Fairest: In All the Land

The most notable female Fables, the “fairest in all the land” if you will, are on a list and being killed off one by one along with whatever unlucky bystander happens to be next to them at the time.  It’s up to Fabletown’s top spy Cinderella to find out who’s behind this, why they’re doing it, and whether or not the deaths can be reversed.  Being the latest “Fables” original graphic novel, it’s not quite as good as “1001 Nights of Snowfall” but a huge step up from “Werewolves of the Heartland.”  Written entirely by series creator Bill Willingham, “In All The Land” reads just as well as any volume of the series, or its current spinoff, as it’s full of the wit, whimsy and clever plotting that one would expect of it.  If that wasn’t enough to get a fan onboard, the volume also gives a deserving spotlight to the Magic Mirror after all these years in text-with-pictures segments and addresses a neglected plot point from the main title.  Just don’t make my mistake and be sure to read this after “Snow White” or else you’ll be spoiled for one of the key events of that volume.

“In All The Land” also boasts an impressive roster of twenty-four artists who contributed to its creation.  They range from familiar contributors to the “Fables” world like Mark Buckingham, Tony Akins, Russ Braun and Gene Ha, to new faces such as Chris Sprouse, Karl Kerschl, Ming Doyle and Phil Noto.  All of them are fantastic and before you think that having so many artists involved would lead to an epic clash of styles, Willingham wrote the book in a series of “chapters” with a different illustrator for each one of them.  As a result, the effect is far less jarring than one would expect and even comes across as fairly natural for how these things go.  One has to think that after the artistic trainwreck of “Werewolves of the Heartland” that Willingham figured having two dozen people work on smaller sections of a graphic novel would work a lot better than having one person, then two, then more come onboard to make sure the art got finished and the book made it out the door.  If that was his thinking, then it was the right kind this time.