FABLES THE DELUXE EDITION
Friends had been after me to read this Vertigo series for a long time. Now that I have, I'm sorry. I don't read comics as they come out, preferring to wait for collections. Now I have to wait. This was great stuff. It didn't redefine my experience of comics but it was absolutely captivating. In fact, Bill Willinghams, About The Author blurb in the back of the jacket is worth the price of the book alone.
Fables collects a virtual village of our shared storybook heritage and turns the characters we all know and love and love to hate loose on the real world where they can experience the joys and sorrows of loving, losing and working for a living while they wait to get back to their beloved ever after and try to keep their existence as secret as possible from us mere mortals. But life in exile could be worse, especially when we readers get the benefit of watching the Big Bad Wolf play detective and Snow White play a bitchy bureaucrat. The narrative style is unclassifiable mixing fairy tale and noir elements into a gloriously garish soap opera where the once grand come down to earth to reveal themselves to be as petty as we are. And yet the story is so well told that we can be happy for them, care about them, root for them in a way that transcends mere genre.
This gets you issues 1-10 collecting both Legends in Exile and Animal Farm in a beautiful hardcover volume. You also get covers and sketchbook art. An added bonus is that if you choose to remove thejacket, the art is reprinted on the cover in glorious wraparound with no text. This has won too many awards to mention, any self respecting lover of dark fantasy (or fantasy period) will award it a place on their shelf.
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