Two Las Vegas comic-book writers have new collections in stores, Bill Willingham's Fables: March of the Wooden Soldiers and Steve Gerber's Hard Time: 50 To Life.
March of the Wooden Soldiers is the fourth collection of Willingham's popular Fables series from DC's Vertigo imprint, and 50 To Life is the first of Gerber's Hard Time series from DC. Both are complex, mature stories of the fantastic that offer intelligent alternatives to mainstream superhero fare.
Fables is the superior of the two, and Wooden Soldiers collects the book's most ambitious story to date. Willingham has created a fascinating world of fairy-tale characters living in modern New York City, exiled from their homelands after fleeing a deadly foe known only as the Adversary. In this latest edition, the residents of Fabletown prepare for an attack from the Adversary's forces. Willingham effortlessly combines the whimsical fantasy of the fairy-tale characters with a gritty, adult tone, turning figures like Snow White and the Big Bad Wolf (here a hard-boiled detective known as Bigby Wolf) into believable, fleshed-put people.
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The scope of Wooden Soldiers reads best in this collected form, which features stunning artwork by Mark Buckingham (Peter Parker: Spider-Man) and a prologue illustrated by Craig Hamilton (Green Lantern, Starman) and P. Craig Russell (Elric, The Ring of the Nibelung). Buckingham makes full use of the comics medium, changing his page borders and panel structure to reflect events and moods in the story, and his characters all have wonderfully expressive faces.
Hard Time is not the hit that Fables is, and is the only survivor of DC's Focus imprint. Gerber's story is more intimate than Willingham's, focusing on 15-year-old Ethan Harrow, sentenced to 50 years to life in prison for his role in a school prank gone horribly wrong. Once inside, Ethan manifests a sort of psychic presence, a specter that can leave his body even as his body is trapped in a cell.
While the story slowly builds, by the end of the collection you have a good sense of who the players are in the state prison where Ethan resides, even if you are no closer to figuring out the motivation or origin of his psychic manifestation. The artwork of Brian Hurtt (Queen & Country) is simple, mostly effective but hampered by a monochromatic color scheme. Ethan himself remains a cipher, often bitter and sarcastic and with little emotional depth. Still, Gerber has created a rich world with the potential for fascinating developments. In time, it could reach the heights that Fables hits every month.