For over eight years, Bill Willingham's Fables has grown into the flagship title of DC's Vertigo imprint. And after 99 issues, Fables is perhaps the only title launched within Vertigo that will soon reach the coveted 100 issue mark. The series follows numerous characters from folklore and fairy tales who call themselves Fables. Years ago, they fled to our world to escape the vast forces of "The Adversary," which had conquered most of their respective worlds. And while that storyline wrapped up nearly two years ago, it paved the way for the Fables' current battle against a being known as Mister Dark.
Fables #99 brings the current storyline to a penultimate moment as Totenkinder (the elderly Black Forest witch from Hansel & Gretel fame) recently made herself young again in preparation to take on Mister Dark. As revealed in the previous issues of the storyline, Mister Dark is the personification of darkness and he holds a grudge against the Fables for appropriating his magic while he was in captivity for hundreds of years. Mister Dark's arrival to this world was heralded by the destruction of Fabletown in New York, which has left most of the cast as refugees for the better part of the last year.
In this issue, guest artist Inaki Miranda steps in for the great Mark Buckingham to give us our first full-length look at what Mister Dark has been doing since he took over the former Fabletown. The demon cat Maddy (better known Sycorax from The Tempest) has discovered that all of Mister Dark's zombie like victims have had previous dealings with the Fables, which may be giving the Dark one a way to track them down. It's an alarming revelation that signals that the story may not be as close to an ending as it was previously believed. One of the reasons that Mister Dark has been so effective as a villain is that none of the heroes have the power to challenge him outright. And those unfortunate enough to get close to him have either been killed or transformed into his undead servants.
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Miranda's depiction of the darkening of New York itself is quite impressive. His clean figurework is very close in some ways to Buckingham's style. And the horrors that the ordinary people in New York are experiencing due to Mister Dark are also rendered effectively. In the space of a few panels, a simple misunderstanding escalates into one man beating another nearly to death while a cop verbally and physically mistreats a woman who came to him for help after being sexually assaulted. These instances illustrate Mister Dark's growing influence on everyone near him and give his threat to transform the entire world some teeth (which he also likes to snack on).
Totenkinder's confidence in facing such an enemy is refreshing from the usual self-doubt that plague heroes. But Totenkinder has always been a grey character at best and in this issue she betrays a long held secret of Snow White and Bigby's seventh child to the North Wind in exchange for his help in setting up the duel. It's a secret that Fables readers have known for years, but it clearly means more trouble ahead for our heroes. And I don't believe that the storyline will be wrapped up in issue 100. Willingham is too good at setting up long term stories to simply end one so quickly. I'm willing to bet that Totenkinder won't come out on top of next issue's duel, which would leave the rest of the Fables without one of their most powerful allies in the months ahead.
I've said before that Fables is one of the best comic book series on the market. In execution, it's almost perfect. The only slight against Fables right now is that it is horribly off-schedule, which may be in part due to the extra length pages coming up in issue 100. But if you enjoy fantasy stories set against the modern day era with great writing and beautiful art, then you should absolutely be reading Fables.
