I spent part of Thanksgiving weekend reading the first two books in a series of comics called Fables. The premise is that all the characters from the world of fairy tales and fantasy have been driven from their homelands by an evil being called the Adversary and forced into exile in the human world. Humans are called “mundys,” short for mundane. The fables who look human (Snow White, Blue Beard, Jack of beanstalk fame, etc.) live in Manhattan, holding various jobs in the fable government. The mice, pigs, foxes, giants, pusses-in-boots, animated playing cards, bespectacled Mr. Moles, etc., live on a farm upstate screened by enchantments.
As the series unfolds you meet different characters from different stories. The Wizard of Oz characters are there, and so is everyone from Lewis Carroll, the Just So Stories, Aesop, the Jungle Book, Grimm’s, Mother Goose, etc. Those last two get the most page time, since the stars of the series are Snow White, who runs the fable government (though merry King Cole is the figurehead), and Bigby Wolf, the chain-smoking big bad wolf who goes around in hairy and disheveled human form. He works as the sheriff for the fables in Manhattan and isn’t allowed on the farm because he’s tried at some point to eat almost everyone who lives there. (All the fables received amnesty for past crimes upon moving to the mundy world, but no one has forgotten or forgiven.)
The comics have their bawdy and violent scenes (they have a Mature rating, I think, or the equivalent of an R for movies), but mostly they’re concerned with the fables’ uneasy relationship to each other in a world much more morally nuanced than their own. They are used to solving their differences by eating each other or tricking each other or getting married and living happily ever after, so it’s fun to see them bumbling through modern life with their basic personalities intact. Prince Charming is a smarmy serial philanderer; Snow White is frosty and rule-bound; Rose Red is a rebel with a permanent chip on her shoulder because people have only ever heard of her sister. Blue Beard is a terrifying millionaire. None of them age, and they all have to support themselves and somehow get along for eternity.
I guess I find this series interesting for the same reason I find the comic Unwritten interesting: they both turn fictional worlds inside out, shaking the characters loose into the real world. I understand the impulse, because maybe it’s a way to see, and test, the strength of a fictional creation. Can your character adapt? Does she have legs of her own, or can she only survive buoyed by magic? Can you shore up someone else’s unsteady creation and make him or her do some different kind of work?
On the other hand, part of me resists this porousness between fantasy and real worlds. I want the world of a fantasy novel or story, perhaps of any novel and story, to feel complete and intact and, frankly, safe: safe from me as I am safe from it. I don’t want to be bringing my mundanity in with me like some kind of pox, and I also like to take breaks from these worlds which tend to be scarier and nuttier and more intense than daily life. When I set down a book to feed the dog or brush my teeth, I like that feeling of closing a door that I can open again when I want, or leave shut. (I shut the door on Lolita for eight months the first time I read it — I think the longest time I ever did that and eventually opened it again.)
I’m not in any fear of the three little pigs (turned bloody revolutionaries in Fables) showing up in my living room, so I’m not sure what I’m after here, except I think my attachment to reading is essentially that of a child: to run toward danger and yet be safe, to be lost but always feel it in my power to be found. In one scene in Fables Snow White races to Bigby’s assistance armed with the vorpal blade, and you laugh and also feel nervous seeing her carrying it around, because it seems it should never be used against any less (or less ridiculous, or less murkily defined) foe than the Jabberwock. It seems it can only be misused in the mundy world, which is probably one of the points of the comic: look how we misuse our fantasies, or look how they misuse us.
One, two! One, two! And through and through
The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!
He left it dead, and with its head
He went galumphing back.
