Review: Bill Willingham: Fables: March of the Wooden Soldiers

I found Bill Willingham's Fables series to be more engaging as I worked my way through it. March of the Wooden Soldiers offers an even richer story with layers of deception and intrigue -- not to mention angst and guilt -- and a couple of side stories that continue to fill out the major characters.

We start off with a little history on Boy Blue, Snow White's assistant. Every year, Blue and a group of friends gather for an evening of hard drinking. They were the last to escape the Homelands, but the evening is not marked by celebration: there's a lot of guilt that they escaped while others perished. Blue's story is particularly poignant: the last refugee to reach their final stronghold was Red Riding Hood, and she and Blue fell in love. When the final battle came, he sent her to the ship that was carrying the refugees to safety, while he went back to the battle. Unknown to him, she left the boat and went back to fight at his side, while he, through the gift of his commander's magic cloak, was able to transport himself to the ship after it had left.

And now Red Riding Hood has made it to the Earth. But there's something a little off -- her reaction to meeting Blue again is extreme, and not at all friendly. Bigby, as usual, is suspicious. And then a group of men appear, wanting to buy guns. Lots of guns. And, as it turns out, they're not exactly men.

In the meantime, Snow is pregnant, the result of that little camping trip with Bigby, aided and abetted by Bluebeard's hypnosis. She's not really very happy about it. And Prince Charming, having finished off Bluebeard, is searching his apartment for whatever gold, jewels, silver, or anything else of value hasn't gone to fill the coffers of Fabletown. (Bluebeard died intestate, so his fortune reverted to the government. But Prince Charming isn't really interested in full disclosure.) He has a brilliant idea: he's going to run for Mayor.

Things develop, and Fabletown is under attack by the wooden soldiers of the title. Since Bigby is away on his investigation, Snow takes command of the town's defenses, even enlisting the witches to work in Fabletown's defense -- for free, which doesn't make them happy at all, but their options are limited.

This one is a lot of fun, and I think my favorite in the series so far. The story is multi-layered, there's a lot of intrigue, but nothing you can't figure out if you want to. It's so well done, though, that you don't bother. Willingham's script sucks you right in, and it's really easy to just go with the flow of the story.

Mark Buckingham, Craig Hamilton, and P. Craig Russell penciled this volume, and the visuals are just as appealing as the previous collections. The battle scenes are exceptionally effective, but the whole thing is worth looking at. My one objection to this one, and looking back, to the series as a whole so far, is that Willingham scripts fairly heavily -- there's not a lot of room for the visuals to carry the narrative, and it never gets past the idiom of illustrated story and into true graphic literature, with that particular synergy between the elements.

Collects Fables: The Last Castle, and Fables #19-21 and #2-27.

(Vertigo, 2004)