Comic Review – Fairest by Bill Willingham (writer) and Phil Jimenez (art)

 

Fairest-Wide-Awake-by-Bill-Willingham

Does this man never run out of ideas? I consider myself a fairly creative person, and I write a lot, but Bill Willingham creates at an astounding rate, and happily, this latest addition to the Fables canon, is top notch.

This one combines the stories of Sleeping Beauty and Ali Baba, along with a snippy and somewhat tricksy, Djinn, to great and hilarious effect. It covers all the things you expect from a good Fables stories.

The characters are wise beyond their humble beginnings, sharing wisecracks and insults, the women are strong willed, strong minded, and never averse to taking control, the art is stunning and drives the story on, and the story itself is compelling and filled with twists and turns.

I love Fables because it never takes the easy route, or goes for the obvious choice. This story is no different, zigging when you expect it to zag, and throwing the heroes into all sorts of scrapes.

If you read Fables, you won’t be disappointed with this, nor with the follow up, written by a different author, and in a very different style, telling the tale of Rapunzel in a very different way to the recent Disney movie!

If you don’t read Fables, then this is an excellent introduction. It captures a great deal of the magic and atmosphe

The thing that makes the works of Bill Willingham so entertaining to read

Bill Willingham, another comic writer and the creator behind the wonderful Fables series. There are a handful of authors working within the comics medium who are, to coin a phrase, treasure troves of ideas. People you can’t imagine get much sleep because every hour they wake up and have to jot something down, some new nugget of storytelling wonder.

Bill Willingham is one of those. From the very concept behind Fables to the bizarre self-referential world of Jack and on to the shorts he created for House of Mystery, he always manages to make stories just a little more original than most. With either an unexpected twist or simply taking the road less travelled he never seems to follow the well-worn paths of story telling cliché.

This kind of thing is tougher to emulate; the simple creation of ideas isn’t easy to copy, but when I come to a part in my book where I have options within my plot frame, I ask myself, ‘What would Bill do?” My books seem to have more goblins in them now than I originally intended, but it’s a start.

There are a lot of other writers who deserve a mention here, and I’m hoping to write about them in the future.  However, I must just mention Robert Kirkman, mostly for his ridiculous work rate and, as with Bill Willingham, apparently endless supply of ideas.