You may notice in the coming months a small uptick on this site of comic-book and graphic-novel reviews. Namely this results from a $1 purchase I made at Goodwill a few weeks ago, a copy of Scott McCloud’s Reinventing Comics, which I recently finished and can’t get out of my head. I’m sure I’ll talk more about it later in its own review, but that non-fiction book has got me dabbling in comics and graphic novels of all kinds, and this Fables is just among the first.

Now I’ll state from the outset that I’m not really a fan of the traditional comic book, mainly because super heroes are just too fantastic for me. I recall reading the full Invincible series by Robert Kirkman while I was in the Army, but only because I had nothing better to do. And it was available. And that was about it.

So when I pulled this Bill Willingham volume from the library shelves, it was an attempt to see if I might want to dabble even more in this fanciful realm or instead stick with the more realistic and standalone graphic novels out there. Definitely I’m veering towards the latter, because this first installment to the Fables collection was totally not my style.

The gist of the story is thus: New York City has become a home to fugitive fairytale folk, the surviving refugees of a war on the magical worlds by The Adversary that has nearly obliterated all their kinds. These fanciful creatures and characters (many you’ve heard of) keep their identities secret yet reside in a common building, The Woodlands Luxury Apartments. Inside they’re allowed to be themselves and remember their pasts with fondness, but that sort of life isn’t for everyone.

This first volume is a murder-mystery of sorts, but really of the pulp-fiction variety. It’s a single-thread whodunnit about the murder of Snow White’s sister. The Big Bad Wolf is a detective on the case, and other characters come and go. There’s a little backstory about The Adversary’s War on the fabled folk, and I suppose that if this were someone’s thing, they might want to stick it out for all 88+ installments. But not I.

This is definitely not a comic book for kids, by the way (and my surprise at that fact ought to show you how little I know about the comic book business!). This short 5-book collection was filled with shocking scenes: blood, murder, sex, voluptuous ladies, and F-bombs. If it had a rating, it would be ‘M’….and now that I look more closely at the cover, there it is above the UBC code: “Suggested for Mature Readers.” Well, there you have it!

Reading this book was like suffering through the pilot episode of a TV show I definitely don’t want to watch, so not surprisingly, I have no desire to move on to Volume 2 or to dabble much further into the traditional comic scene. From here on out, I’ll stick with graphic novels…and happily so.

©2022 E.T.