coffee on Wednesday night, much to my delighted surprise. He and I are crack to each other we feast on shared thoughts brought about by the gestalt formed by the love we have for comic books. Playfully we run rampant around the comic book universes pissing on parts of them to mark territory to hem in the others wit. It’s all rapid-fire sentences and cryptic phrases that left Derek and Shafik staring in the dust as our minds raced.

He is building a website to post his thoughts on, he has asked me to supply content. He brought me homework. I was giddy before I slept, that might have just been the cold sneaking its polluted way through the gears of my mind though. I’m to read the first two trade paperbacks of Fables by Bill Willingham.

This is the article I wrote. I need my friends to read it and be brutal in their critism. I need to know if this works, is imformative, or is crap. Don't spare my feelings I need the truth this time.

Fables: Legends in Exile and Animal Farm

I’m a sucker for stories that take existing characters and reinvent them, or use them in new situations. Sometimes this works out, most times it’s a gimmick that runs thin quickly. Bill Willingham tried his hands at reinventing the Holy Grail of a character cast. He took the fairy tales we had read to us as kids then had rammed into our minds by that theme park company, you know the one over there in Orlando, that’s right the one supposedly with its founder in cryogenic frozen suspension.

Anyways. Here’s a couple story arcs about a world where the fables of our childhood live in exile in New York city their homelands having been taken over by a creature know as the Adversary. What’s a fairy tale to do when pushed in the cold reality of our mundane world, why set up a government in exile under Good King Coal with Snow White as the principle administrator of course. Has the idea run thin on you yet? It only took two issues into the first collection for me, but that was okay because by then I had forgiven the kitsch value of the idea and was impressed by the subtle characterization Willingham was portraying. Snow White and her sister estranged because Red Rose had had an adulterous affair with Snow’s hubby Prince Charming. The big bad wolf was now Fable town’s sheriff and Snow’s principle enforcer. No shrinking violet our Snow either, she might be a bit naïve and dare I say it stuck in a storybook mentality, but when push comes to shove she’s a cagey bird.

So the characters are good and it’s obvious that Willingham and the first arc’s artists, Lan Medina, Steve Leialoha, and Craig Hamilton are having fun playing with them. Turning them on their ears and making them more ‘human’ with our mundane foibles while still keeping true to the elements of character found in the fables but is the first story a good read?

Not really. It’s a classic bit of detective fiction so much so that Bigby Wolf even comments on the fact within the narrative. It plods along with the expected outcome showing up in the last issue, but I found that I wasn’t reading the book for the central story instead I was reading to see what the characters were doing in the background. The artists drew and inked a pretty world, its not artistically ground breaking but it does transport you to where you need to go. There are some genuinely funny moments caused by who the characters are in relation to each other that had me chuckling as I turned the pages.

Then I read Animal Farm, the second collected story arc and smiled. Where Legends in Exile was okay, this was fantastic. Here you get to see the flip side of the Fable community in exile. Here was the hidden farm where the fables that don’t look human where hidden away and not to happy about it. How can you not enjoy a story of Revolution where the Three Little Pigs and Goldilocks are the ring leaders? I will not be a party to spoilers, that would be unfair to you, my dearest readers, but suffice to say it is worth picking these two trades up if for nothing more then a giggle at seeing old bedtime characters come to life in a way that will make you remember those days past fondly. When was the last time you thought about the Little Boy Blue and the difficult task he has as Snow White’s secretary? And I know you’re interested in finding out what Jack the giant killer has been up to. Did I mention that Goldilocks is sleeping with baby bear?