Fables Vol. 4: March of the Wooden Soldiers

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1401202225 ISBN 13: 9781401202224

Publisher: Vertigo, 2004

Bill Willingham's runaway hit series FABLES continues its success in this fourth trade paperback, collecting issues #19-21 and #23-27 (issue #22 will appear in a future collection) and featuring the rise of a new threat to Fabletown. Also included is the Prestige Format Special Fables: The Last Castle. When Little Red Riding Hood suddenly walks through the gate between this world and the lost Fable Homelands, she's welcomed as a miraculous survivor by nearly everyone - everyone except her old nemesis, Bigby Wolf, who smells spying and subversion more than survival. But will he be able to prove his case before disaster strikes? And how will it all affect Prince Charming's upstart campaign to become the new mayor of Fabletown?

About the Author:

Bill Willingham has been writing, and sometimes drawing, comics for more than 20 years. During that time, he's had work published by nearly every comics publisher in the business, and he's created many critically acclaimed comic book series, including Elementals, Coventry, Proposition Players, and of course the seminal Vertigo series Fables, as well as its spin-off series Fairest, Jack of Fables and The Literals. His work has been nominated for many awards, including the Eisner, Harvey, and Ignatz comic industry awards and the International Horror Guild award. He lives somewhere near a good poker room.

Born in 1966 in the English seaside town of Clevedon, Mark Buckingham has worked in comics professionally for the past twenty years. In addition to illustrating all of Neil Gaiman's run on the post-Alan Moore Miracleman in the early 1990s, Buckingham contributed inks to The Sandman and its related miniseries Death: The High Cost of Living and Death: The Time of Your Life as well as working on various other titles for Vertigo and Marvel through the end of the decade. In 2002 he took over as the penciller for Bill Willingham's Fables, which has gone on to become one of the most popular and critically acclaimed Vertigo titles of the new millennium. When not in Clevedon, Buckingham can be found with his wife Irma in the Asturias region of northern Spain.

From Booklist:

Willingham's happy idea of bringing the Fables--that is, the characters of Europe's best-known fairy tales--to contemporary New York rolls merrily, dangerously along in two stories. The former, "The Last Castle," guest-drawn by P. Craig Russell and Craig Hamilton, flashes back to the Fables' last stand in their home world; echoing the Disney and John Wayne Alamo flicks and Peter Jackson's Two Towers, it winningly introduces the long title story, in which Boy Blue reencounters the love he loses in "The Last Castle"--the grown-up Red Riding Hood. But is this the same Red? Reason for doubt precedes her in goblin sightings near a door between this and the Fables' worlds--and goblins can only be harbingers of impending attack by the Adversary, who drove the Fables into exile. Meanwhile, what's with these toughies in black suits who look like Pinocchio? Willingham never sacrifices a joke for the sake of a thrill, or vice versa, and artist Mark Buckingham continues matching Willingham joke for thrill, and vice versa. Ray Olson
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