Warning: contains spoilers for Fables #151!
After a seven-year hiatus in its main series, Fables is returning courtesy of DC’s Black Label imprint, and Screen Rant sat down with the returning creative team of Bill Willingham and Mark Buckingham to discuss what they have planned for the upcoming twelve-issue arc ‘The Black Forest.’
In a world where fables like The Three Little Pigs and The Princess and the Pea are distorted accounts of real, magical worlds, a community of supernatural beings are forced to take shelter on Earth to escape the armies of the diabolical Adversary, putting aside old grievances under the watchful eye of Fabletown sheriff Bigby Wolf. At least, that’s how Fables started in 2002, but now – on its twentieth anniversary – the story resumes with the Adversary’s armies defeated, the scattered Fables moving on, and magic finally blossoming in the mundane world.
After checking out the first three issues of the new series, Screen Rant talked to Bill Willingham and Mark Buckingham about returning to chart the further adventures of the Wolf family, resurrecting a fan-favorite Fable, and introducing a chilling new major villain to the franchise. Out today, DC is celebrating the release of Fables #151 by adding all prior issues to DC Universe Infinite, with the first five available with a free account.
I’m a big fan of Fables, and it’s really interesting how issue #151 picks up right where the series left off in 2015. How quickly in the process of deciding to revisit Fables did you settle on making the return such a direct continuation?
Bill Willingham: Pretty soon, I think.
Mark Buckingham: I remember it was something that we talked about right from the outset.
Bill Willingham: The Wolf family moving off-world to the world of the Hesse and the Black Forest was sort of the next major thing that happens to them. So, why not get right to that? If we were going to continue Fables with issue 151, as I dearly wanted to do, it would behoove us to continue it more or less from the moment when the main events of Fables 150 left off, as if there were never a seven-year gap between the two issues. And we did need to be pretty quick on the heels of that last major event, because I found that we weren’t quite done with Cinderella. And if she was going to be back, we needed to explain why.
I wasn’t going to spoil Cinderella’s return, but seeing as it’s been said, why was she among the characters who had to come back? There was a natural end to that story that’s undone early on.
Bill Willingham: She really already returned in Batman versus Bigby, and it seemed incumbent to explain that in the Fables book.
Returning to this series has got to have been something of a juggling act after such a long break. How did you find the balance between welcoming back old friends and not overwhelming new readers?
Bill Willingham: Well, whether or not we overwhelmed the readers, new and old, is a test yet to be decided. I hope we won’t, but I guess we’ll see. After more than forty years in the business of spinning stories, I don’t know exactly how one follows that idea, of striking a balance, except to try my best to do it, and trust to whatever instincts I’ve developed along the way. Of course I have a marvelous backup to my own instincts in Mark, who’s been in the business about as long as I have. His storytelling instincts are first rate, which I’ve learned over the course of our long-time partnership.
Mark Buckingham: I have been in comics professionally for 35 years, so you were very close. You were very, very close. I don’t think we were going to overwhelm readers. I think what was probably more overwhelming was the last couple of years of Fables, where we were throwing every character we’d ever had in the book back in and having this huge, epic conclusion to that period of the series. Endeavoring to wrap up so many different plot lines, I think, was quite demanding on the readership.
I think we’re actually quite kind to them in the way that this new series opens up. We have a nice mix of old favorite characters returning and interesting new characters to intrigue and entice our readers back. So, I think it’s got a nice balance.
Definitely. There is a new status quo, and the Wolf family are very much starting over and starting a new life in a new place. I think it’s a great jumping on point for people who haven’t read Fables before, and a very exciting place to come back to for those who have.
Bill Willingham: Yes, and it’s definitely a way to isolate some of our sprawling cast from the others. The Fables cast did get pretty large by #150, for example, and the issues leading up to it. We did sort of bring everyone else back on stage for the big ending. It might have been a little much, to try to include every character who’s been important to Fables, because who knew that we’d created hundreds of these characters?
Mark Buckingham: I did!
Fables #150 was a huge send-off for the characters at the time, and we got a lot of snapshot moments from the future of who a lot of the Wolf children become. Do you consider upcoming issues bound by those moments, or are they just potential outcomes as we revisit this world and more stories are set within it?
Bill Willingham: The absolute rule is that it counts unless we think of something better. In which case, oops!
Mark Buckingham: I remember commenting to Bill at the time, when we were working on that final year of Fables, that every time that he sent in another last story off for one of the characters, my immediate response was, “This isn’t an ending. This is an introduction to another storyline.” Because it really felt like a lot of those were windows on a further life that those characters would engage with, rather than necessarily the end of their story.
And I think that was certainly the case with that brief glimpse that we got of Wolf Home, in the Black Forest, and the future for Snow and Bigby, and King Cole opening a magic school in the mundane world with Maddy the cat. And a lot of those things just looked to me like, “This is an introduction to where we go next.” So, I think in my head, I always felt that if we did return to Fables, we weren’t going to be short of material to get to grips with.
I think that perspective really comes through with Cinderella in these initial issues. She has a whole new status quo and is kind of James Bond without a country now.
Bill Willingham: Yeah, I disagree. Well, she is a woman without a country in the sense that Fabletown, which she served, no longer exists. I think we’ll see the process of finding her new loyalties and therefore her new country (if you will). I think in her journey, if she’s going to remain without a country, it’s not going to last very long. One hopes.
The first few issues introduce a major new villain to the story, who is a really perfect follow-up to the original. They feel like an even bigger threat, but also someone who poses a really intimate form of danger with the arc’s theme of family. Did they emerge from the story and the ideas you decided to engage with, or were they a really cool early idea that influenced everything else?
Bill Willingham: It was a character we wanted to use from the very first issue of the original run of Fables, but couldn’t at the time, for a host of reasons. Since then the character has become available, so now here he is. Always in Fables we tried to use our favorite characters from literature, fairytales, and folklore – otherwise, why bother? I think one of the secrets of creating good stories is that you identify the characters you love most… and then you think of something really evil and terrible to do to them, because you want to treat them in ways that make their lives interesting, which is not necessarily how one feels towards the people we love.
One of the great things about the series is the mix of very human decisions and the snowballing consequences of those. We get one of those early on with an instruction Bigby gives the kids, which immediately has bigger consequences than you think it might when he issues it.
Bill Willingham: “Go have adventures?”
Yeah, “Go have a big adventure,” which feels true to the idea of a fable, because it’s an offhand instruction that becomes something a lot bigger.
Bill Willingham: What’s better than one quest adventure? How about four quests? A difference of degree being a difference of kind, the scale of the story is automatically increased.
On that theme, Fables does a lot of playing with genre conventions. It began with a detective story and became a war story, then played with superhero narratives and heists. Are there plans for more of that narrative experimentation, or are we digging deeper into the Fables legends with four quest narratives going on at once?
Bill Willingham: There’s a lot of adventure stuff in there, and certainly no sub-genre, except for heroic fantasy things. Maybe the coming-of-age subgenre, which is called a Bildungsroman (from the ancient Latin: “How do you build a Roman?” – no, not really). Mark, am I forgetting anything?
Mark Buckingham: Not really. I mean, this is our first attempt at the female archer heroine genre, I suppose. But I think with each story arc, we always explored some new avenue, or went into some interesting new territory. With this being one story over 12 issues, there isn’t really a lot of changing tack within it. It is one strong, epic tale that involves a number of characters interweaving their different adventures together. I don’t think there was room within this tale to go on too many other tangents. But that doesn’t mean that we can’t explore some very different territory if we were to come back and do more after this.
Despite ending up with such a big cast and ambitious story, Fables always felt like it kept to its core themes, in terms of this enclave of characters wanting to protect what they built. With everyone spreading out now, is ‘The Black Forest’ examining those ideas through new characters and a new status quo, or does it have its own new ground?
Bill Willingham: Well, it’s new ground in the sense of the well-known Thomas Wolfe quote, “You can’t go home again.” This is Bigby coming home, but it’s not Snow coming back to her world or what the kids know. It’s a whole new thing for them. Everything that looks for wrapping it up or closure is really just a door to more. Mark was saying that with the Fables #150 stories; every one of them suggested that, even the ones with death and the afterlife as their so-called final story. We could easily do a hundred issues just on Boy Blue in Jazz Heaven.
I don’t think you get a good story, or at least a good ensemble saga like Fables, without the problem of every single story you do opening up so many more potential doors to other stories you could do. Mark and I have arranged to clone ourselves multiple times so that we can finish everything we started here.
Mark Buckingham: I don’t know if the world’s ready for more of us, Bill. But nice idea.
I think one of the key things that I’ve always felt about Fables is that it was really about family. All of these characters had been forced to flee their own worlds – in many cases either leaving behind or losing their own friends and families, and uniting together in this new world where they effectively became a new family together. They’re united by their shared experiences and circumstances.
And I do feel that, as Fables evolves and develops with each new stage in the series, those characters move on. Some go to different worlds, but all they effectively do is build new families by bringing new people into the fold. And I do feel that’s the case with The Black Forest. In many ways, we’re expanding and extending the family of Fables that we know. That’s how I see it, anyway.
Mark, Fables is well known for its gorgeous art. Was there anything coming up in this new series that you were particularly excited to draw, in terms of coming back to this world?
Mark Buckingham: Oh, bless you. Thank you. Our new big bad for this series – I won’t say any more than that – is a character that I had been looking forward to drawing since I was first told about the concept of Fables. It’s been that long in coming. That was something that really excited me. Also, we get a whole host of new, fun talking animals and weird creatures and monsters, which are always my secret favorite bits of Fables to draw. So, that has been an absolute delight. And I think I was just delighted, also, that we had a nice new world to visit that was deep with forest and full of natural environments that I could get a huge amount of pleasure from drawing. There was lots here for me to get my teeth into.
Bill Willingham: I think the very first thing Mark ever said in the early Fables days was he wasn’t interested in drawing buildings. But then the series ended up having a lot of buildings, and so a forest setting was perfect.
Mark Buckingham: That’s right! That was the silly thing about the situation, when Fables was first being instigated. The idea was that maybe, rather than having a regular artist, it would follow the Sandman route and there would be a different artist on each arc. It would sort of develop in that way.
Shelly [Bond] and yourself were kind enough to actually have given me a choice as to whether I drew the first story or whether I drew ‘Animal Farm.’ And, much as it’s nice to be the first artist on the first issue of a series, at the time I just thought, “If I’m only going to get to draw one arc, I want to draw the one which is entirely populated by animals and dragons and giants and talking sunflowers and all of those sorts of things.”
It just had two attractive female humans as the only people that I had to worry about drawing throughout the whole thing. Whereas I’d spent the preceding two years drawing Spider-Man swinging around New York, and I kind of didn’t want to do buildings anymore. That pretty much made my mind up for me. Of course, I hadn’t anticipated that I’d be loving drawing Fables so much that I’d then turn around and beg you to let me stay on the book for the entire run from there on.
Bill Willingham: I heard it that he kindly informed Shelly and I that he’d be staying on. But that’s just the way I heard it.
Mark Buckingham: There may be some truth in that.
Bill, you’ve said before that the story isn’t done until you’ve seen the art. Did ‘The Black Forest’ offer up any major surprises, in terms of that translation from script to finished comic?
Bill Willingham: Tons. There are so many wonderful things coming up, including things I can’t believe Mark drew. Note that I never have any doubt about what Mark will be ABLE to draw. Mark can draw anything – and has proven that time and again. Some things I am always surprised Mark is willing to draw once, knowing in advance he’d have to do it again and again. And I know that we made sure to tell Mark that anything you do now, you will have to draw again and again. And this time you don’t have anyone else to blame. And he did Fabletown and Castle, which I would not have made so complex, knowing they’d become the crux of the series, Mark.
Mark Buckingham: I foolishly designed it to be sort of triangular, which I hadn’t really thought through until I started having to do it again and again and again. Yeah, I do this to myself all the time. There is a very impressive location in the forest, and I did it again. It was like, “Oh, I could have made this quite simple. And I had to make it really tricky, just for the hell of it.”
Bill Willingham: I warned him. “Really? You’re gonna draw that twice?” It flabbergasts me that he did it once. There are some pretty magnificent visuals coming up, is what I can say. There’s a scene coming up… I just know that you will be amazed at the way Mark does it. I’m not gonna say what. I can’t say well, though I could.
Mark Buckingham: No, don’t spoil it.
Bill Willingham: I won’t spoil it. But, yeah, the visuals in this are mesmerizing. They really are. It’s not pride of authorship on my part, because I didn’t have anything to do with it. It’s all Mark.
Mark Buckingham: I always feel really inspired by Bill’s scripts. When I found out that Bill was intending for us to come back with this story for the 20th anniversary of Fables, I was really excited. I don’t think I’ve ever had a working relationship as simpatico as it is with Bill and I. He just seems to naturally write the most beautiful, amazing scenes. Every time I read one of his scripts, those images just immediately open up and unfold in my mind. I don’t normally have that when working with other people; there’s just something for me that feels so natural about the way that Bill writes. I think it’s because he is an artist in his own right, so it just feels so natural.
Bill Willingham: There’s your headline! Mark Buckingham says all comic writers except Bill are crap. I think that’s what he just said.
Mark Buckingham: Accentuate the positive!
Bill Willingham: Okay, “I’m positive that all comics writers other than Bill are crap!”
Fables #151 is available now from DC Comics.
