1 out of 5

I don’t think that Paul Jenkins is a bad writer, or that Ramon Bachs is an ineffective artist.  And I don’t think that ‘Fiction Squad’ – though it pulls from a similar well as Fables or related stories – is a bad premise, I just think this is a misfire of execution.  Not a complete disaster, but that only makes it worse, as it’s just far enough off the mark to make it… well, one star.  It took me three reads to get through this first issue, which is (almost) always a bad sign.

So our page one setup: all those fictional stories you read are true, and exist in a world called (cough cough) Fablewood, which is split up into ‘the mystery realm,’ and ‘the romance realm’ and so on, with the lands of the Unknown home to ‘all the tales that are yet-to-be-told.  Our specific series is going to focus on Detective Frankie, who’s migrated from the crime realm – shamed out as a side character – to the children’s realm, home of most of the nursery rhymes with which we’re to be familiar to get the puns throughout the book.  Now I’m really not picking on the book just for hanging around in Fables territory: I’m aware that there have been many variations on the Fables theme (before and after that series began), and Jenkins apparently has already written of Fablewood in another series.  So that’s actually a good thing: the world and general concept should be established enough to just get a move on things.

We do, as we open with a crime: Humpty Dumpty being pushed off a wall.  ‘Every nursery rhyme is a crime scene.’  It was a good start.  But in the next couple pages, well, Humpty Dumpty is alive.  So I’m not quite clear on why it’s treated like it’s a murder scene.  Jenkins tries to up the mystery by making frequent references to ‘the Madonnas’ as being involved – the Madonnas apparently being the big crime family in town (or whatever) – but the presentation gets filed into the same unevenness as Humpty’s “accident”: treated like a big deal but it doesn’t feel like a big deal.  Same thing as when Frankie tells us about leaving the crime realm: “Throwaway stories like mine never get a sequel, so I crossed the genre border…”  Cute, but it just doesn’t sell it.  A ‘dark past’ is tossed off in one line.  You can see the idea is to blend noir with nursery, but… okay, yeah, Fables did that much better in its first arc because it was willing to get its hands a little dirtier.  If this was, actually, a kids book, I’d think the light-heartedness could get a pass, but it’s not on Boom! Kids, and it really does feel like Paul is trying to write it for big boys.

Here are the further two conceits that really dragged it down for me:

Some of the puns and references are fun.  But something kept nagging.  We’re told that this is the realm of fiction, with untold stories in another land.  And yet… every pun and reference presents these characters’ stories (Humpty, Jack and Jill’s tumble) as having happened for the first time.  And that doesn’t compute.  These stories are already known, and yet we’re acting like they’re unknown.  Which slots this book even more firmly into ‘hook’ territory (writing around an idea instead of writing a story), which I admittedly loathe.

…And the art.  Bachs has a fine cartoonist’s style.  This would work well animated.  But on the page?  Boring.  No one especially stands out, and though he nails the over-expressiveness of cartoon emotions, actual motion on the page doesn’t really happen.  Some mood could’ve been added with heavier shadows, or more dynamic coloring, which falls on colorist Lenoardo Paciarotti, who chooses the most inoffensive and bland range of lukewarm colors for every page.

Not horrible.  Just offensively not amusing (to read or to look at) for its premise.