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Looking down at the handout, you read: Welcome to Fabletown. I am Miss Sarah, the Librarian of the Fabletown Library. I have compiled this handout to help people get better acquainted with Fables. If you haven't read issue #1, please refer to the free copy that I undoubtedly gave you with this letter. This welcome article was at the end of the first issue. But since it was missing in the free version, I typed it up for everyone to read. I've only made one note and added a cross-reference for ease. Otherwise it is as it was originally printed. -Miss Sarah, the Librarian ~~~
Welcome to Fabletown Or: Why do we need new stories with these old characters? By Bill Willingham Like many of my generation, I grew up with these stories – fables, fairy tales and folk tales – reading them and having them read to me (television had yet to take over as the primary children’s storytelling mechanism in those far gone days). Being a curious young tyke, possibly in anticipation of becoming a writer some day (though I seem to recall I most wanted to grow up to be a jungle lord, frustrated only by my parents who refused to give me up for adoption by apes), I had questions. Was the Big Bad Wolf who tried to eat the three piggies the same character who ate Red Riding Hood’s granny? If so, why didn’t he use his huff and puff powers against the ax-wielding woodsman? Could people really talk to animals back then? If so, did they apologize to the chickens they were about to behead for supper? Did they first give the poor cluckers five minutes to plead their case for mercy? Was it the same Prince Charming who married Snow White, Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty? I assumed it was, because they seemed identical, from one story to the next, and I knew from my comic books that characters could visit each other’s stories. Also, my favorite maternal uncle had been divorced and remarried too often to count, and everyone in the family always referred to him as the charming one. Perhaps there was some connection between charm and serial marriages (and of course I eventually found out there was – if not entirely of cause and effect, at least in opportunity). And I wondered at those who were privileged to add to the official canon of stories. Lewis Carroll created Alice and dropped her abruptly into his Wonderland. Baum did the same with Dorothy and Oz. C. S. Lewis upped the ante a bit by sending four children off to his Narnia. And Mr. Barrie even had his main character, Peter Pan, show up and kidnap the latest residents of his Never Land. And there were so many others, some still living, who constantly took whatever they liked from existing tales, changed them, added to them, or subtracted from them, in order to craft their own stories. Why were they allowed to do this? Since folk tales were made by all of those unknown folks who lived in the days of yore, and since yore was clearly long past, didn’t that mean the stories were officially closed? No more submissions to be accepted? But – and more important – if the door was still open to play with these old tales, where did one go to be allowed to participate? In my young whippersnapper days I was vitally concerned about the rules governing such things. What a pleasant surprise it was to eventually figure out that the rules were both simple and obvious. These were, after all, folk tales in every sense of the word. They belonged (and still do) to all folks, individually or collectively, and anyone who wanted to could alter or add to them at will. No special permission needed. If a giant mega-corporation wanted to draft these old characters into their animated films, making them sing (in painfully warbling falsettos) about the imminent arrivals of any number of handsome princes, that’s fine. If a competing giant entertainment conglomerate also decided to use the same characters in their movie (throwing in a new troll character or two) in order to tell fart jokes, that’s fine as well. It’s all good. And now it’s my turn. Okay, actually it’s been my turn for some time now, in that as long as I’ve been doing funnybooks (20 years and counting), I’ve been sneaking old fable characters in anywhere I could make them fit. But now, with Fables, it seems time to make a more formal (or at least obvious) stab at adding to the canon. It’s time to finally answer some of those questions I’d asked long ago, to my own satisfaction. Do we really need more stories
using these old characters? No, of course not. But we’re going to have them anyway, because I want to, and the Vertigo editors thought they were good enough that others might enjoy them as well. And in the final analysis, that’s the only justification for any new story – that someone might enjoy it. So there. I’m not doing this alone. Far from it. You’ve already seen a full issue’s worth of Lan Medina’s amazing artwork – deftly aided and abetted by Steve Leialoha’s masterful inking and Sherilyn van Valkenburgh’s colors. When Fables quickly takes its place among your short list of “must have” books every month, most of the credit (and glory) will belong to them. And if, by some miracle, you’re still sitting on the fence when Lan’s story arc finishes up, Mark Buckingham, whose story arc starts with issue 6, will finally seal the deal. I’ve seen some of the advance pages from those issues and he is doing, without question, the best artwork of his already remarkable career. Trust me on this. You’ll want to write letters about this series, and we want to read and respond to them. Since Vertigo comics no longer have letters pages, and since most of us (even a neo-Luddite like me) has a computer with an Internet connection, we’re going to have a letters page anyway – online. To participate, just go to my website at www.clockworkstorybook.com* and click on the “Join the Forum” link. You’ll see the Official Fables Letters Page forum and we’re in business. I’ll be there, usually daily, to read and respond to your letters, and we’ll even try to coax the artists, letterer and editor in there from time to time, to do the same. It’s also going to be the place to get advance Fables news. Go there now and join in. There’s also a new Fables forum on DC Comics website at www.dccomics.com and I’ll also be there every day or two to take your questions.
That’s about it for now. The artists, editors, publishers and myself would like to thank you for trying us out for at least this first issue, and we invite you to return again, each and every month, for a new issue of Fables. If you stick with is for a while, we’re confident you’ll be with is for a long time to come. It should be a fun trip. ~~~ *Note: the clockworkstorybook has been closed. All comments should be posted at Bill's new site. |
