Fairest #14 – Review

By: Bill Willingham (story), Barry Kitson (art), Inaki Miranda (finishes), Andrew Dalhouse (colors)

The Story: A crappy meal can get in the way of any date.

The Review: Love is the trickiest of all things to manage and the most difficult to obtain, particularly when it’s true.  Considering how many fables are dedicated to illustrating those points, it should perhaps be no surprise that so many of our Fables have been, to say the least, unlucky in love.  In that regard, the fairest of the Fables endure a special kind of suffering: for all their beauty and other virtues, they live rather lonely, loveless lives, which are the worst kind.

So it goes with Princess Alder, the dryad, who sees the most depressing problem in her life as her “deplorable dating life.”  Honestly, this would be an exhausting premise for a story had this involved any other kind of woman—namely human woman.  Fiction nowadays is inundated with stories about women running the gauntlet of the dating game.  But put a half-tree, forest creature in the same high-heeled shoes and suddenly you have a story that’s funny and kind of brilliant.

Fables #126 – Review

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

The Story: On the bright side, Snow has a husband willing to wait centuries to get to third base.

The Review: Although soap operas rightfully deserve all the jokes about their various and sundry clichés now, there’s a reason why they continue to have a place in our world, whether you’re talking about our American offerings, your Mexican telenovelas, or Asian dramas.  It’s all about their total fearlessness (or utter lack of taste—call it what you will) when it comes to throwing in plot twists that can upend the entire storyline up to that point.

Such was the case with the last-page revelation we got last issue.  Discovering heretofore unknown spouses is basically the bread and butter of your average soap, no?  Here, however, the nature of Snow’s “marriage” to Holt (or Brandish) is a little more questionable than we were initially led to believe, though Holt takes a rather stunted view of things: “[A] ceremony is meaningless in the high law of our land.  The promise is all that matters.”