Fairest vol. 5: The Clamour for Glamour

The main series may be over, but here’s one more volume of this (decidedly uneven) spinoff series for the road!  Longtime “Fables” artist Mark Buckingham writes the six-issue title story as he picks up on a stray plot thread.

Back during his campaign for mayor of Fabletown, Prince Charming promised glamours for all of the inhabitants of The Farm so that they could take on human appearance and venture out into the world of their own accord.  Much to his surprise, the witches of the thirteenth floor informed him that they didn’t have the power to grant that many and this particular campaign promise got swept under the rug.  However, with Reynard the Fox gallivanting around the world courtesy of his own glamour the natives are becoming restless and demanding fair treatment.

This leads the narrative to split off into two different directions as a whimsical chaos envelops the inhabitants of The Farm as the raffle for the glamours approaches, and Reynard grapples with the fact that he’s not nearly as self-assured and suave when he’s a human than when he’s a fox.  Reynard’s story has a very fun idea at its core (that immediately leads to him getting decked by Snow White and subsequently flown right out of there) that gets lost when the character gets mixed up with a mundy girl and her hick family and faces the twin challenges of life on the run and fatherhood.

As for the business on The Farm, it has a decidedly more episodic and random feel to it.  That’s not a bad thing as a lot of these scenes are amusing fun in the best tradition of “Fables.”  After all, it’s not everyday you read about how an owl tries to assuage his pussycat’s wife’s desire to travel with a whirlwind tour of their surroundings, or see Clara the dragon-turned-crow and the thumb-sized Sergeant Wilfred cleverly track down a missing glamour.  Then there’s also the business of the Sunflower Kid and the way his efforts to manipulate the outcome of the raffle go amusingly awry.  It all leads up to a climax involving some mis-aligned transformations and a lot of property damage.  

With Buckingham handling the writing, art for this story falls to the more-than-capable Russ Braun.  He’s a guy who has proved himself to be a surprisingly good fit in the fill-in jobs he’s had to do for “Fables” and “Fairest” in the past, and it is awesome to see his work fill these six issues.  The tone is perfectly light and affable under his pen with the title’s many fairytale conventions looking just as you’d expect and like they all belong together.

You could also say the same of Meghan Hetrick’s work in the final issue, a Goldilocks story from creator Bill Willingham.  We get to see the villainess at her self-deluded best as she tries to get the fortune and glory she thinks she deserves (while also spreading the good word of communism) across many different words.  It’s a bit jarring, at the end, to be reminded that this issue was originally supposed to be a lead-in for the graphic novel “Fairest:  In All the Land” but wound up being delayed to the end of this series.  

Even on that off note, and the less joyful parts of the main storyline, this final volume of “Fairest” does a better job of capturing the spirit of its parent title than most of the stories in this anthology series.  It may not be of great importance to the franchise itself, but it’s definitely good fun overall and something I have no problem recommending to other fans of “Fables.”