As the Fables world grows to include more and more key characters, some are falling into the background to make way for the rise of previously bit characters. And certainly the tone is changing away from the noir feeling of the early volumes as the stories start to grapple not just with events involving the fable characters, but with their overarching histories and futures. Or maybe it’s just that recent political upheaval is what has pushed Bigby Wolf and Snow White off the main stage, and the tone change is down to their absence as well. I figure it might be both, but I’ll have no way to really know until the Wolf is back and the noir returns, or doesn’t.

Homelands focuses on two characters over another handful of quickly passing years. In the opening, Jack Horner, and the Beanstalk, etc.[1] hatches another scheme for riches and fame, with better than usual success. It may be my independent knowledge, but it very much felt like Willingham saw that Jack was his for-fun character and didn’t really fit the flow of the main Fables story, and this was an explicit way to put him in position for the spin-off series, Jack of Fables, which I will begin reading relatively soon in the sequence, I think. And then in the main part of the storyline, Boy Blue infiltrates the fallen Homelands on a daring quest to rescue his love, save his best friend’s life, and with a little bit of luck, unmask and assassinate the Adversary himself! If that sounds pretty cool and exciting, well, sure enough, Fables keeps on delivering. And if you expect it to keep on delivering in ways the characters (and sometimes readers) cannot hope to foresee, well, that just means you’ve been paying attention.

[1] They’re all the same Jack, you see.