Jack of Fables volume 1: The (Nearly) Great Escape


By Bill Willingham, Matthew Sturges, Tony Akins & Andrew Pepoy (Vertigo)
ISBN13: 978-1-84576-451-7

Fables are refugee fairytale, storybook and legendary characters that fled to our mundane Earth from their various mythic realms to escape conquest by a mysterious and unbeatable Adversary. Keeping their true nature hidden from humanity they have created enclaves where their immortality, magic and sheer strangeness (such as the talking animals sequestered on a remote farm in upstate New York) do not threaten the life of uneasy luxury they have built for themselves. Many of these immortals wander the human world, but always under an injunction not to draw attention to themselves.

In Fables: Homelands (ISBN: 1-84576-124-3) the completely amoral Jack of the Tales (everyman hero of Beanstalk, Giant-killer, Frost fame) does just that by stealing Fabletown funds and becoming a movie producer, creating the three most popular fantasy films of all time.

Subject? Himself, of course.

An underlying theme of the series is that the more “mundies” (that’s mundane humans like you and me… well, you anyway) who think about a fable character, the stronger that character becomes. Books TV, songs, all feed their vitality. There must be something to it as this first volume collects issues #1-5 of Jack’s own comic, a series crafted much more with broad, adult, cynical humour as the driving force.

Discovered by the Fable Police, Jack was banished from Hollywood and ordered to disappear. Circumstance soon came to his aid – as it always does – when he is captured by the forces of Mr. Revise – an outlandish metaphysical martinet who has been “vanishing” Fables for centuries. With his beige, white-bread, matter-of-fact minions his self-appointed task is to contain these conceptual creatures, bowdlerising their life-stories until they become innocuous, forgotten and eventually Mundane…

Jack, however, is no ordinary Fable. Charming, cunning, totally self-absorbed and utterly ruthless he quickly makes many friends in the rest home-like gulag of fantastic creatures where he is imprisoned. He plans to escape – no matter how many of his fellow inmates he has to sacrifice to do it…

Playful, saucy, self-referential and wildly funny – with a few dark corners and sharp edges to keep the pulses pounding – this is a delightful whimsy for unshockable grown-ups who love stories. This is a perfect book for newcomers and jaded fantasists alike.

© 2006, 2007 Bill Willingham and DC Comics. All Rights Reserved.