Fables 1: Legends in Exile

Fables 1 

By Bill Willingham, Lan Medina, Steve Leialoha and Craig Hamilton (Vertigo)
ISBN 1-84023-614-0

New York City holds many secrets. One of the most amazing is a quiet but distinguished block of streets where some very famous celebrities live very private lives. In fact it’s safe to say that the residents of Kipling Street, Bullfinch Street and especially the Woodland Luxury Apartments are all household names all over Earth.

The reason for their preferred anonymity is revealed in Legends in Exile. This brilliant modern fantasy tells how long ago, all the heroes, myths and legends of fairytales and stories sought refuge on our mundane Earth. In their own fantastic lands and kingdoms a mysterious and overwhelming Adversary had launched a war of conquest and was consuming their Realms. Via magic, the surviving story characters fled to Earth and have lived here as refugees ever since.

The story begins approximately five centuries later as Bigby Wolf, head of security for the Fabled Enclave in called in by Chief Operating Officer Snow White to solve the brutal murder of Snow’s wild child sister Rose Red, and he’s got to do it without alerting the ordinary humans – us Mundanes. I’m afraid that’s all the synopsis I’m willing to concede, as the whole point of this is to get you to read these things.

Fables starts brilliantly and just gets better. By transposing some of the reader’s earliest fictional experiences to a post-modern gritty milieu and by embedding the characters in modern genre set pieces such as murder-mysteries, soap-operas and political thrillers, Willingham and his brilliant artistic collaborators have produced a fantasy set to rival Sandman in terms of creativity, and sheer enjoyment.

© 2002 Bill Willingham & DC Comics. All rights reserved.

2 Replies to “Fables 1: Legends in Exile”

  1. Shelly

    Thanks for reading the blog, and assuming you are talking about the book and not my review, let’s just agree to disagree.

    At least we’re all reading comics and not wasting our lives drinking or playing computer games.

    Cheers

    Win

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