Review:
Bill Willingham's multiple award-winning Fables universe brilliantly reimagines the characters from classic fairy tales and nursery rhymes, setting them as long-time refugees settled into our real world. In this collection, Willingham provides overall guidance but hands the creative reins over to South African writer Lauren Beukes. The result is recognizable Fables Universe characters but cast in a tale that feels closer to Asian Horror films than either the urban fantasy fiction of the original series or the fairy tale land of the source material.
The result is both starkly beautiful and deeply unsettling.
Rapunzel, with her faithful companion Joel Crow and a tagalong Jack Horner, leaves Fabletown for Japan, to search for her long-lost children and put right a past she thought long buried.
Fables she knew, loved, betrayed and lost long ago, whom she thought long dead or gone, are still there, hiding in plain sight in modern day Japan. When she arrives, some of those old friends seek to use her, others to kill her.
Characters like Tomoko, her fox-woman former lover with a spherical and magical soul of fox-fire, and whose current loyalties are decidedly mixed. Her torture of Jack is gruesome and cruel.
Or like blue-haired Mayumi with her grotesquely disfigured face, thanks to the sword of a warlord long dead. She has emerged as a Yakuza assassin par excellence.
Rapunzel must navigate these and other past sins and wounds and shifting loyalties in the present and come to terms with what she left behind upon fleeing Japan centuries earlier.
Inaki Miranda's art is disturbingly effective at evoking the horror underlying Beukes' story. His attention to fashion detail, from ancient dress codes to the modern streets of Tokyo, adds to the fun. But he does not shy away from the violence and freaky visuals in the more terrifying sections. His use of cross-panel slashes, selective heavy inking and blue-tinting (most critically in the scenes at the well which lies at the heart of the tale) elevate and complement the narrative, helping to make sense of a complex and at times confusing story.
Bill Willingham's only writing in this collection is the backup tale at the end. It contrasts heavily with the main story in both tone and visual mood and really does not belong here. Was it only included for marketing or royalty purposes? It sticks out like the fabled sore thumb from the rest.
It is the tale of Raymond T. Fox and his date with Princess Alder, a living humanoid tree. It provides some frivolous fun and the only nudity in the whole book. The story would be fine elsewhere but here it undermines what Beukes and Miranda have created, and I must dock the overall collection a cape as a result. I would give the Rapunzel tale three and a half, but the overall collection just two and a half capes.
Description:
New York Times bestselling, award-winning creator Bill Willingham presents a new series starring the female FABLES. Balancing horror, humor and adventure in the FABLES tradition, FAIREST explores the secret histories of Sleeping Beauty, Rapunzel, Cinderella, The Snow Queen, Thumbelina, Snow White, Rose Red and others.
In a stand-alone tale, Beast must hunt a beauty, but what is her relation to his past? And then, in a 6-part epic, Rapunzel lives one of the most regimented lives in Fabletown, forced to maintain her rapidly growing hair lest her storybook origins be revealed. But when word of her long-lost children surface, she races across the sea to find them--and a former lover.
Collects: Fairest #8-14
Authors: Bill Willingham (Author), Lauren Beukes
Artists: Inaki Miranda (Illustrator), Barry Kitson
Published By: Vertigo
Published When: July 30, 2013
Parental Rating: Mature
ISBN: 978-1401240219
Pages: 128 pages
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