Bill Willingham's Modern Fables

This story originally appeared in PW Comics Week on September 26, 2006 Sign up now!

by Chris Arrant, PW Comics Week -- Publishers Weekly, 9/26/2006

Bill Willingham's acclaimed series Fables chronicles the adventures of well-known fairy tale characters after their happily-ever-after moments. The series recounts the modern-day adventures of characters like Snow White, the Big Bad Wolf and others as they struggle for their homeland against an unknown and unseen adversary. The majority of the "Fables," as they're called, live in exile in an underground community in the heart of New York City called Fabletown.

Coming in October, Willingham's newest work, Fables: 1,001 Nights of Snowfall, is an original graphic novel which takes Snow White to the fabled pantheon of the Arabian Nights in an attempt to gain their assistance in reclaiming their homeland. Instead, she's captured and forced to entertain the local sultan with a series of stories in the tradition of Scheherazade to keep the executioner's axe at bay. These stories run the gamut from horror to comedy. They are about the fables themselves and bridge the gap between the fairytales and the modern-day events of the comic-book series. Artwork on the stories is by some of the brightest comics talent working today—Charles Vess, Brian Bolland, John Bolton, Michael Wm. Kaluta, James Jean, Jill Thompson and others.

So far there have been seven trade paperback collections of the Fables comic book series. In an interview with PWCW, Willingham talked about producing a standalone original graphic novel and the original comic book series.

PW Comics Week: For those unfamiliar with Fables, please explain the series and the graphic novel?

Bill Willingham: Briefly, Fables is an ongoing comic book series about all sorts of people you've heard about before: Snow White, Prince Charming, the Big Bad Wolf, all kinds of characters like that, from fables, folklore and fairytales. The premise is that these "Fables," as they call themselves, are still alive today and living in an underground secret society in New York because they've been driven out of their magical homelands by a terrible being known only as the Adversary.

In Fables: 1,001 Nights of Snowfall, we have a larger form, 144-page story about the early lives of all of these characters. Sort of bridging the gaps between the last times you've read about these characters, in their original stories, and when we pick up their stories again in the Fables series. These stories take place somewhere around the 17th- and 18th-centuries, with little looks at each of these characters and how they made the transition from fairytales to what they’ve become when we pick up the comic series.

PWCW: Your main protagonist for the book is Snow White. People tend to know her from storybooks and movies; how would your describe your interpretation of her?

BW: Well, Snow White is basically a very enclosed, self-reliant woman. One of the reasons is that, as we learn in her fairy tale, many of the people whose job was to love and care for her treated her very badly. Her stepmother was a wicked witch who tried to kill her, and sent the woodsman to try to chop her head off, and things like that.

What we've established in the comic series is that, after all of these traumas and dramas, the handsome Prince Charming took her away to live happily ever after. We went on to show that the handsome Prince Charming was a bit of a rake and was great at wooing women, but really really bad at the tough business of maintaining a marriage. So not long after the marriage was consummated, Prince Charming was caught in bed with Snow White's sister, Rose Red, the marriage broke up and hilarity ensues.

But what we get from this isthat Snow White is someone who keeps getting betrayed by people. Some readers have described her as a very "stick up the butt" kind of person, but I would not go that far; I would say cautious and reserved.

In Fables: 1,001 Nights of Snowfall, Snow has worked in the underground Fables government for some time and is sent as an ambassador to the fable lands of the Arabian Nights" characters, to try and enlist them as an ally in the war against the Adversary.

PWCW: Tell us more about the Arabian Nights pantheon that Snow White will be meeting.

BW: Well, in the graphic novel we only really learn about one of them, because as soon as Snow White gets to the Arabian lands, she falls into the story of Scheherazade, where the character has to tell interesting stories every night or her head gets chopped off. I found a way to put Snow White in that same predicament, and she is kept prisoner for 1,001 nights, hence the title. With a death sentence hanging over her head, unless she can come up with an interesting story every night. Now the conceit or clever little thing about this book is that the individual stories that in this hardcover are the stories she's telling the Sultan to keep herself alive every night. And those stories are the background stories of the various characters in the Fables cast.

For example, we learn why Snow White doesn't like anyone to mention the seven dwarves. We learn how the Big Bad Wolf got to be big and bad. We learn what happened to the frog prince after his "happily ever after" moment, things like that. There's some longer stories, some shorter stories; some sad, some comedic. But a nice mix of stories that is about all of the characters of the Fables series.

PWCW: For regular readers, this original graphic novel promises to answer some questions brought up in the regular series. How does life in Fabletown and the fable existence differ in the two works?

BW: The main difference of course, even in the graphic novel, is we've established that they're living in the New York area in an underground capacity. It was first called New Amsterdam and then became New York. But they pass as humans, and if you meet them on the street, you'd have no idea they're this magical character. The main difference is that during the time of this graphic novel, the Fables still don't know who the Adversary is and they haven't really pinned down any way to overcome the Adversary. They want to go back to their magical homelands. They're still looking for ways to do that in a military fashion.

By the time the Fables series has started, they've sort of given up the idea of a quick military overthrow of the Adversary. They haven't given up on it entirely, but sort of in an abstract way. They want their homelands back, but they're pretty much resigned to the fact that they don't have enough manpower and might not to succeed in a military way. That's one difference.

We tried to do a book here that could be entertaining and informative to the regular Fables readers but at the same time be an instant jumping-on point for new readers who don't need to know anything about the comic series to understand and enjoy this book. I'm not in a position to determine myself if we've succeeded.

We decided to use the introduction to catch up new readers on everything they needed to know in order understand this book from the regular series.And that took all of a single paragraph, or maybe even less than that. So you don't really need to be a veteran of the Fables comic series to understand this. That's trumped by the fact that these stories take place before the first issue of the Fables comic series, which is now up to 50 or so issues.

PWCW: Let’s talk about the talented artists you work with; which are the standout pieces?

BW: One of the nicest things about writing comic books is that it's essentially a visual medium. Most of the storytelling is done in the pictures, with the words backing that up. The nice thing is that I write these scripts and by themselves they don't make an effective story because if you just publish the scripts you get, at best, half the information you need. I write these scripts, I set them up, and over the next year these wonderful pieces of artwork start coming back to me. It's like Christmas every other day or so.

Shelly Bond, the editor of Fables, and I spent some time as it was being written making a wish list of all the wonderful artists working in the comics business today. That turned out to be a huge list. So we just went down the list and offered the stories to cartoonists who might or might not be interested. And it turned out that a lot of really terrific artists were interested. Part of it was that they didn't have a long commitment. So we were able to get a lot of illustrators simply perhaps because they had a love for the Fables series and thought they could commit to at least one story.

Some of the outstanding things are by James Jean, our multiple Eisner Award-winning cover artist, who is doing his first interior work ever in this book. He's doing the Frog Prince story, and it turns out to quite a tear-jerker.

PWCW: Did any particular artist influence the way you wrote their story?

BW: Sure. The best example is the story Mark Buckingham illustrated. Mark Buckingham is the most prevalent illustrator of the regular Fables series, so we wanted him to be included in this collection. And he wanted to do some painted work for I think the first time in his career. I wrote specifically to his strengths, things he liked to draw, and avoided many of the things he prefers not to. That's one example where his story is definitely tailored specifically for him.

PWCW: How did the idea for the graphic novel come to be, and how long has it taken to get it from soup to nuts.

BW: The main problem is that the damned writer took forever to finish his part of it, so we can heap all sorts of embarrassment on him for taking as long as he did [laughter]. That said, Fables was doing well and the lead editor of Vertigo, Karen Berger, simply asked one day if I would be interested in writing an original graphic novel of Fables. Which of course I was, because I wanted to use this as a chance to work with artists I probably would never get to work with under other circumstances.

I knew pretty quickly that it would be a number of different stories illustrated by a number of different wonderful artists. Coming up with a way to link all the short stories together was the biggest task. The book itself, in one sense, is all one story. It's all about the adventures of Snow White in the Arabian lands and how she gets out of a really tough predicament. But it's also about the nature of storytelling, and the joy of telling stories themselves. In the middle of one artist's story, the characters start telling their own story and we get another artist in the middle of that to illustrate that, then go back to the original artist when they finish. So it's a very unapologetic celebration of the nature of storytelling.

PWCW: Fables has been a great second act for your comics career. Back when you were doing the initial scripts for Fables, did you think it would blossom into what it is today?

BW: Possibly. When the idea finally occurred to me, I'd been using fables and folklore characters in just about every project before the actual Fables series.

PWCW: You did a series of prose novels under the banner of Coventry....

BW: Prose novels, comic book characters. Even in my first superhero work, folklore and fairytale characters kept showing up. So I think I've been circling the idea of Fables for a long time. When Fables actually occurred, everything fell into place. I think one of the benchmarks for knowing you've got a good idea is when that happens. One of the clichés is that to sell a story in Hollywood, you need to be able to sum it up in one line. The Fables series is an easy high concept. Once you say it, anyone can get it.

As far as the degree of success, I didn't understand that it would catch on so well. At that stage of my career I was pretty much getting used to coming out with works that would get some critical attention but not a lot in the way of sales. So that was a surprise to get those [sales] for once after many years.

PWCW: Do you have any plans on an ending to Fables?

BW: Nope. No time soon. Too many stories to tell.

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