Jack of Fables Volume 3

The saga of my addiction continues and deepens.


After the punishment of Knights, I needed something, so I picked Jack of Fables back up. The contrast was immediate. Willingham and his crew have a grasp of the narrative; they know how to tell a story. And they play with it—challenging the boundaries of conventional narratives.


Every issue ends with Jack throwing out a teaser, commenting on the direction of the narrative. The small yellow boxes, though, mark this as a dialogue outside of the narrative; the boxes could be Jack’s comments to himself as he tells the story or some such clever two step.


But then Gary—the Pathetic Fallacy—warns Jack and John. He tells them that a disrupted and disjointed exposition is undermining the narrative; he goes on to explain that readers will be lost and that the issues will not have a neat conclusion.


The character is aware of the story in which he lives. The storyteller is aware of his narrator’s audience.

In both Fables and Jack, Willingham and friends are telling a story about storybook characters living outside of the storybook. Like Unwritten (review upcoming), these works can be labeled metafiction—fiction about writing fiction. A tedious, lengthy literary discourse could follow dissecting the significance of this sort of self-reflection—mirror held to a mirror. And perhaps, it should. Narrativity.


Perhaps. (If you are interested, I will send you files—no links for the literary elite. You could consider writing a paper and sending it to the Pop Culture Conference in Albuquerque.)


Strikingly, the narrative is not broken by the character’s refusal to abide by the dictates of the convention. Willingham, though, plows on. The plot continues. The conflict builds. Readers maintain their willing suspension of disbelief—despite the character’s audacious attacks on that disbelief.


The boundaries between fiction and reality are thin. Any sort of extended analysis of the break would be a foolhardy construct meant to bolster what has already been ruptured, to reassure ourselves that that is fiction and this is reality. We would be whistling against the dark—something Jack consistently does.


And as if to highlight the point—the illustrator puts Satan in a devil’s costume. Even Satan assumes his role, dresses the part, challenging the reader to notice that in the end he is just wearing a red suit.


Half-nude women, severed body parts, and dirty words are all much more titillating—for some of us. But this kind of manipulation of narrative threads is reminiscent of American Modernist and Indian epics.



Bayard Sartoris