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Wars fought with dragons, flying carpets and giant ogres.  Only in Fables.

I’ve tried to read Bill Willingham’s Fables a number of times but I’ve never gotten that far with it.  When the buzz really began to build years ago for this series, I picked up the first couple of trades and they were clever but, to me at least, never much beyond that.  At least every couple of years since then, I’ve tried to get into the series, either through the regular issues or even through the graphic novel 1001 Nights of Snowfall.  Willingham has worked with great artists and has interesting premises but the story just never came together in a way that made me any more interested in the characters.

Fables #75 depicts a war story with the Fables against… Well, honestly from this issue alone, I can’t tell too much who’s fighting the war or why they are fighting it?  There are the obvious good guys (Bigby the Wolf, Prince Charming, Little Boy Blue and Sinbad) fighting against armies of giants, dragons and magic arrows.  The good guys are trying to blow up the “gates” but why and for what purposes I’m still not clear on.  Even if the reasons and stakes of this war aren’t terribly clear from this one issue, Willingham clearly expresses the importance and the dangers of this war.  Even from the opening pages, he conveys an epic atmosphere to his tale.  You don’t necessarily need to know the motives and desires of the good guys and bad guys.  You just need to know that there ARE good guys and bad guys and that the costs of the war are great and the results of the war are important.

While he manages to do that, Willingham’s script is choppy and rushed.  Scenes are mashed toghether with little transition and are often began abruptly.  It’s a fast issue, showing a war being fought on a couple of fronts, so I can see what Willingham is attempting to do; keeping the reader jumping around from scene to scene.  But the scenes do not hang together well; they don’t flow naturally.  That makes the reading experience a bit frustrating.  For as much as I enjoy the story that Willingham is telling here, the method that it’s told in is difficult to get through.

I don’t know if I’ve ever been as impressed with Mark Buckingham’s artwork as much as I was with this issue.  I’ve always enjoyed and appreciated his artwork.  He’s a solid, non-flashy artist who could tell a good story but his work on this issue is staggering.  Working with long, thin vertical panels running from the top to the bottom of the page, Buckingham creates a different scope to the page.  It’s almost the opposite of the wide-screen effect that’s been so popular the last 8 or so years.  It creates a narrower, more intimate look at the Fables’ war that explodes when he does expand his panels and go for the big, wide screen image.

Buckingham’s design sense is also fully on display this issue and it is stunning.  I’ve never thought of Buckingham as a Kirbyish artist but his designs for the enemy army reminds me of Kirby’s Asgard and Apocalypse rolled into one.  Early in the book, Buckingham has an image of the army charging forward.  The army, made up of giants, armored men, and great and fantastical beasts, is a fantastic tribute to Kirby, down to one of the beasts having the Kirby krackle around it.

After reading this issue, I find myself again curious about Fables and about the world that Willingham and Buckingham have built.  While the war isn’t clearly laid out in this issue, I’m more and more curious about what the war is and why it’s being fought.  I’m curious about the different characters and their motivations.  And I’m left wondering where do they go from here and that’s something that this book hasn’t given me before.  Fables #75 is in many ways an end and a conclusion to a grand story but Willingham and Buckingham now have an entire future of the Fables to explore.

Fables #75
“War and Pieces Chapter Three: The Fire Ship”
Written by: Bill Willingham
Penciled by: Mark Buckingham
Inked by: Steve Leialoha and Andrew Pepoy
Colored by: Lee Loughridge
Lettered by: Todd Klein

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