Book-A-Day 2014 #274: Jack Of Fables, Vols. 8 & 9 by Willingham, Sturges, Akins, & Pepoy

Calling a comic-book series that ran fifty issues and was entirely collected into book form "failed" is stretching the term to its limits. But Jack of Fables did fail in a number of ways: it never quite found enough for its main character to do, it was often wishy-washy on who that main character was, it relied on charm and slickness to glide over rough patches (much like that main character), and it never really added anything interesting or useful to the world of its progenitor Fables. (The whole Literals thing was confusing, never completely clear, and didn't go anywhere interesting.)

But now it is over, and we can look back at the whole thing: it was amusing, in a silly, frivolous way. It was another Fables book to read for four years, while the main series was quite popular. It probably made decent-sized pots of money for DC Comics. It gave employment to a number of good comics creators for several years. And if its main character was casually sexist -- he was casually dismissive toward everyone, but more so to women -- well, at least no one ended up in a fridge, and several of the female characters had a fair bit of agency and control.

I've reviewed all of the volumes of Jack of Fables along the way, so really devoted readers could dig back into volumes one, two, three, four to six, six and a half, and seven. And now I'm back for the ending: the eighth volume is The Fulminate Blade and the final ninth is The End.

But, actually, the real story of Jack of Fables ended in that "six and a half" volume, the one that wrapped up the Literals plotline. If Jack had managed to run another forty issues, writers Bill Willingham and Matthew Sturges would probably have figured out other things to happen, but, as it turned out, volumes seven and eight wander around aimlessly, and the last is an exercise in vamping to gather all of the characters into one place for the big finale. (This is a particularly egregious example of writing for the trade: the entire last plotline really just exists so that it's long enough to be a book called The End; it's all entirely unnecessary and silly.)

Jack of Fables started out about the ne'er-do-well who was "Jack" in all of those fairy stories -- an entitled, slick jerk for whom everything worked out fine in the end and who was the quintessential anti-hero -- but he's sidelined in these last ten issues, as part of something that was probably originally planned as a longer-term plot development. Instead, the title character is his much more boring son, Jack Frost, who is young and naive and optimistic and crusading and dull in Fulminate Blade and old and crafty and optimistic and crusading and dull in The End.

So The Fulminate Blade is a bland epic fantasy adventure of the young Jack Frost, entirely separated from anything that happened earlier in the series. And then The End first bizarrely jumps about two decades into the future -- without visibly aging a single character, changing their relationships, or altering the "real world" in any way -- and then gathers basically every character still left alive. In the end, they all get to the hoard of the original Jack, who was turned into a dragon in volume seven, with various aims in mind. And then -- spoiler alert! -- they all die, in what I suspect Willingham and Sturges meant to be a parody of Walt Simonson's famous all-splash page Ragnarok issue of Thor. To say it doesn't work is to massively understate the case.

(The art -- mostly by the regular series team of penciller Tony Akins and inker Andrew Pepoy -- is sold mainstream-comics storytelling; nothing to get excited about, but always solid and dependable.)

If you never read Jack of Fables, you can safely ignore it. It never lived up to its promise, and almost entirely avoided the picaresque adventures of an amiable rogue that it could have been. If you stopped somewhere in the middle, I don't recommend throwing any more good money after bad. And if you stuck it all the way out to The End, you have my sympathies.

Book-A-Day 2014 Introduction and Index