Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *
The war is over and now the stirrings of a Civil War in the family has begun to grumble down every side-street and political office in Fable Town. It is though a Civil War that will have to take place without either Snow White of the father of her children Bigby Wolf.
With the ballots cast, Old King Cole has been removed from office, Boy Blue has taken leave and even the semi criminal Jack of the Tales has seen the death throes of a once happy corner of New York City begin to crumble and turn to dust. When the criminals and the scammers call time on a place you know the situation must be pretty bad. Not for nothing has Bill Willingham disguised the political upheaval in America in 2005, the year after George W. Bush was re-elected for a second term of office as the President in America, a year in which political and social change was on the agenda. With art aping real life events in where a wolf can become a father to children and where the city and county of San Francisco began issuing marriage licences to same-sex couples, where Nick Berg, a civilian defence contractor working is shown being murdered in Iraq on social media and in which the death of Ronald Reagan cast a shadow far and wide over world politics, The Mean Seasons is perhaps one in which most American society could identify with.
The good with the bad in real life, the marked social change in the quite right quality for same sex couples as for heterosexual couples and the death of a much loved President going hand in hand with a man following him to the highest position imaginable in the Western World and who was more ridiculed than Manchester City under the tenure of Alan Ball, It seems that America has always been a Script writers and lampoonist’s dream.
With the fifth set of collected tales starting with the story of Cinderella Libertine, the volume is one extremely well crafted to show the use of America’s involvement in the world of spying and espionage and through to its involvement in World War Two, the tentacles in the history of a country which is a home to some of the most deadly secrets imaginable spread far and wide. It is though the look at Bigby Wolf’s exploits during World War Two as an American agent deep in the heart of Nazi Germany in the story Dog Company that sees the underlying threat of fable and truth collide.
For many the way that in recent years Hollywood has distorted America’s role during World War Two has come at a price. By allowing films to show a certain historical truth to be nothing more than against the ethic of government propaganda or by contrived methods putting down markers against established facts, it seeps into every corner of everyday thought. War is after all the big movie, as they would say in America. A war film captures the imagination of the young man in a bid for glory, to die for a cause that on the face of it might seem a strange one. Dog Company sees a group of soldiers fighting a just war against the vilest of political creeds and yet underneath Bill Willingham manages to find something to hang fable upon to. By having the mission depend on blowing up an experiment completely and utterly in a castle in the dying days of the war, it suggests to the reader that they should look further into what the United States allowed to happen instead. By having known Nazi’s work for them and develop the atomic Bomb and even work on their space program in the 1960s, it seems that underneath that patriotic red, white and blue heart there is a falseness which has been allowed to fester to this day.
The Mean Seasons is a graphic novel of courage and bravery. It strikes at the heart of the established order and asks the reader to dig deep into history and read, to not be sucked in by television or distorted film. Bill Willingham certainly deserves to be lauded for that feat.
Fables: The Mean Seasons is available to purchase Worlds Apart on Lime Street, Liverpool.
Ian D. Hall