Written by Bill Willingham; Pencilled by Mark Buckingham; Art by Peter Gross & Andrew Pepoy, Michael Allred, David Hahn; Colour by Lee Loughridge & Laura Allred; Letters by Todd Klein (Vertigo Comics)

Another freebie from the Hugo Packet. Like Girl Genius, Fables is one of those things I’ve been meaning to get to for some time. It sounds on paper like it is exactly the sort of thing I love to read: a world that takes fairy tale images and iconography and does something new and inventive and meta with them.

Sadly, unlike Girl Genius, this one is not for me.

I was reasonably compelled by the first chapter of the selection which has been nominated for the Hugo – the character of Gepetto, a former evil dictator, and his reluctant attempts to fit in now that he’s just one of the people, did catch my attention. But after that first promising chapter, I mostly found myself bored.

Yes, I started reading quite far in, and yes the story isn’t meant to be read that way. But I should be able to tell from this volume whether it’s worth my time to go back and read Fables from the beginning, and from what I see here, it’s really not.

I see what they’re doing here. The combination of fairy tales with a stark noir storytelling sensibility is a good, solid framework to hang a story off. But I’ve seen it done in so many other places that the premise itself is just not enough for me. Add to that the tiresome male gaze which renders the female characters mostly unimportant to the storyline, and an old fashioned internal artwork style which renders said female characters utterly passive even on the few occasions that they have something interesting to say, adds up to… well, not much, really. Did I mention the book is humourless? It’s HUMOURLESS. And seems far too pleased with its own bleak style.

I can appreciate why Fables is popular, it has so many elements going for it. I can even see why this is a comic that many people recommend that women read. There are women in it, after all, and for the most part they are drawn in humane proportions (well, humane 1940′s dress pattern proportions which is still better than wasp waists and breasts bigger than head) and apparently even participate in politics, though the only scenes involving women substantially that I saw revolved around a) the care of a pack of children and b) the wearing of lingerie. I’ve seen more gumption in 1950′s Lois Lane comics! I was particularly disappointed in Rose Red, the only female character who seemed almost interesting to me at first, and then disappeared into a haze of grim and depressive slut-shaming and emotional torture as her backstory caught up with her, and whose plotline in this book seemed to consist of men cruelly telling her what she had been doing wrong.

The old school nostalgia-style artwork is done very well for what it is, and I’m sure if I had been reading from the beginning, I would be far more gripped by this volume. But I haven’t seen anything to convince me that I personally should be making that time commitment, or that there’s anything in Fables that I couldn’t get elsewhere, done far better.

Just in the graphic novel department, Rapunzel’s Revenge and Castle Waiting spring to mind as works which deal with fairy tales in a far more revolutionary way, with dark humour and two very different styles of artwork that are utterly pleasurable to look at.

So far, Girl Genius still has my vote for this category! But there are 3 to go…

Tags: fables, fairy tales, girl genius, graphic novels, hugos, reading, reviewing, women in comics