By Kristy Boney

Myths, as Friedrich Schlegel told us in his Discourse on Myth (1800), create a new world view that abolishes the course of logical reason and returns humanity to the “beautiful confusion of imagination, the original chaos of human nature.” Similar to Schlegel, who, in the throes of German Romanticism along with the likes of the Brothers Grimm, sought to connect a mythic past with a German culture, Bill Willingham amalgamates his own fairy tale kingdom in Fables: 1001 Nights of Snowfall. Ultimately, Willingham does not craft a beautifully confusing canvas for the imagination, but instead fashions a very tidy fairy-tale universe.

1001 Nights of Snowfall is structured as a frame story that allows Willingham to delve into the backgrounds of established characters—such as Snow White, Bigby Wolf, King Cole, and the mischievous Reynard the Fox—from his ongoing Fables series and to generate new portraits for lesser known characters such as Colonel Thunderfoot and Mersey Dotes. As is clear from the book’s title, Willingham uses 1001 Arabian Nights—in which the central narrator, Scheherazade, tells King Shahryar a different story each night so that he might spare her life—as the basic structure for his story. But in 1001 Nights of Snowfall, Willingham replaces the legacy of Scheherazade with Snow White. The function of stories for Scheherazade—or more directly, the function of voice as intricately connected to the need for survival from King Shahryar’s prejudice against unfaithful wives—eventually creates a host of anecdotes that explore “the original chaos of human nature.” Snow White’s voice, though, serves merely as a device to provide origins for Willingham’s Fables series. As a result, many of his characters are no longer deliciously complicated and ambiguous; rather, their actions in the Fables series become predictable and the frame-story becomes an organized checklist of back-stories.

I sat down to read 1001 Nights of Snowfall on a very cold Sunday afternoon. As a fan of the Fables monthly, I was curious about the supplemental stories of Snow White and Prince Charming, intrigued by the tale of Bigby Wolf, and chilled by the narrative of Frau Totenkinder. Part of the appeal was the atmosphere in which I settled in to read the tale and part of it had to do with the stunning artwork by the likes of Charles Vess, Mark Wheatley, and Mark Buckingham (although some of the most gorgeous pages are illustrated by John Bolton, Tara McPherson, and Esau Andrews). But after finishing the collection, I felt a little disenchanted by the efficiency with which Willingham had ordered his universe. The charm of Fables is that characters from a myriad of cultural myths have become refugees because an adversary has taken over their magical homelands and they have been forced to reside in a district of New York. The miscellany of cultural threads and quirky characterizations provides an intrigue that has served Willingham well throughout the series, but to create explanations rather than tales shelves the series into the library of predictable conventionality.

Certainly it could be argued that one of the functions of myths is to provide rationales and explain the unexplainable, but the fairy tale sources used by Willingham are generally not those of explanatory type. Rather, his sources stem from the folk tradition in which there is a black-and-white worldview and the characters are met with an existential threat (ala Scheherazade). The strength of Willingham’s Fables series is that he starts with a familiar tradition and adds a synthetic and polyvalent element in which there is no flat platform for the soul of the character; at the core is a search for truth and inner experience. As a result, the fairy tale tradition becomes artistic—in the vein of the German Kunstmärchen—and there is more depth than a one-sided tale with an ending of a reward or a punishment. 1001 Nights of Snowfall is certainly entertaining and absolutely beautiful—especially in “The Chrismas Pies” and “The Witch’s Tale,” which have traces of Willingham’s ability to subvert the collective tradition. But the compilation ultimately lacks the urgency that guides traditional fairy tale figures within their tales. The urgency that drove Scheherazade through 1001 nights of storytelling disappears under a tidy (if pretty) snow.