The Onion’s A.V. Club has a lengthy interview with Bill Willingham that focuses primarily on his Vertigo series Fables, from inspiration to pitch to current form:
Any publishing company, any big one, the first thing they do once they accept the idea that they’re going to do a series, once they’re committed to it, they panic. They break into this huge panic and say, “Oh my God, what have we done? We’ve agreed to do this,” and start second-guessing everything. There was a lot of back-and-forth about, “Why don’t we just make this a six-issue miniseries, because we’re not entirely sure you can get more than one story out of this concept.” I said no to that. “Why make the Big Bad Wolf an important character? That doesn’t seem very smart.” Things like that, just questioning everything, from format to how many times a month. It’s just the nature of the beast, I guess. For example, they were really concerned, I guess because this was Vertigo, that this not be a bunch of elves and unicorns in the happy little enchanted forest, which I assured them it wouldn’t be. They wanted to make sure everyone knew this was gritty, urban stuff. The proposal included various possible storylines, and they said, “This murder-mystery thing that you’ve got as about the third or fourth storyline, why don’t you move that to the front?” I said, “Yeah, no problem.” That’s the kind of thing that they did. It’s kind of boring. There’s not a lot of preproduction in comics the way there is in movies, or anything. When they accept a proposal, the next thing you really have to do is sit your butt in a chair and start writing it, so that’s what we did.
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