Vertigo released the final chapter of the Fables comic book in July. The series that started with the quirky idea of refugees from fairytales, folklore and nursery rhymes all living together in a community in New York City eventually turned into an epic that spanned dozens of mythologies, launched several spin-offs/mini-series, and had a literal cast of thousands (if you take into account all the wooden soldiers and background mundies, that is).
So how do you wrap up all the threads of a thirteen-year story and still answer many of the “So whatever happened to…” questions in a single issue? Simple: you give it at least a hundred more pages and turn issue 150 into Fables: Farewell, the 22nd and final graphic novel of the series.
(Warning: I’ll do my best to not spoil much for this particular graphic novel, but I’m going to assume that you’ve read most of the story leading up to it.)
To start out with, the art in this book is top-notch. And not just Mark Buckingham, although his work is still amazing, and remained to the very end one of my favorite parts about this series. But the book includes a range of different artists, each focusing on a different character as we get a last look at some old favorites.
Having to cover so many characters is one reason why a graphic novel was really the only way to do the final issue. The first half of the book gives us the resolution to the main story (more on that later), but the second half is set up in tiny bite-sized chapters, each featuring a final story for one of the main characters. We’ve seen a lot of this kind of thing in previous collections, since the comic’s creators have tried to include one at the end of each of the last several issues. But there were so many still left to cover, and the one-to-two page stories would have made things way too choppy to split them into several additional regular-sized issues.
For the main story, well…the first 75 issues of Fables was really the high-water mark for me. Geppetto was such a multi-layered characters as an adversary, and it felt like the series lost a lot of focus after his reign ended. And I’ve always had a bit of a problem with how Bill Willingham ends his stories. It’s never that they’re bad endings, it’s just that sometimes the story feels like it needed something more.
The resolution of the conflict between Rose Red and Snow White was a little unsatisfying. I could never quite figure out Rose Red’s motivation. She obviously didn’t want to be at odds with her sister again, but being Rose Red she jumped into her role as Snow White’s nemesis with so much enthusiasm that you had to wonder how much she was really enjoying the thought of the death of her sister and (possibly) everyone she cared about. And if you can’t understand her motivation, then it’s hard to tell if what happens at the end is Rose Red’s “vindication” or “redemption.”
Oh, and the final one-on-one, winner-takes-all-which-won’t-be-much-since-this-will-tear-up-the-whole-world battle? Anti-climatic. And I don’t mean it was boring or it wasn’t exciting enough, I mean Willingham writes an ending that’s completely different from the one he’d been leading up to. It’s a bold choice, and I can respect an author who can pull off something like that, but like a lot of Willingham’s endings it makes you wonder if all of the lead-up was worth it.
I think a lot of this is just my personal preference speaking. Lots of people want to find out how it all ended , but I’ve always loved the stories that reveal how it all got started. So the graphic novel leading up to this one – where we finally get to learn the history of Snow and Rose’s mother – was a little more satisfying for me. (Also the deaths in that particular collection were a lot more shocking. Not a very high body count in this book, surprisingly.)
I wasn’t disappointed with all of Farewell, or even most of it, obviously. We finally get an explanation for the Summer Prophecy for each of Bigby and Snow White’s cubs (a couple of them I’d already figured out, but a few more were a nice surprise). Cinderella’s story ends triumphantly; she was one of my favorite of the fables, and while I was sorry to see her go, I can definitely say she gave as good as she got. Brandish meets his end, finally, good riddance to bad rubbish. And I’ve been enjoying the “Last (insert character) Story” segments that have been included at the end of the previous eight or so issues of the comic, so getting a final send-off for so many of the characters was a lot of fun.
Some of these segments showed that the characters don’t get a happily-ever-after, but that’s only because it’s made clear that adventures don’t end. It’s a major theme for the book that the stories don’t stop just because the series is ending. The reader gets a lovely goodbye (courtesy of a glorious double barrel gatefold picture by Buckingham featuring as many of the characters as he could fit on one page), but the cast-of-thousands story will go on for at least another thousand years, and since every one of them has stepped out of their original fairytale into this one, there’s nothing stopping them from stepping into someone else’s story next.
