Jack of Fables

Kind of an interesting start for this series.  Jack of the Tales is the rogue character in the early part of Fables; he’s the Jack who climbed the beanstalk and any fable or nursery rhyme with “Jack” in it refers to him.

After his last major crime in Fables, Jack was exiled and given his own comic strip (what a punishment.)

Now, the thing about Jack of Fables is that it is a comedy.  Unlike Fables, with its sense of epic scope and fully-fleshed characters, Jack of Fables creates its own epic story and makes fun of it.  The enemy is a group called the Literals, which are literally literary terms embodied.

How best to describe this?  In one chapter, all the genres are gathered to determine the fate of the world.  Seriously, physical representations of Horror, Mystery, Fantasy, Comedy, Western, Science-Fiction, etc. gather to see how to obliterate the world and make a new one.  It’s crazy.  And you get to meet all sorts of characters, from Gary the Pathetic Fallacy, Dex the Deus ex Machina, Censorship, and a host of others.

Silly, and yet there’s still strong storytelling behind it.  The best way to mock the epic format is to do a good job depicting it.  Despite how compelling the series was, it’s too bad that nobody was likeable.  Not one single character.

Jack may have charm, but he’s also a selfish, greedy philanderer who has no end to his own depravity.  His son Jack Frost, while not the rogue his father is, ended up boring.  Gary was a spineless twit.  The Page Sisters were as mean and greedy as Jack.

And several of the repeated jokes were awful.  What was with the Blue Ox pages?  That was a gag that was easy to skip every issue.

This marks the first time I have been completely okay with everybody dying at the end.  In a lot of ways, there’s no other way it could finish, with all of these characters being as vile as they were.  I guess that would make this series a tragedy rather than comedy, except that it made me happy.  Figure that one out, philosophers.