Recent Reads

1001 Nights of Snowfall, by Bill Willingham, illustrated by divers hands.

I've greatly enjoyed the previous installments in Willingham's Fables. This series of graphic novels deals with the struggle and conflicts of various characters from folk tales who are forced to live in secret enclaves in our mundane world after having been driven out of their homelands by a mysterious and all-powerful Adversary. Some of them, like the rotund Old King Cole, haven't changed much from their pre-exile selves. Others, like Snow White, have been forced to change. After divorcing her unfaithful royal playboy husband and barely escaping with her life from the bloody disaster that wrecked her homeland, she's become a canny and hard-as-nails political operator. She's nominally second-in-command of the Fabletown government, but well known to be the real power behind Old King Cole's jovial rule.

One of the ongoing pleasures of the series is seeing Willingham point out the difficulties that these mythic characters would encounter in real life. Most obviously, those fables who cannot pass for mundane humans are exiled to a well-hidden rural "farm" which some regard as a prison. But what about Beauty and the Beast, for example? Her love removes his beastly curse and allows him to be human. But what if they have a fight? (Talk about codependency!) And what about Pinocchio, trapped forever in an immature boy's body by that irresponsible flibbertygibbet Blue Fairy?

But I digress.

This volume, which stands apart from the story sequence of the volumes so far, finds Our Heroine, Snow White, on a diplomatic mission to the Baghdad of the mythical Arabian Nights. She finds the sultan unreceptive to her repeated requests for an audience. When she does finally get an audience, she finds that the sultan has, shall we say, psychological issues with women. But of course if you've read the 1001 Arabian Nights, you already knew that, didn't you?

Poor Snow! How will she keep from joining the ranks of the Sultan's unfortunate wives? By telling stories, of course. And in those stories, illustrated by divers hands, we find out the backstories behind many of the Fables who appear in the other volumes of the series. (Although Willingham steals some of Scheherezade's thunder, his Snow White is at least gracious enough to return the reins to her at an appropriate point.)

This is not a comic for little kids, as several of the stories depict mature themes involving sex and violence. But it's a great collection of re-imagined fairy tales likely to be of interest to anyone who's enjoyed previous volumes in the series.