Children's & Household Tales: 'Fables'

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BACK IN 2002, armed with an idea inspired by his childhood adoration for Rocky and Bullwinkle's fractured fairy tales, Bill Willingham hatched a new universe in the comic book "Fables" (Vertigo/DC Comics).

Its inhabitants were the vast characters of folklore — a rogues gallery that runs that gamut from the obvious standbys (The Big Bad Wolf, Snow White) to the more obscure (Bufkin from "The Oz Chronicles," Reynard the Fox).

DC Comics recently released "The Good Prince," the 10th bound collection of the "Fables" series. The story focuses on Flycatcher, a Fabletown janitor who is suddenly faced with a new, more powerful identity. Willingham, who based the character off the frog prince, was somewhat apprehensive to give such a hefty story arch to a "Fables" character who, up until this point, had been relegated to the background.

"There was a part of me that wondered whether the reader would put up with a single storyline for so long," said Willingham. "It was also a challenge finding a way to break the length to DC. I extended the length about three times. I wanted to give it the length it needed to unfold, although I think DC hemmed and hawed a little bit when it wound up turning into nine issues. By the end, it was exactly the length it needed to be."

While Fables still exists within the standard single-issue-comic format, Willingham acknowledges that as the popularity of the series has risen, he's started to focus on the bigger picture.

"I do want to make sure each individual issue of Fables ends on some dramatic, possibly cliffhanger moment so that the issue itself has a little bit of a self-contained story," said Willingham. "With that being said, more often than not now I write the stories with the collection format in mind."

Willingham is also writing with stand-alone graphic novels in mind. He confirmed that another "Fables" graphic novel has been completed — the first was 2006's "1001 Nights of Snowfall" — but he remained tight-lipped about the details of the project, which will officially be unveiled next month at San Diego's famed Comic-Con. He was, however, able to divulge a bit about the circumstances surrounding the creation of the book.

"I wrote the first half of it ... in the same room, on the same desk, that Kipling invented Mowgli and 'The Jungle Book.' I stayed at the Kipling mansion in Vermont, which might have been the two most wonderful weeks of my life," said Willingham. "I think the greatest problem of my time there was the time lost when I just sat there like a dumb idiot saying to myself, 'Woah, look at where I am.'"

Willingham cautioned not to expect too much of that Kipling inspiration to bleed into the storyline, however.

"The book was outlined pretty rigidly before I got there, so I couldn't really deviate much, but I definitely wrote one scene in there as a nod to where I was and what my circumstances were."

As for "Fables" making the inevitable transition from fanboy favorite to cineplex blockbuster, Willingham seems to find the prospect a relative impossibility, but not for the finicky reasons you'd expect. After a series of near misses involving a revolving door of studio executives, Willingham seems genuinely baffled regarding the processes and procedures necessary to get a project green-lit.

"My brushes with Hollywood have all been so completely surreal," he said. "I have no idea how anything, even the smallest possible thing, can get made in that town. There has been a growing realization that anything makes it to become a TV show or a movie is some sort of bizarre miracle. Boy, do those people love taking meetings!"

Regardless of its movie franchise potential, avid readers can take heart that Willingham and "Fables" are in it for the long haul. Willingham drolly explained that "the possibilities are spinning off pretty rapidly. If 'Fables' were to end, I don't think it'd be because we ran out of ideas. Sales may go bad; I may walk in front of a bus ... but lack of ideas, probably not."

Written by Express contributor Matthew Siblo
Images courtesy Vertigo/DC Comics