REVIEW: Fables: ‘Animal Farm’ by Bill Willingham

Fables: Ani­mal Farm (2003) writ­ten by Bill Will­ing­ham is the sec­ond vol­ume in an ongo­ing series that fol­lows a bunch of dis­placed fables who live in upstate New York. The series is being pub­lished by Vertigo.

This series is good — so far. Also, let’s not be too quick to judge this series by the cover art. This is a story for adults because it has plenty of polit­i­cal intrigue and sus­pense, cussing, vio­lence, and sex­ual innuendo.

“Fables: Ani­mal Farm” has a pretty firm plot. The fables who now call New York home, were forced out of their home­land by some­one named The Adver­sary. So they aban­doned their homes and for­tunes and cre­ated a new secret com­mu­nity in New York which is led by King Cole and his deputy, Snow White. Fables who look human enough are allowed to live in the city or “Fable­town” as they refer to it while the non-human fables reside out­side the city, on the ani­mal farm.

The story opens with Snow White mak­ing her bi-annual trip to the farm. This trip is work for her but she decides to bring along her lit­tle sis­ter, Rose Red, in the hopes that the two can mend fences and get along again. Rose Red is doing com­mu­nity ser­vice for her role in another event that hap­pened in the first vol­ume. I won’t go into that here. The women arrive at the farm and real­ize that the non-human fables are orga­niz­ing a rev­o­lu­tion to gain back what they lost from The Adversary.

Snow White is against it, of course, and she has a group of loy­al­ists back­ing her up but the rev­o­lu­tion­ar­ies seem deter­mined to go through Snow White and who­ever else that stands in the way of them win­ning their land back. Win­ning their land back is one thing but the non-humans also feel slighted and impris­oned on the land and don’t like that some fables live in the city while they have to live on the farm. So they’ve armed them­selves to the teeth, thwarted the admin­is­tra­tor of the farm while spread­ing inflam­ma­tory rhetoric to increase their numbers.

The events in this story spans a year and it was com­pletely unpre­dictable for me. I had no idea that the story would end the way that it did. Bigby Wolf, the law enforcer of fable­town makes some brief appear­ances only because he’s for­bid­den to enter the ani­mal farm because of some char­ter agree­ment. When he learns of Snow White’s endan­ger­ment, he sends in rein­force­ments led by Lit­tle Boy Blue and his pet mon­key plus Blue­beard and Prince Charm­ing. As an aside, my favorite char­ac­ters are Snow White and Bigby Wolf.

This series is great. A good sound plot, some adult humor that fit in nicely with a well fleshed out cast of char­ac­ters. Snow White may run Fable­town with plenty of atti­tude to spare but often she has moments where she comes across as being quite dense espe­cially in mat­ters of life and death. Some of the humor comes at her expense, too. There are plenty of sur­prises, plenty of action with a nice sum­ma­tion at the end that I’ve come to expect in the dénoue­ment. This is a good series and rec­om­mended if you enjoy meaty sto­ries that are quick reads. My grade, B. Now onward to the next entry.