RRRs: The Fables Spin-offs Edition

Rapid response reviews are shorter entries for books that I want to comment on, but don’t have enough time or material to finish a normal post. Given the sheer length of the Fables series, the only way I’ll ever be able to tackle most of its volumes is if I keep my comments short and sweet! My reviews for the actual Fables series are simple: go read them all! To get the whole story, readers need to finish all of the books, and even though there are 19 volumes (as of now), all of them are worth the read. Today’s RRR, therefore, is dedicated to the Fables spin-offs since they are almost as voluminous, but differ widely in their importance to the main series and their overall quality.

Title: Jack of Fables (Volumes 1-9, including The Literals mini-series)

Author: Bill Willingham

Rating: *

Genre: Fantasy, Fairy Tale, Graphic Novel

I’m cheating a bit with Jack of Fables as I am lumping all of the books into one write-up (though I did write mini-reviews for volumes one and two here). Simply put, I hated this series. Jack of Fables is extraordinarily different from its predecessor, and very little of what I loved about Fables was present in Jack. Admittedly, the story premise is quite intriguing as these books deal with the existence of the Literals, beings that are the anthropomorphic representations of writing tools, but the titular character makes the story all but unbearable. I read the full series because there is a cross-over between it and Fables, but after trudging through these books, I am pretty sure I could have just skipped Fables 13 and saved myself the trouble. While the Literals are an interesting concept, most of the series is dedicated to showing how Jack is a terrible human being. The humour is sexist (for example, Jack sleeps with his half-sisters and this fact keeps coming up throughout the entire series as something that is supposed to be funny or admirable), the art is inconsistent, and I could not care less about any of the characters. Unless you are a diehard Fables fan, these books should be a skip.

Introducing Rapid Response Reviews (The RRRs)

Back in May, I started a habit of noting down everything that I read with an accompanying bit of text about the book’s topic and what my thoughts on it were. Shortly thereafter I discovered GoodReads and the book review blogosphere, and this is what inspired me to start my own blog. However, I’ve run into a bit of a problem: I read too fast. I can’t write full reviews quickly enough to keep up with the books that I finish, but I often have at least some brief comments to say about what I read. Consequently, I have decided to launch “Rapid Response Reviews”, named so because saying RRRs is fun. These are meant to be short reviews for books that I just don’t have as much to say about or ones that I don’t have time to write a full review on. They’ll be released in sets, possibly with themes, possibly not when I am lazy. In any case, it will be a good way of getting myself back into the habit of commenting on a bigger selection of my reading material.

Today’s theme is graphic novels that I have read within the past little while. I swear I’ll get back to writing about other types of fiction soon. I have been glutting myself on comics ever since I got a library card in my new city and discovered that their collection is vast and amazing. Consequently, this RRR is going to be longer than I anticipate most will be so that I can get through the vast majority of graphic novels that I have built up over the past little while.