#44 Fables, vol 6: Homelands by Bill Willingham
This review has spoilers for previous volumes in the Fables series, but no real spoilers for Homelands. 
After discovering that the woman he loved, Red Riding Hood, was really Baba Yaga and an agent of the adversary, Boy Blue has stolen precious magical artifacts and ventured back into the homelands to get his revenge. After killing various mercenaries to the adversary, he begins to build a reputation as a dangerous masked killer. Blue’s adventures eventually leads him face to face with the leader of the adversary, who will tell him the shocking tale of how everything came to be.
Homelands is the sixth Fables Graphic novel, and collects two arcs. The first is a two issue arc about Jack’s adventures in Hollywood. Although I’m not a huge Jack fan, I enjoyed how it used multiple viewpoints to tell one story. This arc clearly used a different artist, and I found the style to be a little too simplistic for my taste. The majority of the graphic novel is made up by the Homelands arc, a fascinating story that almost completely ignores the major players of this series (Snow White and Bigby do not show up at all, and Charming and the rest of the big Fables only show up in one issue) to tell a story that is half from Boy Blue’s perspective, and half from agents of the adversary's viewpoints. This trip behind enemy lines introduces us to some fascinating new fable characters (such as The Snow Queen), give us a better idea about how the adversary functions, and at the end of it all, shows us how the adversary came to be. Homelands answer some important questions, and some of the answers really caught me off guard. By the time you get to the end of this storyline, with the face of the adversary finally revealed and new characters brought into the comic, I could not be filled with a feeling of dread. The adversary may have been fought back from Fabletown in March of the Wooden Soldiers, but clearly there are many more challenges ahead for our favorite characters.
Fables, vol 6: Homelands is a fine addition to the Fables graphic novels series. I already have the next volume taken out from my library and I look forward to seeing what will happen next.
Rating: four and a half stars
Length: 192 pages
Source: Lewiston Public Library
Other books I've read by this author:
Next I will be reviewing Timeless by Gail Carriger
xposted to temporaryworlds, bookish, and goodreads
After discovering that the woman he loved, Red Riding Hood, was really Baba Yaga and an agent of the adversary, Boy Blue has stolen precious magical artifacts and ventured back into the homelands to get his revenge. After killing various mercenaries to the adversary, he begins to build a reputation as a dangerous masked killer. Blue’s adventures eventually leads him face to face with the leader of the adversary, who will tell him the shocking tale of how everything came to be.
Homelands is the sixth Fables Graphic novel, and collects two arcs. The first is a two issue arc about Jack’s adventures in Hollywood. Although I’m not a huge Jack fan, I enjoyed how it used multiple viewpoints to tell one story. This arc clearly used a different artist, and I found the style to be a little too simplistic for my taste. The majority of the graphic novel is made up by the Homelands arc, a fascinating story that almost completely ignores the major players of this series (Snow White and Bigby do not show up at all, and Charming and the rest of the big Fables only show up in one issue) to tell a story that is half from Boy Blue’s perspective, and half from agents of the adversary's viewpoints. This trip behind enemy lines introduces us to some fascinating new fable characters (such as The Snow Queen), give us a better idea about how the adversary functions, and at the end of it all, shows us how the adversary came to be. Homelands answer some important questions, and some of the answers really caught me off guard. By the time you get to the end of this storyline, with the face of the adversary finally revealed and new characters brought into the comic, I could not be filled with a feeling of dread. The adversary may have been fought back from Fabletown in March of the Wooden Soldiers, but clearly there are many more challenges ahead for our favorite characters.
Fables, vol 6: Homelands is a fine addition to the Fables graphic novels series. I already have the next volume taken out from my library and I look forward to seeing what will happen next.
Rating: four and a half stars
Length: 192 pages
Source: Lewiston Public Library
Other books I've read by this author:
Next I will be reviewing Timeless by Gail Carriger
xposted to temporaryworlds, bookish, and goodreads