3 out of 5

Well, I hated it, I stuck with it, I enjoyed it, I felt ambivalent toward it, I hated it in retrospect, I hated it upon re-reading it… and then it wasn’t bad.

I read past issue 50 of Fables.  By 10 or 20 issues, I can’t remember.  And I picked up the first arc or two of Jack of Fables.  At some point it just dawned on me that I didn’t really care what happened in the next issue.  Willingham came up with a wonderful concept that has a built in richness to it providing potential story springboards for a million more issues, so it’s fitting that it seems to follow that Sandmanish template of half-in half-out mythology that people can get behind, and that both books have the potential to attract similar readers…  It’s very low cost reading without the unappealing ‘uncoolness’ of a leotarded Superman and Batman on the cover.  Nie, instead you get that nifty ‘Vertigo’ label that proclaims you as a reading champ of ‘different’ books.

Let’s get a couple things out of the way: I don’t think Willingham is a great comic book writer.  A lot of his storylines are tied up by cop-outs disguised as clever sidestepping, and I swear to Christmas the man has never learned how to section things off properly into issue to issue conclusions, often stopping way too early or way too late before or after a ‘last panel’ to make a reader (or maybe just me) intrigued for the next issue.  You could say that this is favorable, someone not writing just for the cliffhanger, but it’s part of the nature of comics to give us that lil’ something at page end, or at the very least to be mindful of page limits when you’re structuring your story.  Not every movie can be ninety hours long or every book 2,000 pages – these limitations exist, and though we can make a lot of progress by stretching those limitations, or setting down our own rules, consistently having ho-hum conclusions to your books isn’t really a ground-breaking technique to me so much as it is an inability to pace yourself.  Bill also has an annoying habit of having characters re-state things issue to issue to characters or groups who just heard them, a really uncomfortably stupid way of re-capping for new audiences that is an old school comic book move and feels really ridiculous for the era in which Fables was and is written.

That being said, beyond the frustratingly pointless opening story that REALLY doesn’t make a lick of god damn sense and then the annoyingly clever following story which reeks of “wouldn’t it be clever if…” logic, Fables does develop into a fun book, with really excellent art from Mark Buckingham that evolves into a truly fascinating storybook pastiche (…for a while, until it, like the book, settles into itself a bit too much and suddenly it feels less and less ‘special’ and more like an expected calling card for the series…).  I would not have stuck with the series beyond those first two stories if not for praise from fellow comic fans, and I would not have continued reading it for as long as I did if not for that same circulating praise sort of automatically convincing me that what I was reading was gold (similar to Elephantmen, to which I also one day ‘awoke’ and realized I felt no connection to it).  Once his main story beats are out of the way (by about issue 30), Bill pitches around for how to follow it, until realizing that he can just mine the world of fables endlessly, because isn’t fantasy fun…

I criticize because of how easy he makes it seem.  There’s certainly tons of research here – the book, BY THE WAY NINE THOUSAND WORDS LATER – proposes that all those storybook characters we know and, uh, love, like Snow White and Prince Charming, are, in fact, real, and live in a private community in New York called Fabletown, and are immortal, and were chased from their homelands of fiction by ‘The Adversary,’ and have various adventures here in the real world that tie back to their source material and la dee da and so on.  It’s cute.  It’s cute, it’s cute, it’s cute.  I suppose if I had endless comic book cash flow, I could still be reading Fables.  It’s harmless.  But… I don’t.

And I don’t know what else to say.  I cut the run to issue 50 because I feel that post that, the book takes a definitive turn toward ‘syndication’ style storytelling, sorta like Hellblazer or Spider-Man or any other forever book.  If you’re a fan, you’re happy as shit to continue reading for always.  Casually, some of us may pick up an issue or two if we read about something interesting going in.  But overall, that world is never going to change so much, so thrifty readers can safely pass the book by on the shelf, assured that they’re only missing some entertainment.  Girls will like it though.  Girls with boobs.  And butts.