Serial comics do have to go on as long as they have an audience, even if the "real" story is over -- as Jack of Fables seemingly wrapped up its over-arching story of Literals and the Fate of the World in the last volume (the combined collection The Great Fables Crossover, which I reviewed as Book-A-Day # 129) -- and so The New Adventures of Jack and Jack
, the seventh collection of the Jack of Fables series, follows two so-far-independent stories.Jack -- aka Jack Horner, or Jack of the Fables, or just about every other Jack you remember from childhood stories -- is back on the road, with his sidekick Gary, who used to be the Literal Pathetic Fallacy, but now, apparently, isn't. (There's also the usual post-Crisis-style "I'm talking about things that I then claim I don't remember, to nudge the reader in the ribs" to establish the new status quo -- though, as I recall, worlds did not live or die, particularly, in the previous Jack of Fables story.) And Jack's son, the vastly younger, more innocent, and more conventionally heroic Jack Frost, is off on his own path, looking for adventure and to do good deeds. (Having recently rewatched the MST3K episode Jack Frost, I couldn't help but be struck by the "I must do good deed" parallels, though this young hero never gets a bear's head or gets into a stomping contest with Baba Yaga.)
So, after a single-issue story written by Chris Roberson and drawn by Tony Akins involving Jack, Lord of the Apes (which may have been a try-out or fill-in of some description, or possibly just a way to give the usual crew a month to catch up), that usual crew -- writers Bill Willingham and Matthew Sturges, artist Russ Brawn -- bounces between the separate adventures of our pair of Jacks. Jack the elder finds himself changing in unexpected ways, but does not actually develop an actual story in this volume. (In fact, there's a concluding caption that implies -- in the arch, generally misleading style the series has often used -- that he's been written out of the book entirely, but I entirely doubt that. He may disappear for a story arc or two, but he'll be back, like a bad penny.)
Young Jack Frost takes the inevitable pilgrimage to the seat of the former empire of the Adversary (where his nasty mother is entombed alive along with most of the Big Bads of that empire), renounces enough of her powers to keep his story interesting now that he's not battling someone who can rewrite the universe, and meets his own sidekick (Macduff, a wooden owl carved by you-can-guess-who). Frost and Macduff then have a minor adventure off on a random fable-world, which may or may not set the tone for the next stretch of this series.
It all looks very much like a reboot, substituting a very different protagonist and set of stories in the middle of a series -- but, then again, the original Jack was more the irritating grain of sand at the middle of a pearl than an enticing and engaging hero, so it's not as if we'll entirely miss him. We'll have to see where Jack of Fables goes from here -- I do have my suspicions that this "new direction" will not prove to be deeply enduring -- but getting away from Jack, even for a little while, is just fine.
Book-A-Day 2010: The Epic Index
No comments:
Post a Comment