Fairest #29 – Review

By: Mark Buckingham (story), Russ Braun (art), Lee Loughridge (colors)

The Story: Some parties you want to be rescued from. This isn’t one of them.

The Review: Another one of those words critics and English majors tend to throw around a lot is “craft,” as in “There’s not much/a lot of craft in this work.” I’m not arrogant enough to come up with a definitive definition, but I’ll give you an idea of what I mean when I say “craft.” It’s the care, thought, time, and skill a person puts into their art. Craft alone doesn’t make great art; you need talent and inspiration for that. But without craft, you won’t produce anything worthwhile.

A foreboding sort of intro, I know. But I can’t help thinking about the distinct lack of craft in this issue, specifically where Meghan’s hillbilly uncle and cousin are concerned. You can appreciate Buckingham trying to subvert your archetypical wicked relatives—although this is probably the one series where he can get away with such formulaic characters—by showing Bobby and Joey aren’t as callous as they appear. But there’s nothing so subtle about these men’s changes; Reynard’s the one with the glamour, but he has nothing on their sudden, inexplicable transformation from cruel to excessively affectionate.

Dead Boy Detectives #8 – Review

By: Toby Litt (story), Mark Buckingham (layouts), Ryan Kelly (finishes), Lee Loughridge (colors)

The Story: It’s hard to tell the difference between the living and the dead in a nursing home.

The Review: In my line of work, I see firsthand how often kids take their parents’ mistakes to heart, which is probably one of the saddest things you’ll ever see besides an invalid alone in the hospital or the mentally ill talking to themselves at a bus stop in the rain. So it’s not surprising to me that Charles would internalize his dad’s problems so much, to the point that his dad’s litany of horrible qualities results in his own self-loathing and a desire for a second death.

It takes a bit of adjustment to handle this sudden emotional weight that’s been thrust on the previously quirky Dead Boy Detectives, but it works. If nothing else, it provides a springboard for the Charles-Crystal relationship, as his melancholy spurs her to show the sweetest parts of her personality. “Charles, you say that ever since I met you, you’ve done nothing but put me in danger. But it’s all been so exciting—even the terrifying parts! …If it wasn’t for me, you wouldn’t know about Clementine. If it wasn’t for you, I wouldn’t know about the Neitherlands. We need each other, Charles. …I wish I could give you a proper hug.”

Fables #143 – Review

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

The Story: Bigby threatens to bring down Fabletown, with neither huffing nor puffing.

The Review: One of the many ways I’m a little off in the head is the way I treat stories like people. On first acquaintance, I’m open-minded, relatively forgiving of small quirks and flaws, and cautious to make any hasty conclusions. If it rubs me the wrong way, my judgment can become scathing, and it can be quite difficult to return to my good graces. If I really take to one, my loyalty is steadfast; even if things don’t go well for a while, I’ll still be by its side.

To me, Fables is a bit like my clique of coworkers at a transition job after grad school. We met somewhat late in life and I’ll always remain a bit of an outsider, but we get along well and make each other’s lives that much more pleasant. When we part, it’ll be with regret and hugs, but not tears. This is all a roundabout way of saying that even though I haven’t known the Fables that long, I’m fond enough of them to be really grieved when bad things happen to them. And Willingham seems set to unleash quite a lot of bad things on many of them, even the most beloved.

Fairest #28 – Review

By: Mark Buckingham (story), Russ Braun (art), Lee Loughridge (colors)

The Story: Has Reynard found his rebound girl?

The Review: In what has to be a burst of psychological insight—or stating the obvious, you decide—I’ve realized why Reynard is so determined to make it with this human thing. The fact is he never needed a human body to succeed in anything; he was doing quite well without before he got his glamour. Being a handsome man is really only necessary for one thing: attracting the ladies. Small wonder that he thinks finding a woman to love is key to unlocking his potential as a man.

You might say it’s his final challenge, the last thing he needs to stand aside the likes of, say, Prince Charming. There’s really just one thing getting in his way: he’s not Prince Charming, which is to say that he doesn’t have Charming’s shameless addiction to conquest. His audacious move on Snow is driven by ignorance of human mores rather than lust, which makes his poor reception that much more pathetic. Reynard likes to be of service, but he won’t get that chance chasing after strong, independent women.

Dead Boy Detectives #7 – Review

By: Toby Litt (story), Mark Buckingham (layouts), Ryan Kelly (finishes), Lee Loughridge (colors)

The Story: Even ghosts can have daddy issues.

The Review: We’ve had a lot of fun with the Dead Boy Detectives’ miscellaneous adventures, but now seems like the right time for us to grapple with more long-term material. I expect most of us are new to the characters, so we really know nothing about Charles and Edwin before they attended, died, and returned to St. Hilarion’s. If a ghost exists only because of unfinished business in its life, then it’s essential we learn more about that life, no?

It’s easy enough to see what was left unresolved with Charles’ untimely death: his feelings toward his father. We’ve seen hints that Charles’ dad wasn’t a very nice guy, but the nature of his cruelty is unclear, even after Charles recounts his boyhood memories of the man. Obviously, Charles’ dad was kind of a douche for receiving his son’s thoughtful, handmade gift with more thought to its flaws than delight, and the fact that he was constantly away isn’t great, either. But these seem like typical paternal failings, not the kinds of things that’d keep a long-dead boy attached to the world.

Fables #142 – Review

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

The Story: Sisters, sisters, never where there such destructive sisters.

The Review: Last issue, when Maddy came around Wolf Manor declaring that war between Snow and Rose was practically inevitable, I wondered idly how Maddy expected Snow to fight a war all by herself when Rose had an entire kingdom at her back. I had forgotten about Winter’s preparations for this very possibility back in #137, which goes to show just how involved and sprawling and foresighted Fables can be. [It also goes to show my memory is shot since bar prep began, but I digress.]

But what are Winter’s plans, anyway? There must be something more delicate going on than a meet-force-with-force strategy, otherwise she wouldn’t be so threatened by Maddy’s interference. Then again, considering the forces she’s gathered (which now includes all her wolfish uncles), the outcome can go either way: mutually assured destruction or stalemate by threat of the same.

Fairest #27 – Review

By: Mark Buckingham (story), Russ Braun (art), Lee Loughridge (colors)

The Story: Even a fox loses his charm once he turns human.

The Review: And we’re back! It’s been several months since the abysmal Mice and Men arc, and if I had any doubts at the time whether I was doing the right thing temporarily Dropping the series, I have none now. I’m in a much better spirit of mind than if I had forced myself to buy into Andreyko’s wandering, inconsequential storyline, and eager to check in with the less pressing side of the Fables universe, especially as we’re winding down to the series’ conclusion.

Since I’m still woefully deficient in my Fables history, I can’t confirm whether Prince Charming’s promise to provide glamours to all non-humanoid Fables was ever established before this issue, but it does lead to a solid plot for the Fables that tend to be overlooked. It’s true they don’t get enough respect; that will happen when you look like a walking sunflower in breeches or cat with a bonnet or some other anthropomorphized creature in medieval costume. Kind of hard not to see them as comical even when they have very real grievances.

Fables #141 – Review

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

The Story: No need for minutes—this is a witches’ meeting!

The Review: As a lover of most things magical, some of my favorite Fables by default are the Thirteenth Floor witches. In most respects, they live up to the typical spellcaster mold: distant and a little bit distracted, always with an air like they’re seeing something you’re not, which they probably are. But they also have an unquestioned loyalty to Fabletown that’s somewhat surprising for such powerful characters. Mages are not well known for their charity.

It made sense for the witches to ally with Fabletown when they had Gepetto as a common enemy, but that’s all over now. Not only has the war been fought and won, the need for Fabletown itself is fading, as even the witches recognize. Yet they continue to stick to their customary meetings, discussing various Fabletown concerns, and even going so far as to consider prospective replacements for their dead/missing/departed peers. With one exception, none of these topics of conversation hold as much weight as their passing remarks.

Dead Boy Detectives #6 – Review

By: Toby Litt (story), Mark Buckingham (layouts), Russ Braun (finishes), Lee Loughridge (colors)

The Story: When seeking advice, ask a cat before the manatee.

The Review: As a kid, I was obsessed with Harriet the Spy,* mostly for Harriet’s adventurousness and daring. She, along with the Boxcar Children, those kids from The Egypt Game, and the boys from The Sandlot, had a subtle influence on my early life. I didn’t exactly become a mischievous, unnecessary risk-taker, but by their example I probably was more curious, took more chances, and got into more trouble (in a fun way) than my rigid Vietnamese upbringing would’ve allowed.

I think the charm I’ve recently found in Dead Boy Detectives is how it seems to carry the spirit of all my childhood heroes. As Edwin, Charles, and Crystal slip (and literally break) into Marigold’s house to investigate the precarious situation of the trapped Persephone and Beatrix, I was reminded of bygone tales of kids going places where they shouldn’t be, and finding and solving mysteries there. It’s the kind of story that’s painfully absent from comics these days, despite efforts from titles like the hopelessly commercial Seekers of the Weird.

Dead Boy Detectives #5 – Review

By: Toby Litt (story), Mark Buckingham (layouts), Russ Braun (finishes), Lee Loughridge (colors)

The Story: Never enter a crazy cat lady’s house unless you’re prepared to not like what you see.

The Review: For all you bottom-line people wanting to know what it takes for a title to stay on my Pull List, it’s this simple: it has to feel different. “From what?” you may well ask. From other titles in its genre? From everything else on the market? From all the stuff I’m personally reading? Yes, yes, and yes—one of those, at least; all of those, ideally. The moment I start making clear comparisons between one title and another usually coincides with my waning interest in a series.

That’s why I have such a good feeling about the longevity of Dead Boy Detectives on my Pull List. It may have its share of technical flaws, disappointments, and missed opportunities, but you can’t deny that there’s nothing quite like it out there in the big, wide comic book universe. It’s supernatural, yet it doesn’t fit with any of the classic supernatural sub-categories: sword-and-sorcery, urban fantasy, even magical realism. More than anything else, it’s like the fun, quirky, imaginative stories you read in your childhood years, spun with enough substance for grown-up tastes.

Dead Boy Detectives #4 – Review

By: Toby Litt (story), Mark Buckingham (pencils), Gary Eskine & Andrew Pepoy (inks), Lee Loughridge (colors)

The Story: Need to ward off demons from hell? There’s an app for that.

The Review: We all knew some shady things were going down at St. Hilarion’s, between the military-grade tech in the headmaster’s office and the demon-creatures crawling out of a hell-pit and all. Given the long history of the place, you’d think it’d take an equally long time to uncover all its secrets. Any hope of a long storyline at Hilarion’s, however, went out the window the moment Crystal, Charles, and Edwin directly confronted the source of all the school’s evil.

Even if our heroes managed to escape, it’s not as if they could stay on the D.L. from their enemies after that. So you understand why Litt had to wrap things up at HIlarion’s so quickly, but that doesn’t make the school’s destruction, along with most of its fell denizens, any less sudden. As climactic as all this sounds, it’s also a little disappointing. You’ve barely had a chance to get acquainted with Theodore, Nath, Cheeseman, Skinner, and Barrow, and now they’ve gone before achieving much of note.

Dead Boy Detectives #3 – Review

By: Toby Litt (story), Mark Buckingham (pencils), Gary Eskine (inks), Lee Loughridge (colors)

The Story: The dead boys are about to become even deader.

The Review: You’d think that once a person dies, one of the great fears of life has been extinguished (and fulfilled), but if this series is trying to get anything across, it’s that with the existence of an afterlife, your fear can go on long after death.  That lends some danger in a story where the main characters can’t technically die anymore.  Actually, it soon becomes clear that Charles and Edwin have nearly as much to be afraid of as any of the living.

Our detectives, true to their ghostly nature, are caught in a kind of stasis, fearful of moving on completely, but terrified of spending eternity in a place like Hell.  Edwin, who once experienced that chilling prospect, describes it thus: “the years of loneliness and the years of despair.  The decades of terror…  I crave non-existence—eternal absence.”  That is the peril and horror of Saint Hilarion’s: not just that it can kill you, but that it can torment you for ages afterward.

Dead Boy Detectives #2 – Review

By: Toby Litt (story), Mark Buckingham (pencils), Gary Eskine & Andrew Pepoy (inks), Lee Loughridge (colors)

The Story: A school where mean girls are almost as bad as grim reapers.

The Review: With the first issue of this series, Litt not only revitalized the whimsy of the Dead Boy Detectives, he also reclaimed what makes them profound.  More than ever, you’re aware of Charles and Edwin’s undead nature, as they grimly muse on their murders and uncertain futures.  Yet they retain their youthful enthusiasm and adventurousness, which gives them a distinct resemblance to Coraline, another Neil Gaiman creation.

You’d think Crystal, the dark-haired girl with a slightly rebellious streak and intense curiosity, would be even more of a Coraline figure in the series, but she reveals that she’s not made of quite the same stern stuff.  Her flaws and peculiarities seemingly make her less a heroine than Coraline, but they also make her far more recognizable: her reliance on technology; her escapes into “Yonda,” a fictional MMORPG; her desire to not end up like her parents and her subsequent phobia of too much attention.

Fables #137 – Review

By: Bill Willingham (story), Mark Buckingham (layouts), Russ Braun (finishes), Lee Loughridge (colors)

The Story: Winter shows her oft-quoted discontent.

The Review: I may be a cold fish in a lot of ways, but even I hate to see the innocence of kids disturbed.  They already have the rest of their lives to grow cynical, bitter, and pessimistic, right?  So I’ve been distressed to see so many of the Cubs saddled with depressing fates.  Darien committed suicide and has passed; Therese is a grown queen of discarded toys; and Winter has become a force beyond reckoning, with all the burdensome responsibilities that entails.

And now we see that beneath all our noses and against Snow’s extra vigilance, Winter has already taken up those burdens in full.  The North Wind exists on countless worlds, which requires not only her power, but her presence, the experience of which in turn accumulates in her.  “Against my wishes, I’m already old and wise,” she tells the other Cardinal Winds, but more than that, she’s already gained the capacity to be ruthless.  When the other Winds attempt to horn in on her command, she takes the form of the tyrannical North Wind she dreamed of in #114.  She successfully resists their ascendancy, but she also takes a step forward to becoming the fear-mongering dictator her grandfather used to be.

Fables #136 – Review

By: Bill Willingham (story), Mark Buckingham (layouts), Russ Braun (finishes), Lee Loughridge (colors)

The Story: Rose begins to regret all those times she ever dozed off during history lessons.

The Review: A few months ago, back when Rose started this new Camelot business, I questioned the wisdom of modeling her enterprise after a fable that so clearly went wrong in the end.  And considering the nature of these characters, you could guess that they’d be more susceptible to foreordained endings than most.  But that’s the nature of Rose’s virtue, isn’t it?  Always hoping that things might turn out differently this time around?

Not to disparage hope, but it’s clearly going to take a lot more than positive thinking to get over the doom of Camelot.  Rose would be wise to take to heart the wisdom and knowledge of no less than the original Lady of the Lake herself.  Although Lake states that fate itself—or should I say, the Fates themselves—poses the biggest danger to Rose’s plans, such forces require instruments to come to pass.  A lot of our interest in this storyline, therefore, is speculating who will take on the roles Guinevere, Lancelot, Morgan le Fey, and Mordred played in the first Camelot’s fall.

Dead Boy Detectives #1 – Review

By: Toby Litt (story), Mark Buckingham (pencils), Gary Eskine (inks), Lee Loughridge (colors)

The Story: It’s bad if it takes a couple of deceased prepubescent kids to solve a case, right?

The Review: My first introduction to the eponymous Dead Boy Detectives was in the pages of Vertigo’s recent anthologies.    During all that time, it never registered on me that they were anything other than Litt’s original creations.  To discover that they are in fact a Sandman spin-off was surprising, because they seemed like such unlikely candidates to be products from the mind of Neil Gaiman.

A lot of this had to do with Litt’s treatment of the eponymous heroes in those anthologies.  While the young duo’s misadventures started out kind of charming in Ghosts, they steadily grew less so in Time Warp until they became a harmless but rather dull feature in Witching Hour.  It retrospect, it was a mistake to reintroduce them in that piecemeal fashion, because given a whole issue to develop and state their purpose, the Detectives reclaim that Gaiman-esque combination of the whimsical and macabre.

Fables #135 – Review

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

The Story: Rose realizes that castles don’t just grow on trees.

The Review: It doesn’t take too long in life before you run into that one person who teaches you about the danger of forgiveness, the one who makes you doubt the human capacity for redemption.  That’s the thing about second chances; not everyone makes good on them.  With some people, even third, fourth, fifth, a whole plethora of chances won’t do the trick.  And all the time, the people giving those chances are draining their lives to maintain their faith.

This is the risk of second chances that Rose doesn’t seem to have much appreciation for, which is surprising, considering how long it took and how many disappointments she caused before she finally got her act together.  Perhaps this lack of reflection is caused in part by the people she repeatedly disappointed.  Despite the current acrimony between her and Snow, she says confidently, “…Snow will forgive me eventually.  It’s what she does.”

The Unwritten #54 – Review

By: Mike Carey (story), Peter Gross (art), Mark Buckingham (pencils), Dean Ormston (inks), Chris Chuckry (colors)

The Story: And they all died unhappily ever after.

The Review: Hiya, folks—just filling in for Dean while he’s out of the country.  What that, let’s get to it.  Like most crossovers, The Unwritten Fables has offered its share of fun, but is mostly overshadowed by sharp deviations from the ongoing plots in its participating series (Fables seems blithely ignorant that a crossover is going on at all).  Unfortunately, this arc has also fallen into the trap of quarantining its story so that it has no lasting impact beyond the crossover itself.

Unlike some folks, including perhaps Dean himself, I had no problem with at least the notion of a Fables/Unwritten team-up.  The premise itself is sound; Unwritten revolves around the nature of stories, and the Fables have an awareness of their fictional nature and their place in the story-worlds that fits very well in Unwritten’s explorations.  The problem is the plot quickly became less about metafiction and more about a fruitless battle against the embodiment of all evil.

Fables #134 – Review

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

The Story: You have plenty of time for deep conversations when you’re death.

The Review: This sure has been a year for seeing Fables long dead, hasn’t it?  Like Prince Charming, Boy Blue was a character who had already passed away well before I ever hopped aboard this series, but whose reputation was such that even without once encountering him personally, I knew instantly from this issue’s cover that he’d be appearing and what a big deal that would be.  For some characters, as for some people, death diminishes their presence little.

I must say, after getting a chance to experience Blue up close, he really is something.  He just has a quiet magnetism to him, in sharp contrast to the flamboyance of Charming or Jack Horner, but different still from Fly’s similarly reserved charisma.  It doesn’t surprise me that Fly and Blue were close once upon a time; they share a mixture of purity and wisdom which sets them apart from the rest of the generally embittered and cynical Fables.  If anything, dying has only enhanced the virtues which Blue already possessed in abundance.

The Witching Hour #1 – Review

By: Too many to list—or even to review.  Just check out the issue.

The Story: Will you catch any of these folks speaking with the devil?

The Review: These Vertigo showcases are proof positive that there really are an endless number of ways to look at the world, or even just one thing in it.  Both Ghosts and Time Warp offered stories that dealt with actual spirits and time-travel, but just as many stories that explored spirits and time as concepts, and a few that struck at the subjects on both a literal and figurative level.  It’s pretty amazing to see what the imagination will dream up when prompted.

Take Brett Lewis’ “Mars to Stay,” which in both substance and form resembles less like anything having to do with witches and more like a hard piece of science-fiction—the hardest kind, given how Lewis doesn’t take too many liberties with the fiction to deliver science that actually falls within the realm of possibility, if you have a cynical view of the way people work.  Maybe that’s where the witchcraft lies, in the slow, creeping way that the stranded crew’s psyches break down, as if infected with a curse.  Either way, it’s an impactful, haunting tale, despite having no clear connection to magical women whatsoever (and it doesn’t hurt that you get Cliff Chiang’s starkly sharp art illustrating the whole thing).

The Unwritten #53 – Review

By: Mike Carey (writer), Peter Gross, Mark Buckingham & Dean Ormston (pencils/finishes), Chris Chuckry (colors) and Todd Klein (letters)

The Story: The Fables characters come up with a plan to defeat Mr. Dark.

Review (with SPOILERS): I’ve been really hard on this crossover between The Unwritten and Fables.  The major problem being that it isn’t much of an Unwritten story.  It’s just a nice, cute story of Good battling Evil in the Fables universe….with the Tommy Taylor literary characters merely guest stars.  The story is much more about Frau Totenkinder, Fly, Bigbie Wolf, Mr. Dark and Snow White.

None of those problems has vanished in this issue and I still think it is a darn shame that The Unwritten has to finish its Volume 1 run with a paint-by-numbers Fables story.

However, there are a couple little glimmers of hope peeking through in this issue.  It’s nothing as deep as The Unwritten was before this crossover, but it shows that the series isn’t totally killing time until Volume 2 launches this winter.

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?

The Unwritten #52 – Review

By: Mike Carey (writer), Peter Gross (some layouts & inks), Mark Buckingham (some pencils), Dean Ormston & Inaki Miranda (finishes), Chris Chuckry (colors) and Todd Klein (letters)

The Story: The Fables miniseries being published under The Unwritten title continues.

Review (with SPOILERS): I’m amazed that this story-arc isn’t getting any better.  To put things in context, I just finished prepping some recent issues of The Unwritten for binding.  Doing that reminded me of those really powerful stories that we got over the last ~20 issues of The Unwritten and it really illustrated how vapid this crossover with Fables truly is.  Even though the first couple issues of this story have been poor, I hoped that at some point, we’d get back to some of the themes of The Unwritten, but it doesn’t seem likely at this point.

This is just a crummy story and a crappy publication gimmick.  The story within these first three Fables/Unwritten issues just isn’t very deep and it isn’t even much of an Unwritten story.  It’s Fables characters fighting a Fables villain….ergo it is a Fables story.  Furthermore, there isn’t much more to the story than Good Guys vs. Bad Guys.  The Unwritten is/was so much more than that.  It was never a story about a “bad guy” who was plotting to kill everyone.  It was about the power of stories themselves to alter reality.  Maybe that was too esoteric of a concept for the comic market because I don’t think The Unwritten has ever sold that well….and maybe that’s why they crossed it over with the much more popular Fables?

Fables #132 – Review

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

The Story: Joining the Round Table is a bit like trying out for Glee Club, except less singing.

The Review: I took an Arthurian legend class once, and the one thing I took away from it was how grim most of the stories ended up.  In every version of the Arthurian tales,* Camelot, which stands as a shining city of ideals against the Dark Ages, ultimately falls to mankind’s baser instincts.  The chivalric code and the Round Table are undermined by the fatal flaws of the knights, the court, and Arthur himself.  Virtue crumples in the face of human weakness.

So how shall we take Rose’s big idea to bring back the Round Table and to establish “a new order of knighthood, here at the Farm, dedicated to the ancient ideals of chivalry”?  Given how well that turned out last time, can we possible expect Rose to succeed where King Arthur failed?  Erratic at the best of times, it’s clear she’s working out this plan on the fly, though hopefully inspired by, well, hope.  If Rose has one advantage over the legendary king, it’s a sense of realistic expectations.  Her first table looks more like a setting for an AA meeting than a future Camelot, but, as she points out, “This is a start.”

The Unwritten #51 – Review

By: Mike Carey & Bill Willingham (writers), Peter Gross & Mark Buckingham (art), Russ Braun (finishes here and there), Chris Chuckry & Lee Loughridge (colors) and Todd Klein (letters)

The Story: The Fables – Unwritten crossover continues.

The Review (with SPOILERS): I wasn’t very keen on the first issue of this Fable/Unwritten crossover and judging from the comments on that review, nobody else seemed to love it either.  The main problems were (a) that Vertigo is a publisher that readers choose when they are sick of the crossovers that plague superhero comics and (b) that the story was more of an alt-Fables story than anything remotely connected to the ongoing story of The Unwritten.

As I read this issue, I kept hoping or thinking that we might see some little glimmer of The Unwritten lurking in the story.  Something like Pullman showing up in the background or some discussion by the Fables characters of a whale-like creature that feeds on stories (i.e. Leviathan) or even some sense that stories have been damaged and that is what allowed this alt-version of Fables to come to pass…….  Alas, this was not to be.  Our beloved Unwritten seems to be totally buried under the weight of Fables to the extent that you can’t see much trace of The Unwritten.  The only remnants of The Unwritten are the Harry Potteresque Tommy Taylor & Friends and the vampire, Savoy.  I’m not sure that any reader of The Unwritten has been champing at the bit to get a real story about Tommy Taylor (Anyone?  Anyone?) and of all the characters to carry over, why Savoy?