Fables #133 – Review

By: Bill Willingham (story), Mark Buckingham (pencils), Steve Leialoha & Andrew Pepoy (inks), Lee Loughridge (colors)

The Story: Lord help the sister who gets between her and her man.

The Review: The fact that we almost all love a good redemption story attests to our belief in the essential goodness of human beings.  But make no mistake that it is mostly faith that spurs on that belief, and much less in the way of evidence.  Your views on the merits of punishment and rehabilitation often turn on how changeable you feel people can be.  Before one ever get to the redemption stage, one often requires a lot of forgiveness and trust first.

You can see this conflict play out between Rose Red and Snow White as they bicker on the fate of Brandish, someone who both needs serious redemption and for whom redemption seems impossibly out of reach.  Rose is correct in saying that if Brandish can be reformed, then that is incontrovertible proof of the power of second chances.  But can a man who seems to have been a bad egg since childhood (see #132’s matricide), who’s allied with the most purely evil forces in history, who literally has no heart—can such a man even live with himself if he actually develops a conscience?