Fables Vol. 13: The Great Fables Crossover

From Publishers Weekly The appeal of Fables has always been the reimagining of fairy tale characters as if they were as messy and screwed up as real people; the characters are divorcées, drunks, womanizers, and overall flawed beings. In this crossover of all the Fables characters from various spinoff books, Kevin Thorn, the creator of the world and its stories, is angry such liberties were taken with his characters and is determined to destroy the Fablesverse and start over. The regular Fables cast, Snow White, Bigby Wolf, and Jack (the one with the beanstalk)—with a few additions such as gun-toting embodiments of the library sciences and Thorn's son, Mister Revise—try to stop Thorn before he writes them and the rest of the world out of existence. Unfortunately, most of what could be good ideas becomes burdensome, with zigzagging plot twists that bog down the pace. There are a lot of meanwhiles, and interesting side points and characters, but the overall plot is lacking. (Feb.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. From Booklist Taking a breather from Fables’ main action, Willingham teams with fellow scripter Matthew Sturges for this story that occupied three monthly installments each of Fables, Jack of Fables, and The Literals, which was created for the occasion. It’s a frayed, comics-medium in-jokey yarn centered on a comics author (one of the Literals) determined to rewrite the Fables’ history, deleting characters he dislikes with a pen that makes what he writes real (at least in the world of comics). His straitjacketed twin, Writer’s Block, prevents him from whole-hog renovation but not from thwarting the posse after him by recasting its leader, Bigby Wolf, as a chimp, a pink elephant, a donkey, and a little girl. Fortunately, Wolf’s personality remains constant and, with the help of the kick-ass librarian Page sisters (from Jack of Fables), prevails. Meanwhile, when Jack drops in on the Fables’ Adirondacks farm, he’s hailed as the messianic second coming of the martyred Boy Blue; as Daffy Duck, whose Duck Amuck is surely one inspiration for this arc, might say—what a revoltin’ development! --Ray Olson Bill Willingham has been writing, and sometimes drawing, comics for more than 20 years. During that time, he's had work published by nearly every comics publisher in the business, and he's created many critically acclaimed comic book series, including Elementals, Coventry, Proposition Players , and of course the seminal Vertigo series Fables , as well as its spin-off series Fairest, Jack of Fables and The Literals . His work has been nominated for many awards, including the Eisner, Harvey, and Ignatz comic industry awards and the International Horror Guild award. He lives somewhere near a good poker room. Matthew Sturges has written a number of comics for DC, including House of Mystery, Justice Society of America, and the Eisner-nominated Jack of Fables (with Bill Willingham). He has also written the novel Midwinter , available from Pyr, and its sequel The Office of Shadow .Born in 1966 in the English seaside town of Clevedon, Mark Buckingham has worked in comics professionally for the past twenty years. In addition to illustrating all of Neil Gaiman's run on the post-Alan Moore Miracleman in the early 1990s, Buckingham contributed inks to The Sandman and its related miniseries Death: The High Cost of Living and Death: The Time of Your Life as well as working on various other titles for Vertigo and Marvel through the end of the decade. In 2002 he took over as the penciller for Bill Willingham's Fables , which has gone on to become one of the most popular and critically acclaimed Vertigo titles of the new millennium. When not in Clevedon, Buckingham can be found with his wife Irma in the Asturias region of northern Spain. Read more