Eh, it's just working with Fairytales, really.

Yeah, that's how I saw it.

Personally, I'm all about Bigby Wolf, though. Him and Rose Red.

I'm definitely with you on Bigby, but I haven't got much of a sense of Rose. We've seen much more of Snow.

I like Rose too, and was very sad when Weyland bought it -- because of her. Bigby rocks the house, though, and I don't just think that's leftover Logan-lust talking.

I don't like the stories that are narrated. No damned reason a comic should fall down there, but that's pretty much the ones that are resoundingly flat for me. Everything happening in the here and now pleases me.

Everything happening in the here and now pleases me.

I'm with you. I wasn't as big a fan of the "back then" stories (with the exception of The Last Castle, the flashback to the day the Fables left the Homeland).

Even The Last Castle didn't do it for me. The Thumbelina story, the WWII one -- big old YAWN.

Comparing anyone to Gaiman and Moore is a tad unfair, don't you think? I mean they're more than a little exceptional.

I don't know... anyone writing Vertigo comic books specifically dealing with how figures out of myths and fairytales interact with the modern world would be pretty naive if he didn't expect to be held up for comparison. Though perhaps my own impression that Willingham has the ego that Gaiman and Moore have actually earned and yet thankfully don't possess makes me less than sympathetic.

Though perhaps my own impression that Willingham has the ego that Gaiman and Moore have actually earned and yet thankfully don't possess makes me less than sympathetic.

There is this.

I think it might be an issue of approach, when comparing the two. Neil started out Sandman as a tale of fairly unique characters who inhabit their own fantasy realm and then had them interact with and come to embody certain mythological/fairytale figures as part of the series' progression. Fables is kind of going about it the opposite direction, taking an established fairytale mythos (several of them, actually) and trying to place them all within a brand-new conceptual space. It's bound to create some disconnect when it comes to the way things develop.

I was in Half-Price Books, and they have a 2005 Batman wall calendar of art from Hush. I may need to own it.

Okay, so now that I've read IC#7, everyone was right. Or at least the people I remember. What I did like most about the issue is that the reveal was almost throwaway, and they spent more time on emotional fallout, though not near enough.

Still a women in refrigerators story?

Still a women in refrigerators story?

Well, perhaps not your usual variety of one, but I think it's hard to argue that it was on a few levels. Jean Loring turning out to be the killer, for instance, made pretty much the only female character in the book with a voice a psychopath. (Although she's had a long history of mental illness, very little of which was actually addressed in the book.) Still, I liked the resolution quite a bit, and that the events drove different characters in different directions--some closer, like the JLAers, some shattered, like poor Timmy. I like that the stage seems set for a new Atom story, and even new Elongated Man stories. I like the sense from the end that Ralph, ultimately, will survive. Still, the story's treatment of women is its most serious flaw.