Graphic Novel Review: Fables, Storybook Love, by Bill Willingham

Storybook Love is the third volume in Bill Willingham's award-winning comic book series Fables. Unlike the first two volumes, Legends in Exile and Animal Farm, Storybook Love includes several shorter storylines (covering issues 11-18 of the comic) which serve to flesh out the characters and world of the Fables.

The book begins with a one-shot story, "Bag O' Bones." The character Jack, who has already been identified as Jack and the Beanstalk, Jack the Giant-killer, and many other Jacks from folklore who share little more than a name, is now identified as the Mountain Jack of American folklore. In this story, he fights in the Civl War, finds love (or at least sex), and captures Death. It's a decent story, although not as interesting as Fables has been so far. Its most important role, however, as with the series's future one-shots, is to provide a breather before the start of the next intense storyline. adparams.getadspec('c_billboard1');

Next is a two-part story in which the Fables must deal with a reporter who claims to have discovered their secret. He's realized that the Fables have been living in a closed community in New York City and have not aged for centuries, and he's seen Bigby change back into his true form: the Big Bad Wolf. He's got it wrong, of course; he believes the Fables are a secret community of vampires. But still, Bigby and the others must find some way to prevent the reporter from drawing attention to them. Although this is only a two-part story, it is just as intense and surprising as the storylines before and after.

The volume's title story, the four-issue-long Storybook Love, comes next. Goldilocks, who has escaped justice for her insurrection at the Farm, is now shacking up with Bluebeard. In order to avoid discovery, Bluebeard enchants Snow White and Sheriff Bigby to go on vacation together, where Goldilocks will kill them. Here the relationship between Snow White and Bigby is developed - disturbingly, true to the previous Fables form - and we discover new things about the characters - for example, Bigby can "huff and puff" so well because he is the son of the North Wind. Storybook Love is the most important story in the volume for the way it sets future events in motion and changes the course of the Fables storyline, and it continues to turn the readers' expectations about fairy tales on their head.

The final story is another one-shot, "Barleycorn Brides." It serves as a breather between the intense Storybook Love arc and the future March of the Wooden Soldiers arc, but also to provide background information for the Liliputians. When these tiny people escaped their homeland, there were only men on the boat. Thumbelina revealed that she was grown from an enchanted barleycorn, and so the Liliputians began a quest for the barleycorns so they could grow themselves brides. It's a very sweet, fairy tale-like story - even the art is different, with less of the gritty realism that usually characterizes Fables - and provides a nice, upbeat ending for the volume before the depressing things to come in March of the Wooden Soldiers.