From 2002- 2015, DC Comics’ Vertigo imprint published Fables, a 150-issue, Eisner Award-winning series written by Bill Willingham that followed the adventures of and relationships among well-known characters from fairy tales, folklore and, well, fables.
Many of these individuals, known collectively as “Fables”, have lived for centuries in a community called Fabletown, located on Bullfinch Street in New York City and protected from discovery by various magical spells. Long ago, these Fables fled from their disparate Homelands to our mundane (“Mundy”) world to escape “The Adversary”, who had conquered the Homelands and enslaved anyone remaining.
By the time the series came to an end, the identity of the Adversary had long since been revealed. I’m not going to reveal it here, however. People who’ve read Fables already know the answer, while those who plan to read it should have the opportunity to find out in the pages of the story.
And those who plan to read Fables but don’t care about such spoilers can learn the Adversary’s identity elsewhere on the Internet.
In the first storyline, Jack of the Tales (who is basically any fairy tale or fable character named Jack) bursts into the office of Fabletown Sheriff Bigby (as in Big Bad) Wolf with news that Snow White’s estranged sister, Rose Red, has been the victim of a violent crime. Bigby visits Rose Red’s apartment, along with Jack and Snow White, and finds blood splattered everywhere. With assistance from Flycatcher (AKA the Frog Prince) and Boy Blue, he investigates whether Rose Red is dead and if so, who murdered her.
Bigby Wolf and Snow White discuss the case.
The Snow White in the fairy tale of Snow White and Rose Red is a different person than the one in the story Walt Disney adopted as Snow White and the Seven Dwarves in 1937 (that latter story is titled “Snowdrop” in Sixty Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm), but Willingham conflated the two unrelated Snows into one person, just as Jack is all the “Jack” characters and Frau Totenkinder is all the unnamed witches.
In Fables Snow White’s experiences with the dwarves were much more harrowing than in the Disney version. She eventually got her revenge.
When the series opens, Snow White is deputy mayor of Fabletown (King Cole is mayor) and Boy Blue works for her. In the first storyline, we’re also introduced to Beauty (who’ll later succeed Snow White as deputy mayor) and the Beast (who’ll later succeed Bigby as sheriff); Bluebeard; Cinderella (whom we later learn is an adept espionage agent); Prince Charming; Bufkin, a flying money from Oz, and Pinocchio, among others.
Pinocchio, Flycatcher and Boy Blue, we later learn, are good friends who enjoy hanging out together and buying comics every week.
Those Fables who are not human in appearance or unable to adopt human form live on a farm in upstate New York. Not all of them like having to live there.
Bigby and Colin the Pig.
The second storyline concerns a revolution at the farm, with Goldilocks, who’s depicted as a political extremist, playing a key role among the revolutionaries.
Other storylines deal with Boy Blue’s incursion into the Homelands to assassinate the Adversary (whose identity is subsequently revealed); meetings with a delegation of Arabian Fables to discuss an alliance against the Adversary, alliances with the Cloud Kingdoms; the toll the war against the Adversary extracted on Fabletown as a community and on individual Fables; a power struggle between Totenkinder and Ozma of Oz and Bufkin’s adventures in Oz and elsewhere after he leaves Fabletown, to mention just a few.
There are also storylines of a more personal nature. Bigby and Snow White fall in love and start a family. Their seven children factor in several storylines. In the storyline “Cubs in Toyland”, when Therese Wolf is lured to a barren land occupied by broken toys— in more ways than one — who need a queen, her brother Dare sets out to rescue her. But saving her requires a sacrifice.
Dare’s sacrifice.
Because Dare’s bloodline is magical, his sacrifice restores the land.
Therese’s realization.
In the “Inherit the Wind” storyline, Another of the cubs succeeds Bigby’s father as the embodiment of the North Wind (from whom Bigby got his facility with huffing and puffing and blowing houses down).
The final battle against the Adversary took place in issue #75 and while various individual storylines continued beyond that point, the “big picture” plot subsequently shifted to threats that had previously been kept at bay. Some of these threats would prove worse than the Adversary in many ways, for they’d strike at the heart of Fabletown— both the physical place itself and the community that lived there.
Throughout the series, Snow White remains one of the primary leaders of Fabletown, wielding power on many levels. When a slain Bigby is restored to life in a more monstrous incarnation, Snow makes it clear she’ll end him if he makes a move toward their cubs.
Snow confronts Bigby.
And when a prince from her youth (long before she met Prince Charming) returns, claiming to be her true husband because of her childhood agreement to marry him, and that her children must die as abominations, Snow makes her displeasure abundantly clear.
Snow skewers Brandish.
Brandish, the prince in question, is from the fairy tale of Snow White and Rose Red, again merging the two Snow White characters into one.
While Snow White and Bigby Wolf are important characters in Fables not every storyline concerns them or those related to them. In “The Good Prince”, for example, we learn Flycatcher’s story and how he’d come to establish a kingdom of his own called Haven, with help from the ghost of Sir Lancelot.
Lancelot knights the Frog Prince.
If you’re interested in fables, fairy tales, folklore, mythology and the like, Fables is worth checking out. The whole series has been collected in 22 trade paperbacks.
Copyright 2018 Patrick Keating.
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