Right, I’m feeling a bit cranky and unreasonable so it’s time to say something negative. And right now I’m about to dis on something beloved by many: the comic series Fables, by Bill Willingham.
Now, I was predisposed to like this when it first appeared. I heard good things, and some of my friends liked it a lot. The premise was neat: fairy tale characters hide in the modern world from a mysterious Adversary. The creator, Bill Willingham, had been involved with seminal supers RPG Villains & Vigilantes, to boot. And, of course, the Vertigo comic stable was looking a bit thin after the conclusion of Sandman, Preacher and Transmetropolitan.
Did I mention this comic was widely praised? Per Wikipedia, it has won four Eisner awards, including Best New Series and (three times) Best Serialized Story. It won’t take you much Googling to find enthusiasm for the title throughout the comics blogosphere.
(Also, I didn’t have to pay anything to read it, because my brother bought it.)
So, with all signs pointing to a favorable response, I sat down to read the first trade. And I was surprised to mind myself not particularly impressed. Figuring this was when Willingham was still settling in, I stuck with it, and read the next few trades. And I was still not impressed.
I have since read almost the entire series. You can’t say I haven’t given it a solid go. Even so, it fails to impress me to this day. In fact, I’ve reached my ultimate conclusion on the matter of Fables: It just isn’t very good.
It isn’t very good because Bill Willingham can’t structure his stories. They are uniformly badly paced, from the movement through the page to the movement through a multi-issue arc. There are many wonderful ideas in this series, and characters change and grow in pleasing ways, but the way the stories are told is so hamfisted and frustrating that I just can’t ignore it. It’s like hearing someone tell a joke who isn’t very good at joke-telling, and they can’t get the rhythm of it right, and they keep leaving bits out or spending too long on bits that don’t turn out to mean anything, and they hammer the punchline really hard and do it slightly wrong as well.
The stories aren’t well-told, and sometimes they aren’t even good stories. Often they are indulgent and clumsy. The gender politics have caused uproar, and the fictional world isn’t remotely plausible even on its own terms.
I suppose this is me going all Emperor’s New Clothes on Fables. Despite the massive popular acclaim, it is Not Good Comics. The amassed internets disagree with me, so all I can do is hope that the passage of time will prove me entirely correct. I have complete confidence that it will.
(If you like Fables more than I do, feel free to comment and say why Willingham’s storytelling is worth your hardearned money. You’ll be completely wrong, of course, but do feel free.)
7 thoughts on “Fables is not very good”
Comments are closed.
Willingham has built a following based around two earlier series. The Elementals, which, when it was coming out, broke all the rules. One small example : the heroes are imprisoned by the US government for research purchases, and they are broken out by one of their father’s, using lawyers and a habeus corpus suit. It was, also, apart from Rick Vietch, the nastiest of the superhero comics. People died. Nastily. When you least expected it. Of course as all the heroes only had powers because they had already died….
lovely examination of the… difference between them and normals.
Willingham’s second big hit was Ironwood, which spun-off from Elementals (and was also the second and only Theatrix supplement) , starring the son of a dragon trying to stay alive long enough to become one while screwing his way through a fantasy landscape complete with graphic depiction of the sex.
I haven’t read more than a couple issues of Fables I’d agree with you that unlike the earlier series where you could forgive his sightly awkward art and storytelling because of the ground-breaking nature of the work and all the ideas, Fables seems to have one main idea, isn’t ground-breaking and doesn’t have much sex, but still I’d say it was better than the average Marvel or DC, so to people used to that it would be good, and that IMO explains why it has good reviews.
🙂
While I agree Fables is in no way high art, the primary appeal of it for me is that it’s fun. I agree that Willingham’s storytelling isn’t great. In fact, most of the time it feels like he has the vaguest idea of where it’s going and just makes it up issue to issue. There are a few examples of storylines where it really feels like he had no idea where the story was going at the start.
But it’s fun. As a serial fiction it makes for a pleasant, breezy read, populated with characters and ideas that keep me involved and entertained. Yes, it receives undeserved acclaim as some kind of new Sandman (a title which itself was wildly overrated), but that doesn’t mean it’s not worth reading. I find it to be a nice treat on a monthly basis (and as a part of work I read a *lot* of dire, dull shit), like Vertigo junkfood.
You want to try an excellent new Vertigo series, by the way, pick up Scalped.
Andrew: So, in other words, reading between the lines of what you’re saying – it’s just not very good, right?
(I have made up my mind and mere sensible argument cannot sway me!)
It’s light fantasy. How good can it be?
It’s not good in a serious, literate sense, but it’s good entertainment. I’m sure you – like most of us – have happily skipped like a flat pebble of escapism over murky critical waters for media consumed in entertainment’s name in the past. Works that, like certain metaphors, don’t bear up under the weight of close scrutiny, but work on an entirely superficial level. And that’s what Fables is to me. I can’t live on popcorn, but it’s nice once a month.
(Unfortunately I have to spend each month consuming everything from gourmet cuisine to popcorn to greasy hamburgers to downright dogshit. Eh, it’s a living.)
Consider that as a work of fairy tales for grown-ups written in the last 30 years, it is unusual for _not_ being a metaphor for sexual abuse, the Holocaust, dysfunctional families or some other dire undercurrent perhaps best left deeply hidden in the human psyche.
Speaking of over rated books, here’s a big shout of “I hate you” to Karen Joy Fowler’s _The Jane Austen Book Club_. It sucks. The cover, the title, and the review quotes all lead one to believe that it shares some qualities of a Jane Austen domestic comedy, such as wit, humour, and a wry sympathy for the human condition. What you get is a domestic tragedy with mainly unlikeable central characters, squicky flashback scenes and an ending that dribbles into nothing. Oh, and some textual criticism of Austen’s books. A book that is clever and deeply unenjoyable.
Never read Fables, but after your post I decided to give it a try. I suppose that’s ironic. Maybe not: I wanted to see if it was crap, not to see if it was good.
Didn’t get very far – partly because the concept doesn’t interest me, at least in the way it’s executed. What struck me as dull in the execution is probably what makes it a Vertigo title. I’d expect the concept would interest me if it wasn’t such a tight fit with their stable. I’m in no position to rate the writing with regard to pacing etc, but the dialogue struck me as passable – occasionally wordy, but not awkwardly so.
You may well be right that Willingham can’t structure his stories, but when I read your description of this, I wanted to ask “can’t, or won’t?” What you describe could just as easily be an account of, say, Joseph Conrad, or since you compare it specifically to the telling of a joke, Steve Martin. And in both those examples, that’s what they’re rated *for*.
If there’s a universal grammar of narrative from which all deviation is failure, it’s not at this level. This is too narrow, rather like the fad for the “three unities”. For example, Mr S’s description of the story looking as if it were made up from issue to issue – this in itself can be an enjoyable form of entertainment, and the seat-of-the-pants aspect, the relationship between writer and reader where the writer is *signalling* this to the reader, can be part of the fun. Of course, if you set out to produce a “well-made” story with an evenly modulated pace and no hint of improvisation, then the criticisms are apt.