So on Friday my friend and fellow blogger Graeme McMillan covered the Bill Willingham spotlight panel at WonderCon in San Francisco. Willingham, who writes Fables, Jack of Fables and House of Mystery, revealed at the panel that he was working on a super-secret new Fables project along the lines of the 1001 Nights of Snowfall OGN. Willingham said he’d share a passage from the piece that revealed why Fables are called “Fables,” but with tongue in cheek asked everyone in the room to keep it to themselves and not spread it around the Internet.

Well, ironically, Graeme, who our regular readers know has on occasion pissed off creators with his posts both here and on Fanboy Rampage, complied with Willingham’s wishes. Yes, Graeme McMillan did as he was told. I was kind of amused by that, too.

Some of the folks who read the story on Newsarama weren’t pleased with Graeme for keeping the secret, and they let him know. Here’s one of the comments:

What kind of shoddy reporting is this. Hey.. im going to talk about a panel, but not give you the interesting tidbits.

So much for newsarama bring us the news for those people that couldnt be here.

Yeah, I’m sure I will find the information out. And I will do it on another website.

So at the Fables Forum today, Willingham shared that he had heard that Graeme was taking some heat for what he had done, and he felt bad. So during the panel, he let me know that it was perfectly ok to share why Fables are called “Fables.” Luckily I recorded the panel, and when I got home I transcribed the passage he read. At this point I should probably throw out a SPOILERS WARNING for anyone who doesn’t want to know until the book actually comes out … for everyone else, you’ll find my transcription after the jump …

A few caveats before getting into it …

1) I transcribed this as best I could, but may have missed an “ed” or “a” or some other small part of it when I was typing it in. If I in any way didn’t get it down exactly right, I apologize to Mr. Willingham.
2) The book is still being written, so what you see below may not end up in the final draft exactly as it appears.
3) This isn’t the entire passage he read; just the parts that answer the question about why they are called ‘Fables.’

With that being said, here we go …

… now ‘Fables’ seems an odd name for any sort of people to call themselves, and especially odd for this group, since the word implies that they’re folks with stories to tell. They aren’t. They were, and continue to be, adamantly secretive.

But this brings us to another weird phenomenon they discovered after arriving here. It may be, that when you introduce a number of very magical creatures into a decidedly unmagical environment, some of that magic seeps up, spreading by osmosis into the mundane natives, us, whom they often pejoratively call “Mundys.” Perhaps this spilled magic grants the Mundys some rudimentary but unconscious awareness of their new neighbors. Whatsoever the explanation, shortly after the Fables arrived, Mundys all over the world began telling stories about them, stories no one knew were based on actual people and everyone assumed were simply creative and occasionally clever works of fiction.

These stories sometimes became distorted, as they were passed on person to person, and those that were finally written down often contained many errors of fact. But for the most part, they were accurate enough that our mysterious Fable immigrants eventually realized that they were being talked about. They were the subjects of many popular fairy tales, and some did indeed arrive here from the land of fairies. Their private histories were inscribed and revealed in the form of folk tales, nursery rhymes, epic poems and doggerel ditties; haunting ballads, riddled songs and of course, fables.

I’m going to skip ahead at this point, as the next section contained examples of various Fables — Beauty, Beast, Prince Charming, etc. — and what they were doing now that they were in New York. If you read Fables, then there isn’t anything new that was revealed. On to the money shot:

So perhaps it was inevitable that the refugees coming together from so many scattered lands and diverse cultures, wanting to select some collective name under which they could become a unified people, would settle on the one quality they all seemed to share in common — their tendency to become the subject of so many stories in our Mundy world.

At first, they tried calling themselves “The Story People,” but that inevitably got shortened to “Stories,” which seemed a tad confusing seeing as how both books and buildings already had contained stories, and adding a third definition to so basic a word seemed overly burdensome.

They tried “The Folklore People” for awhile, but gave it up too, when at first it became “Folk,” which was already in widespread use among the Mundys, and then “Lores,” which never quite fell trippingly from the tongue.

For similar reasons, “Ballads” and “Rhymes” were also tried and discarded, leaving them ultimately with “The Fabled People,” which simply became “Fables,” which turned out to fit just fine after a reasonable period of getting used to it.

Fables, the personification of story and song, live amongst us in New York, and we for the most part are none the wiser …

So there you have it.

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 24th, 2008 at 11:29 pm and is filed under Comic Books, Conventions, Creators, DC Comics, News & Views. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.