Opinion

Fables

Writer: Bill Willingham
Artists: Lan Medina and Steve Leialoha
Published by DC/Vertigo

Fabletown is a hidden world existing alongside our own - a world populated by all the characters that used to occupy fairy tales. Bigby Wolf is a one-man police force for the Fable community, dealing with such crime as occurs and keeping things hidden from the regular population. Suddenly, though, a bigger case than he could imagine arises, when Rose Red, the sister of the Fable Community leader Snow White disappears, leaving a blood-stained room behind her.

I've never understood why Bill Willingham isn't a much bigger name than he is. Years ago he created a series called The Elementals that I absolutely loved (showing my age), and since then, he's mostly worked with other people's properties. Fables could be his next big thing. The creative concept is very well-developed, even in just a couple of issues, and the characters in this opening arc are all making me want to see more.

The plan at the moment is for each story arc to be drawn by different artists, a model that worked very well for the seminal Vertigo book The Sandman, and one that could be very beneficial to this series, especially if, as seems likely, each arc features different characters.

The most interesting thing about the series' concept, though, is that the fables are not entirely separated from the 'mundanes', resulting in the brilliant sequence in which Prince Charming meets, sleeps with and then charms a regular woman into putting him up, doing his laundry, suggesting that other fables might carry some extra-human abilities with them (indeed, Bigby's sense of smell is established as being more wolf-like than himan too). Additionally, significant hints about 'The Exile' which led to the Fables' current situation make the series' backstory extremely intriguing too.

The art on this opening arc is handled by Medina and Leialoha. I'm not familiar with the former, but his work on these episodes has been very effective, especially in creating quirky intersections between the mundane and Fable worlds. Leialoha, on the other hand, I've been a fan of for years, as both penciller and inker, and his style here is quite different from what I'm used to from him, being rather more traditional, but still highly effective.

Fables doesn't yet appear quite to be in the ground-breaking mould of some past (or indeed present) Vertigo series, but it does have great promise, and I certainly have enough faith in Willingham's track record to give it my attention over the coming months.