Bill Willingham’s Fables is the type of thing the Grim Brothers would have written if they lived in the Bronx doing bong rips while watching The Daily Show on Hulu. The book is smart because it knows that Little Red Riding-hood has more to do with hymens and patriarchy than hiking safety and taxidermy.
Willingham is not afraid of dealing with messy questions like:
how a frog is supposed to handle courtly life and executing criminals.
Why a grown man make wooden boy instead of a perfectly good set of mahogany wives?
How damaged were Hansel and Gretel after they pulled each other out of the rubble of the witches house and what was her name anyway?
In Fables the hard nosed cop's troubled past involves eating people, so Willingham puts the character next to the ones that got away and the relatives of the ones that didn't. He also makes sure that Prince Charming faces the reality of his silly name, his douchey personality, and the realization that he is just a narrative tool and that his name is on the stab and neuter list of most of Fabletown's female inhabitants.
Fables is a story of immigrants so it takes place in New York. Like any thriving ethnic group the characters of Fabletown have there own borough and they want to keep the mundys out.
Willingham includes fables from Africa, India and other places outside of the European rehash we've come to accept and regurgitate. There is a constant theme of cultural atom smashing, with character's who speak four languages and bigots both fantastic and mundane.
Like Neil Gaiman and Mike Carey, Williingham has rescued our myths from the tomb of academia and the sanatoriums rectally fixated Jungian psycho therapy. The tension and the neurotic mood of the series keeps it relevant.
People forget that the wolf ate grandma, how the witch screamed as Gretel stoked the fire, how Mowgli fought to kill Shere Khan or how Bluebeard's secret room ran red with the blood of his dead wives.
In the world of Fables we mundys are the lucky ones. We can launder our legends from a distance, wash off the blood in soapy omission. But Fables can not do that and are forced to be the interesting ones the freaks. With Fables Willingham has achieved folkloric realism.
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