Fables 3: Storybook Love

Fables 3: Storybook Love

By Bill Willingham, Mark Buckingham, Lan Medina, Bryan Talbot, Linda Medley, Steve Leialoha and Craig Hamilton (Vertigo)
ISBN 1-84023-857-7

Fables is probably one of the most fetching takes on narrative in the last twenty years. Bill Willingham has created a universe that appeals to the most childlike reminiscences of the most jaded adult palate.

Volume 3 reprints Fables issues #11-18 of the award winning monthly comic from DC’s adult imprint Vertigo, a sequence of single and short storylines used to flesh out the various characters prior to a big epic beginning with #19.

Bryan Talbot illustrates a tale of Jack (Giant Killer, Beanstalk etc), a vagabond rogue who literally gambles with Death (that’s actually a pun, but you’ll need to read it to see what I mean). Bigby Wolf takes centre stage for the next tale, ‘Dirty Business’, to handle the invasive probings of a Mundane reporter trying to expose the secrets of the fairytale enclave in the heart of New York City. This tale also serves to set up the eponymous ‘Storybook Love’ wherein Bluebeard, one of the most evil characters in bedtime stories, and even more of a ratbag in the Mundane world, begins his long hinted play for the top spot.

We’re introduced to the Mouse Police as Bigby Wolf and Snow White – the CEO of Fabletown – are shanghaied and set up to be murdered. Naturally they aren’t, but the byplay between the two characters will lead directly into the tumultuous events of the next year or so.

The volume is rounded out by a seemingly inconsequential piece of fluff drawn by Linda Medley which could quite easily be the pivotal point of the series as it recounts some of the history of the Fables characters when they first arrived in our realm and how they began to change from the one-dimensional archetypes they were to the cruel, callous, brave, gritty, head-bitten ordinary human beings they so often resemble.

Willingham’s Fables is a captivating exercise in how comics can reinvent and reinvigorate even the most clichéd and played-out old yarns and make them fresh for both comic reading veterans and the shallowest neophyte dragged kicking and screaming into a comic book shop. Hell, even your girlfriend would like it.

© 2003 Bill Willingham & DC Comics. All rights reserved.