Fables: 1001 Nights of Snowfall | Bill Willingham | I don't even read graphic novels...

Fables: 1001 Nights of Snowfall | Bill Willingham | Fabulous, simply fabulous

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Fables: 1001 Night...

	Fables: 1001 Nights of Snowfall Bill Willingham Vertigo, 2006 - 144 pages average customer review:based on 34 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Bill Willingham?s critically acclaimed, Eisner Award-winning series FABLES is a wickedly imaginative take on the current state of the world?s favorite characters from fable and lore.

This original hardcover collection is set in the early days of Fabletown, long before the FABLES series began. Traveling in Arabia as an Ambassador from the exiled FABLES community, Snow White is captured by the local sultan who wants to marry her (and then kill her). But the clever Snow attempts to charm the sultan instead by playing Scheherazade, telling him fantastic stories for a total of 1001 nights.

Running the gamut from uncomfortable horror to dark intrigue to mercurial coming-of-age, FABLES:1001 NIGHTS OF SNOWFALL reveals the secret histories of familiar FABLES characters through a series of compelling and visually illustrative tales. Writer Bill Willingham is joined by an impressive array of artists, including Charles Vess, Brian Bolland, John Bolton, Michael Wm. Kaluta, James Jean, Tara McPherson, Derek Kirk Kim, Esao Andrews, Mark Buckingham, Mark Wheatley and Jill Thompson. FABLES: 1001 NIGHTS OF SNOWFALL is both a welcomed entry point to the critically acclaimed series and an essential part of Willingham?s enchanting and imaginative FABLES mythos.

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I don't even read graphic novels...

I have never read a graphic novel before this one, and I rarely read the comics in the sunday paper, so my experience with illustrated stories for older audiences is fairly limited. I have a thing for re-written fairy tales, and the beginning of this book looked very promising, so I crossed my fingers and hoped it would be a wise choice to purchase. It was.

It is such a fast and interesting read. The illustrations are NOT for the younger crowd (nudity, rape, murder,etc.), but it is done in such a way as to appear to the eye as a movie instead of a book. The writing is very well done and the story is quite seemless. The beginning of the book reads like a child's picture book, but then you turn the page and the real stories begin...

Having been driven from their homes by a villain intent on destroying their realm, the characters of familiar fairy tales make their new homes in the modern day world of New York City (a popular place to have otherworldly creatures). Snow White is an ambassador of sorts, sent to a kingdom where her mission is to convince the ruling Sultan to form a treaty with the refugees of Fabletown, a treaty that will unite them against the dreaded "Adversary" who is slowly murdering his way through the various fable realms.

She arrrives and, through a bit of trickery, she is wed to the Sultan whose biggest vice is his complete distrust of all women. After a first marriage that had failed on account of his wife's infidelity, the Sultan has taken to marrying a bride every evening and sending her to the executioner first thing in the morning. Instead of weeping piteously at this news, Snow White gains the interest of the Sultan with her wonderful stories that she relays to him each evening for three years, thus sparing her life and changing the broken heart of a cruel man.

This is the collection of stories that the Sultan will hear each night, stories of different fairy tale charcters and their lives before the migrations and during the invasions of the "Adversary". BEWARE: There is no happily ever after to many of these tales but there is enjoyment in every page.

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Fabulous, simply fabulous

I definitely loved this book. It was a bit disappointing knowing that it wasn't Scheherazade telling these tales, I would rather have seen her do this, but the stories themselves were nonetheless fantastic, so for that, I give five stars.

A Must Have for Fables Fans

If your a fan of Fables or your looking for a nice quick read Fables: 1001 Nights of Snowfall is a great graphic novel worth checking out. While it helps to have some invested interest in the series to understand why each story's relevance and why it lends so much insight in to the background of the main characters of the series, that is not to say that this is not also a stand alone read. The book has great interesting stories, some as short as a few pages, others that are much longer they are all compelling, sometimes funny and occasionally disturbing but have so much heart and an underlying sense of humanity and universality that anyone can enjoy these tales as much as the Sultan threatening Snow's life in the story.

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Orientalist interludes

The artwork is beautiful but the framing narrative and first story has very little cultural sensitivity, indulging in all the tropes of 19th c. Orientalism with gusto and lack of any self-consciousness that I could pick up. The "Snow-White-in-the-Land-of-Arabian-Fairy-Tales" framing narrative even manages to re-appropriate all of Scheherezade's original wit and cunning to Snow White instead, so that Show White--as the enlightened diplomat from the industrialized, colonizing West--is the one who shares the key to survival with Scheherezade. How lovely for Scheherezade that a white woman was there to help her!

Even when we're removed from the court of the Sultan (which is full of tawdry 19th c. cliches, although in text more than images), the first story-proper artist seems bent on making sure we remember this is an Exotic Story. Thus he meshes and combines all sorts of Eastern visuals willy-nilly, and so in the first story we end up with a Snow White who looks bizarrely Asian, in a more-or-less European land, except that for some reason some of the Prince's men wear medieval Russian costume. The Prince himself alternates through all sorts of time periods and cultures in his clothing. The anachronism and cultural hodge-podge could have been made into a witty commentary on the universality of fairy tales, or their multi-cultural existence (a version of "Cinderella" exists in almost every culture), but the specific cultures here chosen were not suitable for that. Instead, I got the somewhat distasteful feeling that the artist just wanted to give the book a "Gee, how exotic!" feel and considered all non-mainstream-Western cultures as equally exotic and somewhat interchangeable, useful for giving "flavor" to the story and nothing else. A dash of Chinese, a handful of Russian, a spot of Korean, a root of Turk thrown in...

Happily the ensuing chapters do not take this route, but it was a bit of a sour taste to start off on.

The overall story stumbles along at first, as well. It works a lot better once we're done with the framing prose narrative and get into the comic format. The prose-pieces suffer from overwrought, mannered, cliche writing. Of course it is consciously drawing on the way 19th c. fairy tales were written, but clumsily so, amateurishly. Since most of the book is in comic format though, this is not really damning.

However, the art IS gorgeous and most of the stories ARE compelling. I just wish the book opened on a better note.

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antoehr great volume

If you like the series, this one will not disappoint. The art *IS* spotty in some places but the story makes up for it

reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7

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