FABLES #1

It's "no more happily ever after" for these fairytale characters

By Tony Whitt     May 18, 2002

There's a commonly held belief that all legends have a grain of truth to them, and what's more legendary than the fairy tales and fables we grew up with as children? Bill Willingham has taken that ball and runs with it in this new Vertigo series, a series which promises to be a sleeper hit.

Snow White is the deputy mayor of Fabletown, the loosely-knit community of people whose lives we already know about. She's overworked and underpaid as she tries to provide services for a group of former fairytale characters who are living in the modern world and down on their luck. Bad enough that her ex-husband Prince Charming is back in town, using his masculine wiles to get whatever he wants. But even worse, her sister Rose Red has gone missing, leaving behind a trashed and blood-splattered apartment with the words "No More Happily Ever After" scrawled on the wall. Could Rose's boyfriend Jack (of beanstalk fame) be the culprit?

For a Vertigo series, FABLES is remarkable for its restraint in this first issue. Willingham is more interested in getting as much of the backstory out of the way as possible, a goal achieved through an ingenious and hilarious scene in which Snow has to explain to Beauty and the Beast exactly why she can't help them out with their marital problems. It doesn't rely on the same sort of verbal shock tactics that other such books do - the "F" word, for instance, appears exactly once. Even the splash page (no pun intended) of the scene of the crime is tastefully done. Willingham also masterfully subverts our expectations for these characters and plays them against type: Snow White is a bit of bitch - no, make that a major bitch. Prince Charming is a womanizing freeloader; the Big Bad Wolf now heads up the Fabletown Security Office and looks for all the world like a beleaguered police detective; Rose Red has become the original party girl. In each instance, the characters act completely different from what we've always known about them, and yet Willingham's versions make perfect sense.

I have only one gripe with this title, and that's with Lan Medina and Steve Leialoha's artwork. It's not that the artwork is bad - far from it. The artists provide some of the most clean and simple images that a Vertigo series has ever seen. Perhaps that's the problem - it's almost too clean and simple. Snow White, Beauty, and Prince Charming look more like types from an early '70s romance comic without a great deal to distinguish them from anyone else. The most impressive backgrounds in the book are the ones which allow the artists to let themselves go with the detail work - Snow White's office and the aforementioned splatterfest that is Rose Red's apartment - but they're not given nearly enough opportunity. Of course, with a premise like this, it could've been all too easy to choose an artistic team that would've provided over-the-top artwork, which would completely spoil the book rather than creating such minor flaws. Let's put it this way: if this is the only problem this book will ever have, it's one we can easily live with. The story Willingham has set up is instantly compelling, more than enough to make us come back each month to see if the characters ever do make it to "happy ever after."