Recently I've been reading Bill Willingham's comic book series, Fables. The series started out as a set of cute stories with fairytale characters in them, I suspect in an attempt from Vertigo to retain their Sandman audience after Sandman ended. Over time, however, (I'm up to volume 7) this series has become a serious literary contender. Every time I start reading a volume, I can't put it down. There's all the things that fairytales should have - blood, sex, revenge, murder, magic - and there's also modern sarcasm and wit, beautiful art, and just the right amount of subversion (the picture top left depicts an impoverished Prince Charming seducing a hapless New Yorker).
The characters, over time, have become characters I care about, and I was astonished to discover how pleased I was to find rounded, interesting male fairytale characters. We're so used to worrying about how female characters are represented that I had never noticed before how rare it is to find well-represented male fairytale characters, characters with more than one motive and who blur the lines between protagonist and antagonist. But here we have Prince Charming, B.B. Wolf, Jack of the Tales, Beast, Bluebeard (to name a few) and they display charm, ruthlessness, internal struggles and depth of character. They stand alongside (or head to head with) Snow White, Rose Red, Beauty, Cinderella, characters we already knew were intelligent, resourceful, stronger than they look, forces to be reckoned with.
The series is about a group of Fables (fairytale characters) who live as refugees in our world after a powerful Adversary took the fairytale lands by military conquest. I highly recommend it. Currently I'm reading the prequel, 1001 Nights of Snowfall, which, to top everything off, has art by Charles Vess.
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