Our contributor this week is another of those bloggers who needs little introduction – he is a sunny presence from Bulgaria: Harry Markov. He is the benevolent Overlord of Temple Library Reviews and also owns Through a Forest of Ideas, where he discusses the principles of writing. He can be found lurking on Twitter as @harrymarkov. Harry wants to talk to you today about Bill Willingham.

I am pretty much cheating by default, because Bill Willingham doesn’t write novels, but has a career in comic books. He has been writing comic books from as early as 1983, but you would probably recognize him with his current, on-going series FABLES published by DC-owned imprint Vertigo. If you don’t know FABLES, then you are missing out, a lot, because this is one of the few long-running series [with issue #1 published in 2002] to have kept its core creative team: writer Bill Willingham and artist Mark Buckingham. This of course translates to comic book gold as the formula has already been discovered and doesn’t have to be tampered with.

But I’m blabbering without context. Why should you read Bill Willingham? For starters Willingham has a special gift at re-imagining classic folklore and fairy tale characters, both iconic and minor. You’ll have the immense pleasure of seeing the Big Bad Wolf as a sheriff, Cinderella as a secret agent, Boy Blue as an office clerk, then a one-man army and a war veteran and The Frog Prince first as a janitor and then as a sort-of Messiah knight conqueror. On their own, these characters possess immense cool factor, because they represent the types of characters we hunt for in whatever form of entertainment we enjoy. These are the fairy tale characters for grown-ups, who have grown up reading or listening to fairy tales or legends.

Willingham is also successful at handling a humongous cast with over thirty characters, major and minor combined. This is a complicated task, because it means straining the creativity of the writer and the memory/attention of the reader. Character development is a minefield and the story could be bogged down with a lot of story arcs to showcase the cast. To use the familiar high-school analogy, Willingham aced all his tests and passed with flying colors in achieving this.

Among the many cleverly plotted and well paced story arcs I’ll highlight my all-time favorites I think will grab your interest. Goldilocks, The Three Bears and the Three Little Pigs instigate a political regime to overthrow the current Mayor of Fabletown. Baba Yaga posing as Little Red Riding Hood infiltrates Fabletown and leads an army of wooden puppets to fight against Fabletown. In the end she has to face Frau Totenkinder [German for dead children, a subtle, yet effective nudge that this is the witch from Hansel and Gretel]. Boy Blue arms himself with the Vorporal Sword and an enchanted cloak and storms the Homelands [where the Fables are from] to reign bloodshed. By the way, this is just the start of the tale!

To recap: Willingham has upgraded fairy tale characters, given them weapons and has pitted them against each other in smart scenarios with a great deal of mystery and intrigue. Why are you not picking this up?

Masked edited by Lou Anders

… In Masked, superheroes and supervillains move off the illustrated page and into the realm of pure prose. Sometimes this works beautifully, and sometimes it doesn’t work at all, making this anthology uneven. The best stories are those in which the notion of super beings is taken with the utmost seriousness; the weakest are those that seem to mock the tradition…. Still, the ratio of good stories to bad stories is high. Even so, the stories started to seem repetitive to me after I’d read 200 pages, and I was still only halfway through the book. There are only so many things you can say about these fictional beings, and most of them have already been said in comic form. It’s hard to see that this book of prose really adds anything to what one can find in illustrated form from DC or Marvel. Read the rest.

Down the Mysterly River by Bill Willingham

Fair warning: This review of Bill Willingham’s Down the Mysterly River will contain a bit of a spoiler. I usually try to avoid them, but in my mind the “spoiler” is telegraphed so clearly and so early (so much so, I’m not even sure it’s meant to be a surprise) that revealing it doesn’t do much harm. So don’t read past the second paragraph if you would prefer to avoid the spoiler. Down the Mysterly River opens with a young boy scout, Max the Wolf, waking up in a strange wood with no memory of how he got there. Using what he calls his “Five Most Important Rules of Detection” that stood him in good stead in earlier adventures such as the Mystery of the Gruesome Grizzly, Max tries to figure out where he is and how he got there. Things turn quickly stranger and darker, however, when he comes across a talking badger — a warrior named Branderbock who recalls his own death and theorizes he and Max are in the afterlife. Read more »