Rocky and Bullwinkle‘s “Fractured Fairy Tales” segment, in fact, deserves some credit for setting Willingham on the path to Fables. Willingham explains that from his earliest days, he’s “been a listener to fairy tales and folklore, long before I could actually read them for myself.” “I suppose it was only a matter of time before I realized these were obviously the types of stories I was interested in telling,” he says. Many subsequent pre- Fables projects exhibited Willingham’s desire to incorporate fairy tales, mythology, and/or folklore into his stories, such as Pantheon and Coventry. The Elementals, his series from the early ‘80s, published by the now-defunct Comico, is still held in high regard by many fans. Willingham may have seemed to burst onto the scene with Fables, but, in fact, he’s a veteran writer -and artist -in the field.

“I wouldn’t be unhappy at all if this turned out to be my life’s work,” he says. That said, I don’t want to scare new readers off…every single issue of Fables is still in print and available, collected into 12 (and counting) graphic novels.”Īt this point, Willingham sees no sign of the series stopping. “Any number of dramatic changes and upheavals have occurred in the odd lives of our cast. “This is not at all a static tale,” says Willingham. Originally slated to end around issue 75, Willingham and principal artist Mark Buckingham have kept it going, finding further veins from those classic stories to mine for their own clever spin. “Now, these refugees have banded together in an underground community in New York City.” “All of the folklore and fairy tale characters from the stories you know so well, Cinderella, Prince Charming, Snow White, the Big Bad Wolf…are still alive today, living in our world, after having been chased out of their own very magical worlds by the vast armies of a wicked conqueror known only to them as The Adversary,” explains series author Bill Willingham of the initial premise.

Launched in 2002, the series about fugitive figures from folklore has not only garnered a legion of fans as it nears 100 issues, it’s spun off an ongoing series ( Jack of Fables), a graphic novel ( 1001 Nights of Snowfall), a novel ( Peter & Max), and two affiliated miniseries ( Cinderella, The Literals). Perhaps no comic book series in the 2000s achieved the consistent quality and creativity of DC/Vertigo’s Fables.

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