Graphic Novel: Once Upon a Time Machine. Andrew Carl and Chris Stevens

Fairy tales have fueled our dreams and fired our imaginations for centuries. Step inside a time machine built by a collection of today's finest storytellers, and enter a range of futures where familiar tales are reimagined in an astonishing variety of styles. Editor Andrew Carl and Producer Chris Stevens bring you the next wave of leading writers and illustrators, working alongside superstar creators like Farel Dalrymple (Pop Gun War), Ryan Ottley (Invincible), Khoi Pham (Daredevil), and Brandon Graham (King City) to deliver a reading experience that will delight generations young and old.

A panoply of creators retells fairy tales, folktales, and stories from classic literature, all with a sci-fi twist. Every tale, from John Henry in a space-pilot showdown to the Billy Goats Gruff told as a girl’s journey through the subterranean sewer beneath a futuristic metropolis to The Three Musketeers with Nigerian swordsmen fighting samurai robots, takes a familiar plot and casts it into an unfamiliar future. While the whole product is a mixed bag, with a few standouts like poignant re-imaginings of Pinocchio and the Puppet Show Man, a strong theme emerges in the aggregate—namely, how humanity interacts with technology, how we give it life, and what it does to our lives. With a few exceptions (including Jill Thompson, who provides a single-image, futuristic take on Santa Claus), these are not big-name creators, and, while the tone ranges from humor to action to heartfelt drama, manga is a fair-sized influence in style and content. With a large array of stories, though, this will provide hours of opportunity for dipping into the future. --Jesse Karp