Comic Book Review: Jack of Fables, Vol. 2, Jack of Hearts

Jack of Hearts is the second volume of Jack of Fables, collecting issues #6-11. The graphic novel includes two story arcs, the titular Jack of Hearts, in which Jack makes it big in Vegas and battles Lady Luck, and Jack Frost, a two-part story in which Jack tells the others of his past history with the Snow Queen. Although the story in the main arc is moving quite slowly thanks to overuse of the reset button, the short tale of Jack Frost has a haunting twist more reminiscent of the original Fables. adparams.getadspec('c_billboard1');

At the beginning of the previous volume, The (Nearly) Great Escape, Jack had left his former life as a movie producer and was captured by Revise. He escaped, and set out to Vegas with Gary (the Pathetic Fallacy) to make it big in Vegas. He wins money, marries, inherits a casino, and eventually winds up just the way he started: with nothing. This tendency so far to "reset" everything at the end of an arc, returning Jack to where he started, makes it difficult for the story to progress.

It also makes the comic's female characters even more useless and objectified than they already are. Jack's wife dies, for example, for no reason other than to move along the plot so Jack can inherit a casino. Gary's mannequin love, Noelle, is brought to life and then abandoned, but somehow it's a happy ending because some socially inept geeks get to have sex. And in Jack Frost, Jack's sexually assaulting multiple women because he feels entitled to sex from anyone he wants is apparently supposed to be comedy gold. It seems that women in the Jack of Fables universe can only be uninteresting and disposable, villainous, or both.

Jack Frost, however, is a tale which exposes the less "heroic" parts of Jack's past. The first part of the story is shoddily written, with Revise and Priscilla Page interrupting to break the fourth wall and explain parts of the story which the writers couldn't be arsed to integrate. (It's supposed to be funny, I imagine, but in that case it was unsuccessful.) The second part, however, reveals how he callously killed people who wanted to punish him for his womanizing, and how his lying and abandonment of the Snow Queen and their child led her to become evil. In a comic where nearly all of the "heroes" have a dark past, it's good to see that Jack isn't any better than the rest of them, and also that his flaws are being more explicitly revealed as such.