Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10
What do fables do when nobody is thinking of them? It’s pretty much the same for anybody that walks the planet sometimes feeling alone and un-thought of, if they don’t wallow in a pit of despair, they can get up to mischief or they can become a hero.
In the sixth of Bill Willingham’s feted Fables series, Homelands, two of the Fables community’s sons are the topic of choice as the reader is shown what happens when people leave their homes unannounced. The rumours that start and multiply surrounding the sudden disappearance, what is there to hide and where have they run too can get out of hand. In the anti hero Jack and the former golden office worker and music lover Boy Blue, two very different men set out on paths that will ultimately test them to their limits and the furthest depths of their endurance. For one the shallowness of their life that they carried around like a trophy will continue, the other has other plans.
Arguably Homelands is at this point the best of the six graphic novels to have come out of Bill Willingham’s mind. It argues the point of never underestimating what a person can achieve when they believe all is lost and there is no room for hope, the test of character thrust upon them inspiring greater heights, but also the fall that come when a person is afforded every luxury and elements of power for which they haven’t earned.
Whilst Boy Blue’s story is the most adventurous, and one that sets up the past fates of those Fables who made the escape in the struggle and fight against the dark forces built up by The Adversary, perhaps the more telling is that of Jack of the Tales as his dream life producing films about him, storing up the basic fact that he will never be forgotten by humanity, and with the ever so slight nod to the batch of trilogy films that have been out of late, that really brings to mind the tight narrow path that keeps us from descending into the realms of overbearing ego and the fight to contain the soul from being a beast. Bill Willingham manages to convey this further fall from grace in the eyes of Jack’s peers and Fable Town others superbly well and it is credit to the writer and his team of artists that this series of graphic novels continues to entertain and enthral.
Homelands is a true master class in story-writing.
Fables: Homelands is available to purchase from Worlds Apart on Lime Street, Liverpool.
Ian D. Hall