Fables

I want to know how many years this was in the works before they started publishing.  This is one of the best-planned, well-thought out series I have ever encountered.

The first eleven volumes (I think that makes the first 75 issues) were groundbreaking.  The Fables, from the Big Bad Wolf to Snow White, King Cole, the Gingerbread Witch, Boy Blue, Pinocchio, Rose Red, Sleeping Beauty, Beast, and seriously anybody you can think of, have made it into this epic fantasy.

The story begins with them living in New York in hiding.  They were driven from their own worlds centuries ago and are hiding out in the Mundy (our mundane world) to keep the Adversary from killing them all.

What’s beautiful about this series was how every character gets a chance to have the spotlight.  There are very few small characters that stay small, and many of the large characters get shrunken down to size.  At the start Bigby (the Big Bad Wolf and local sheriff) and Snow White (Deputy Mayor) seem to be the stars of the show.  They run Fabletown and have their respective paws and fingers in everything.  And then they have kids and settle into the background and get involved mostly in their own unsettling family affairs.  Flycatcher the Frog Prince is a lowly janitor for the longest time and then comes to rule a grand kingdom.

The politics are sound and in the end, the drama is tight, romances are real, and when the final warfare comes and they destroy the Adversary, I was cheering as much as I ever did for the final sequence of Lord of the Rings.

For a lot of stories, that’s a good run.  You conquer the unconquerable foe and yes, life goes on, but the troubles are never what they were then.

Fables has not taken that road.  They’ve gone the way of Sanderson’s Mistborn trilogy.  The first book is incredible; the heroes defeat a cruel and malicious god and free the people from a millennium-long oppression.  Then book two comes along and they found out that they’ve just made things worse.

We’re now in Act 2 of Fables and for every problem they solve they create two more.  Beloved characters die, there are promises that some families will break apart, tempers flare, and we’ve barely made it to Volume 17.

The three threads that interest me most are Bigby and Snow’s children, Rose Red becoming a paladin, and what happens to Oz now that Bufkin the Winged Monkey has been hanged.