Jack of Fables
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Jack of Fables is a spin off of the comic Fables. It shows the adventures of Jack Horner after his exile from Fabletown. A preview of the series was shown in Fables #50, and the series itself debuted in July 2006. It is written by Fables writer Bill Willingham along with Matthew Sturges.
[edit] Plot
The series follows Jack's adventures following his time in Hollywood where he successfully completed a hugely popular series of movies based on himself and his life. However, he had his power and money stripped from him by Fabletown authorities.
In the first issue Jack was abducted whilst hitch-hiking across America and taken to the Golden Boughs Retirement Village, where he is essentially held prisoner. Following his first encounter with Revise, he then plans and executes the first successful breakout from the Golden Boughs. While some of the escapees were captured or killed, many are now free and on the run from Revise's team.
The first issue also sees the return of Goldilocks, who seemingly died in a much earlier issue of Fables.
[edit] Locations
An important location for the series is the Golden Boughs Retirement Village, named after Sir James George Frazer's The Golden Bough, a wide-ranging comparative study of mythology and religion. Despite its innocuous name, not all the residents live there voluntarily. In the first issue Jack is abducted to there while hitch-hiking.
The facility is run by a man named Mr. Revise. He may or not consider himself a Fable, but he apparently has a great deal of supernatural power. He considers his role to be "neutering" Fables (in part by making the much darker fairy tales less unwholesome), telling Jack "with the dull shears of time and distance, I will snip away at your virility, your power". His stated goal is to rid the world of magic. He had been close to accomplishing that before Jack infused himself with magic through his three movies.
Some of the Fables who are imprisoned are The Tin Man, The Cowardly Lion, The Scarecrow, and Dorothy Gale, the Cat and the Fiddle from Hey Diddle Diddle, The Walrus and the Carpenter, and the little oysters, Paul Bunyan and Babe the Blue Ox, the Black Sheep and boy from "Baa Baa Black Sheep", Mary, Mary, still quite contrary, Humpty Dumpty, Raven, Wicked John, Alice, Mother Goose, a large family from the poem "The Road to St. Ives", Cuchulainn, the Jersey Devil, an unnamed Innuit boy, the tooth fairy, Mustardseed, Peaseblossom, Moth, and Cobweb from A Midsummer Night's Dream, the Cottingley fairies Lola and Doris, John Henry, Pecos Bill, and assorted Munchkins. Another prisoner is an old man named Sam who couldn't remember if he was a Fable or not, since his story was almost completely forgotten. He was later proven to be Little Black Sambo, as the tigers chasing him were turned to butter like in the original story.
The facility is also home to a man who calls himself the Pathetic fallacy and appears to have the powers of that concept. While he does Revises' bidding and appears to have his trust, he is also kind and sympathetic and has (seemingly) aided the escape plan. It is not yet explained if there are other personifications of literary concepts in the world, if he and Revise are of the same stock, or how someone with the power to (theoretically) bring any inanimate object to life and make it obey can be confined to the retirement community.
