Broken Frontier

For this year’s Free Comic Book Day, Image Comics offered a delightful sideways glance at their upcoming hardcover all-ages anthology, Fractured Fables. Published through Jim Valentino’s Silverline Books, the aim of the collection is to bring together the industry’s top creative minds to retell classic fairy tales and nursery rhymes with a humorous twist.

The idea here is to make kids laugh by updating classic tales such as Little Red Riding Hood, Rapunzel, and Rumpelstiltskin to modern sensibilities, making them more relatable to a younger audience. Valentino and his editorial partner Kris Simon have allowed their creators to approach the source material with relatively few limitations or rules. The result of this creative freedom is a delectable sampling of smart, imaginative new stories, fun for both kids and adults.

The creative carte blanche enjoyed by the writers and artists lends itself to wide variety of approaches to adapting the source material. Ranging from Ted McKeever’s cute and clever take on a classic nursery rhyme in his short piece “Diddle, Diddle” to the mildly twisted in Ted TenNapel’s “Rumpelstiltskin”, Fractured Fables offers a smorgasbord of fantastic treats sure to make you chuckle, wince, and smile in genuine delight.

Despite this diversity of creative approaches, Fractured Fables refrains from patronizing its target audience. Kids have never really been stupid and they’re less so now, in this digital age of near-limitless information. When you’re inundated by an undiscriminating onslaught of mental and emotional stimuli, it’s not hard to discern the subtleties of Grecian and Ward’s satirical take on modern love in “The Real Princess,” no matter who you are.

This is perhaps the most important aspect of Fractured Fables. Valentino, Simon, and their colleagues understand that kids, despite their youth, are people too, just like their adult counterparts. If these tasty teasers are any indication of what’s to come in the anthology later this year, then we’re all in for a refreshingly wild, fun ride, no matter how young – or old – we may be.