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Willingham, Bill - Fables: Storybook Love
I am officially in love with this comic now. I liked it a whole lot before, but this one had me smiling and laughing and generally having a wonderful time.
Fables actually reminds me a bit of Sandman, except at this point, it's not quite as broad or as deep. They both have stories at the center, but while Sandman takes everyday life and makes it mythic, Fables takes the mythic and makes it everyday.
This collection is actually framed by two sort-of fairy tales -- the first one is a story of Jack in the Confederate South, and as Willingham puts it, "This story was freely adapted from a couple of the Mountain Jack Tales of American Folklore. In true oral tradition, it's been much altered under my care, which is a polite way of saying that I stole everything I thought I could use, changed a bunch of stuff to suit my whims, and made up the rest." The second is a story of what happens when Thumbelina is the only thumb-sized girl in a city of Lilliputians tale.
Then there's a two-parter, which leads to Storybook Love (actually only four issues). For Who Killed Rose Red? and Animal Farm, I liked the Fables characters, particularly Bigby (the Big Bad Wolf in human form) and Snow White, but now I've just fallen completely for them. Most of the characters are more caricature than character in the beginning books, funny sketches of what fairy tale characters would be like in the real world if they were immortal, but Willingham's started to really make them his own characters by the middle of the second book. There's an interesting mix of ruthlessness and goodness in them, and while the world is by no means warm and fuzzy, Willingham isn't nearly as bleak as Alan Moore can be. And I like how the threads of plot from the first two books tie in and the continuity in general. I'm a sucker for continuity and slow world-building, which is why I like long series and TV shows.
And Bigby and Snow are so cute! I particularly love Snow White and her practical, business-minded self, and Bigby is much in the tradition of Wolverine.
While the first two books of Fables were really good, to me, this one started really opening up the world for side things, like the new folktales, and I'm particularly looking forward to more stories from the Homeland. I really like how the structure of the Fables world supports this, which is what reminded me the most of Sandman. Hellboy's sort of got the same appeal in terms of short stories, but Hellboy's overriding arcs are pretty messy and the characterization isn't quite as neatly drawn.
Sigh. Now I really want to start buying the issues monthly, which is not at all practical.
Oh, also, there are rodent deaths in Storybook Love. Somehow I doubt anyone else on my FL is quite as squeamish about this as me (what with the pet mice and rats), but I sniffled.
Fables actually reminds me a bit of Sandman, except at this point, it's not quite as broad or as deep. They both have stories at the center, but while Sandman takes everyday life and makes it mythic, Fables takes the mythic and makes it everyday.
This collection is actually framed by two sort-of fairy tales -- the first one is a story of Jack in the Confederate South, and as Willingham puts it, "This story was freely adapted from a couple of the Mountain Jack Tales of American Folklore. In true oral tradition, it's been much altered under my care, which is a polite way of saying that I stole everything I thought I could use, changed a bunch of stuff to suit my whims, and made up the rest." The second is a story of what happens when Thumbelina is the only thumb-sized girl in a city of Lilliputians tale.
Then there's a two-parter, which leads to Storybook Love (actually only four issues). For Who Killed Rose Red? and Animal Farm, I liked the Fables characters, particularly Bigby (the Big Bad Wolf in human form) and Snow White, but now I've just fallen completely for them. Most of the characters are more caricature than character in the beginning books, funny sketches of what fairy tale characters would be like in the real world if they were immortal, but Willingham's started to really make them his own characters by the middle of the second book. There's an interesting mix of ruthlessness and goodness in them, and while the world is by no means warm and fuzzy, Willingham isn't nearly as bleak as Alan Moore can be. And I like how the threads of plot from the first two books tie in and the continuity in general. I'm a sucker for continuity and slow world-building, which is why I like long series and TV shows.
And Bigby and Snow are so cute! I particularly love Snow White and her practical, business-minded self, and Bigby is much in the tradition of Wolverine.
While the first two books of Fables were really good, to me, this one started really opening up the world for side things, like the new folktales, and I'm particularly looking forward to more stories from the Homeland. I really like how the structure of the Fables world supports this, which is what reminded me the most of Sandman. Hellboy's sort of got the same appeal in terms of short stories, but Hellboy's overriding arcs are pretty messy and the characterization isn't quite as neatly drawn.
Sigh. Now I really want to start buying the issues monthly, which is not at all practical.
Oh, also, there are rodent deaths in Storybook Love. Somehow I doubt anyone else on my FL is quite as squeamish about this as me (what with the pet mice and rats), but I sniffled.
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Willingham isn't nearly as bleak as Alan Moore can be
d00d, I think Alan Moore would depress Poe.
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Gah, I admire Moore, but I can only take so much of him at a time.
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I bought From Hell after seeing the movie and read it about in a day and a half. There should be a cautionary sticker warning against doing this.
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Gah! I never even finished that one! I think I watched the movie right before dinner, which was a horrible, horrible idea... no appetite for days. Have you read Watchmen? It was a great look at superhero comics, but oh so dark.
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I love Watchmen, but there's a limit to how often I can read it -- the entire nested story of the guy stranded on a desert island freaks me out every single time.
My first "grown-up" comic was probably... hrm, Dark Knight Returns, back in ninth grade. Found Sandman in 11th, and there was no turning back ;).
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Ya know, I remember watching the Dark Knight half-hour television shows and thinking some of them were pretty good, or the art was, at least....the one that was kinda edgy, and then it got yanked off and redone or something....one about the Gray Ghost was fairly cool, although that's really about all I remember of that series (except for one where they're stuck in some whack amusement park and Batman reprograms the Fickle Flying Finger of Fate, or something).
Wow! unable to remember my own zip code yesterday, yet the neurons were still holding onto all that. Brain keeps what Brain wants, apparently.
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I think I must be one of those weird exceptions to that rule! I've always been interested in comics -- my sister and I used to watch that 60's Batman show when I was 6 or 7, and we'd act it out (I got to be Catwoman). I borrowed The Greatest Batman Stories Ever Told sometime in middle school and glommed on that obsessively (I was so surprised in junior year when I found out Dick Grayson was no longer Robin). I remember looking on jealously in 9th grade while all the guys in the class traded graphic novels, and I finally asked one of them if I could borrow theirs (ended up reading Dark Phoenix Saga, Dark Knight Returns, Infinity Gauntlet, Death of Superman).
The really funny thing is that my boyfriend has zero knowledge of comics, with the exception of Tintin. I nearly dropped dead with laughter the day I discovered he had no idea who Bruce Wayne was. So I'm the one dragging us to all the comic book movies ^_^.
"Database temporarily unavailable" my fanny
Aww, that's cute. Dark Phoenix is X-Men, right? I vaguely remember that animated series (OK, sometimes I still like cartoons on Saturday mornings). I remember Evil Willow got a "Dark Phoenix time" reference in the script....
The really funny thing is that my boyfriend has zero knowledge of comics, with the exception of Tintin. I nearly dropped dead with laughter the day I discovered he had no idea who Bruce Wayne was.
HEH. Tim's not that bad, butyeah, he really doesn't know comics either -- I think he was a little nonplussed once when I got a lot of Neil Gaiman books all at once. I think he was into comics when he was a kid, but it really didn't stick.
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Plus the fact that it strikes me as one of the rarish explicitly conservative-oriented fantasy universes - voluntary taxation, heavy "my old man got on his bike and looked for work" attitude, sneering at liberal attitudes to crime as denying personal repsonsibility. And the air of self-conscious moral brutalism that tends to come out of modern American conservatism. And the fact that the only left-wing character is a power-hungry, hypocritical villain into bestiality.
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I actually didn't pick up on the conservative orientation, and I already returned it to the library! Doh. I'm going to have to reread them again now with this in mind.
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And this series? sounds really good. Thanks.
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The series is good ^_^. KdS is much less enthusiastic and think Willingham's characters are on the ruthless side though, fyi.
But I've just gone and bought all of them off Amazon, hee hee.