Despite how far behind I am, I probably would not have read this yet, except I realized about three issues in that I had it backwards with the Jack of Fables I just finished, regarding publication order. So I went ahead and fixed that, as you’ve seen, but then: already three issues in, may as well read the rest. And so here we are, at the end of the twelfth volume in the Fables series, The Dark Ages.

Which, okay, that title doesn’t make much sense when you consider that they just won the war against the Adversary (whose name I should probably stop inching around, to be honest) and Fabletown is no longer in imminent danger, right? Sure, the Empire is still out there, mostly holding all the old lands through numbers and inertia, but it’s a headless snake now, and any heads that develop will at least be smaller and less dangerous. Right?

Let’s just say that any fears I may have expressed about the story’s ability to soldier on in the absence of its initiating premise have been laid to rest, and in rather dramatic and literal fashion at that.

It turns out that if your cyclical reading schedule for graphic novels comes into conflict with your desire to reread the great fantasy series of your lifetime, you can end up going a year and a half between one book and the next. Which explains why I had almost no idea what was going on in the fifth Jack of Fables book. I mean yes, he’s still the self-absorbed, money-, sex- and fame-obsessed character who climbed a beanstalk that one time. I haven’t forgotten everything. But as to his specific circumstances? Let’s just say it’s a good thing I have a long-running review blog.

Good news for me is that this was an incremental book. That is, the first half of the story was a conflict between Jack and Bigby Wolf in 1883, a follow-up I suppose to some previous historical Jack tales about his time in the Civil War[1]. So it was easy to follow, and then I only had to deal with three issues advancing the main plot, which was just enough time to a) get me caught up and ready for the next book, y’know, months from now when I read it, and b) make me fully aware that there’s some high-level familial machinations going on here that I probably need to be paying much closer attention to, to understand them.

There’s this guy Revise who I’ve mentioned before, who wants to make everyone forget all the Fables, because… I wonder if I’ve ever known why? And there’s this guy Bookburner who hates Revise, but seems to destroy Fables, and I guess that’s worse than draining them and the world of magic through forgetfulness, but all in all, I don’t understand why these people are opposed to each other. Except that there’s a lot of family drama, all of which involves other characters with literary tropes as names and powers, and frankly the literary-trope-as-plot works so much better in The Unwritten, which to be fair I had not yet read any of last time I read one of these. So that’s unfortunate.

It’s not like the book’s bad. I really like Jack[2] and I like the hot librarian sisters and the bizarrely Proustian miniature blue ox and quite a few other things that are going on, but the plot? Either I’m lost, or I don’t get it, or it’s kind of dumb.

[1] I sure don’t remember which book anymore, so no link for you.
[2] Well, no, but I really like to read about Jack.