Comics and Fairy Tales?

This past thursday we had to read a critique about Fables: Legends in Exile. The basic argument was for translating the characters we know and love, such as Snow White, the Big Bad Wolf, and Prince Charming into a more modern, "real" setting. They have to live with modern ideas and emotions, such as love, sex, betrayal, etc. I find this to be a great example of the power that fairy tales can have for the imagination.

Stories like 'Bluebeard' and 'Beauty and the Beast' seemed destined for the comic book page. They have characters and plots so intriguing, exciting, dangerous, and every other adjective one could think of. A blue bearded man who kills his wife on an apparent whim. What about this topic doesn't draw a reader in? We want to know all the details, especially how this man would, and could, look. This last statement also applies to the Beast. What does a 'Beast' look like? How could someone describe that? Its result has the potential to be quite entertaining. It just takes somone to draw the picture.

It also takes a creative person to come up with this type of idea. It's one of those ideas so simple that its quite easy to overlook. Many reworkings of these stories follow some type of idea of what, and how, a fairy tale should be, and they become to wrapped up and involved in that one setting. Fables: Legends in Exile, however, dares to think outside of the box and to be creative enough that once someone stumbles upon it, it makes complete sense. They were able to take these characters and cast them in a new, yet familiar, light. They able to "flesh out" the parts that Perrault and Grimm tended to leave out. I think this could have been done intentionally by the the scribes. It would be much more fun for the reader/listener to imagine what happens in a story like 'Bluebeard,' for better or worse. In that way they feel like they were the ones who created a story, not the Brothers Grimm or Perrault.


This idea then flourishes and can be taken to such an 'extreme' as Fables. They were giving no time (Once upon a time could be 10 years ago), no specific setting, and no special identifiers to really tell one 'Beauty' from the next. Fables: Legends in Exile is one of many ways that shows the charm and imaginative creativity of fairy tales.