Broken Frontier

Courtesy of the UK’s Titan Books, Broken Frontier takes a quick look through some recent trade collections of comics published by DC’s Vertigo imprint that all, whether overtly or peripherally, in some way embrace the concepts of myth, legend and fairy tale in their storytelling style.

Fables Volume 14: Witches

Bill Willingham’s long-running, dark fantasy series reaches a whopping fourteenth collection with this latest edition. Once more the exiled Fables have found themselves on the defensive as the sinister bogeyman Mister Dark has driven them out of a ruined Fabletown, forcing them to regroup and arrange strategy. As is obvious from the title of this volume, there’s a strong focus here on the witch contingent of the cast; with the familiar coven planning the Fables’ next response to Mister Dark juxtaposed to great effect with a more comic relief subplot focusing on everyone’s favourite flying monkey Bufkin taking on the power of the great Baba Yaga.

Fables holds that peculiar position in the Vertigo stable of being a book that appears to have no particular endpoint in sight that it is working towards; it embraces the more open-ended, ongoing narrative that is a time-honoured staple of more mainstream comics. Of course, that also means that its collections are not necessarily as self-contained in feel: the first six issues in this one deal with the Mister Dark arc and end on a major cliffhanger. The final two chapters, though, are a diversion from that storyline and take us to Flycatcher’s kingdom in the liberated Homelands, and a tricky legal quandary that threatens to set the goblin contingent of his subjects against the other Fables.

Of late Fables has been criticised in some corners of the Internet for going through something of a lean period. Indeed, post-revelation of The Adversary’s identity and his defeat, there is something slightly Buffy-esque in the way that we have now simply moved on to the next Big Bad - in the shape of Mister Dark - and a familiar cycle has begun again.

However, this legend-inspired saga remains Vertigo’s answer to comfort comics reading, and that plays a large part in its appeal; no comic book does “fantasy soap opera” with quite the same level of wit and panache as Fables. And, like any good soap, Willingham makes us feel invested in the characters first and foremost; if there’s any slight sensation of recycled themes then isn’t that simply indicative of the fairy tales that form the title’s central premise anyway? Ignore the naysayers - Witches proves that, nearly one hundred issues in, Fables has lost none of its intrinsic appeal or charm.

Fables Volume 14: Witches is available in the UK via Titan Books priced £14.99 and published in the US by DC/Vertigo priced $17.99.

Greek Street Volume 2: Cassandra Complex

The second volume of Peter Milligan and Davide Gianfelice’s transplantation of the characters of classical drama to contemporary times is as stark, depressing and utterly compelling as the first. Fashioning modern identities for the familiar archetypes of Greek tragedy, the series has weaved a gripping tale based around the environs and inhabitants of London’s Soho Greek Street.

This collection picks up on the journey of Oedipus substitute Eddie as he continues to become immersed in the criminal activities of local crime family the Fureys and the manipulations of corrupt peer Lord Menon. For those conversant with the source material, Greek Street is replete with familiar characters spiralling towards their inevitable, fated doom. Its recent cancellation as a monthly title means, sadly, that we will have just three trade collections of this clever crime thriller, with a distinctly cultured twist, to savour.

Ultimately this book probably failed to find an audience for a number of reasons; not the least of which - and this is most assuredly not a criticism - was that it was probably far too literate for the existing traditional monthly audience. Perhaps it’s time for Vertigo to look at the European album style as a more suitable and easily digestible format for some of their material, in order to hook readers from the start. Certainly, the current model of hoping that eventual trade collections will ultimately keep critically-acclaimed monthly books like Air, Unknown Soldier and Greek Street alive clearly isn’t working. In this case, twenty-two pages was nowhere near enough room to juggle so many characters and keep their complex, individual arcs alive in the readership’s attention in such small bursts.

Truncated though its run may have been, Greek Street is an absorbing descent into the foibles of human nature and a comic that ably plays the metafiction card without ever resorting to the annoying, self-knowing smugness that its super-hero brethren adopts when covering similar territory.

Greek Street Volume 2: Cassandra Complex is available in the UK via Titan Books priced £10.99 and published in the US by DC/Vertigo priced $14.99.

Sweet Tooth Volume 2: In Captivity

Finally, the second volume of Sweet Tooth continues Jeff Lemire’s post-apocalyptic fairy tale in a collection that ups the stakes for the titular character. Having been betrayed by his mentor Jepperd in the last story arc, our antler-headed hero Gus is now imprisoned in a concentration camp for animal-human hybrids like himself. There’s something unique about Gus that may lead to answers about the plague that devastated the world. Unfortunately, he’s unlikely to survive that process of investigation…

If you had considered on dropping the trades of this series after the scene-setting, but rather inconsequential-feeling, volume 1, then it may be time to think again. While that first trade did feel like an overly decompressed lead-up to an obvious concluding plot twist, In Captivity adds far more depth to both the characters and the world of the book’s Bizarro-Kamandi premise.

I will admit I came away from the first volume of Sweet Tooth feeling Lemire had not succeeded in making me connect or engage with his main players in any tangible manner. However, superficial characterisation is not a complaint that can be levelled at this follow-up arc. For a start, the mysterious Jepperd’s tragic backstory is examined in depth, transforming him from plot-serving stereotype into an acutely sympathetic character. The world of Sweet Tooth is also fleshed out, with welcome information about the nature of the disaster that led to societal collapse provided; also adding a corresponding emphasis on what it means when survival supplants morality as the communal guiding force.

By the end of In Captivity, I no longer viewed the characters with the indifference I had done at the conclusion of Out of the Woods. It would take a hardened soul, indeed, not to be now eagerly pre-ordering the third collection to discover what Lemire has in store for Gus, Jepperd and the rest of the cast of Sweet Tooth.

Sweet Tooth Volume 2: In Captivity is available in the UK via Titan Books priced £9.99 and published by DC/Vertigo in the US priced $12.99.