Outside of a Dog: Kate Nepveu's Book Log

The best thing I can say about Wolves, volume eight of Fables, is that it saved me a lot of money: it made me sufficiently cranky that I now have no desire to buy the series. (This volume, like prior volumes, I got from my local library.)

This contains a two-issue arc, "Wolves," in which Bigby is found again; an extra-long single issue, "Happily Ever After" (#50); and a regular-length issue on a plot tangent to the prior two, "Big and Small." As the first two titles suggest, this wraps up the Snow/Bigby arc. Unfortunately, I found everything Snow/Bigby in this volume offensively sexist—the more so because much of it felt out of character, as though the author were forcing the story to fit his own prejudices. (His comments in the script for issue 50, included in the trade paperback, doesn't help. "This is the one panel at which the dream of every female reader of FABLES has come true," my ass.)

Oh, and this volume also contains an explicit identification of Fabletown with Israel, which I could have done without (and which makes the stereotyped treatment of the Arabian Fables even more unpleasant).

I'll keep reading, because I expect plotty things in the next volume, and the one after that (currently in progress) is about the Frog Prince; but Willingham will get no money from me.