Fables 2: Animal Farm by Bill Willingham

Fables 2: Animal Farm
by Bill Willingham [YA PB (Graphic Novel) Willingham] 

The Fables are back in another story, which is long enough this time to take up this whole volume without the addition of shorter stories. It picks up just after volume one, so I recommend that you start at the beginning. To reveal any of the plot here is a spoiler for the first volume; Rose Red was not really dead in the ‘Legends in Exile’ story. Rose Red and her sister Snow White take a trip up to the farm where the Fables who don’t look like people, such as the Three Little Pigs, the giants, and Shere Khan, live away from society so as not to be revealed to the wider world that the characters from fables are real and living in the same world. The visit does not go as planned due to an up rise among the farm residents who feel that all Fables are created equal, but some more equal than others. The revolt and it’s consequences take up most of the story, and the ending is not entirely a happy one. I’ll let you read it for yourself since I enjoyed all the surprises so much I don’t want to spoil them for you. This has been a very enjoyable series so far and personally I’m looking forward to reading the whole thing over time. If you want to see what happened after the story was over for the fable characters you read as a kid, this is a really fun graphic novel series. What’s also nice is the amount of character development there is from volume to volume. If you prefer e-books then you can also check this out online with Hoopla Digital either in a browser or the app.

One last note is that these stories were published in the volumes reviewed here on BookGuide and as deluxe editions, which are hardback and longer, so there are only 14 of them. The stories line up fairly evenly but sometimes the shorter ones get shuffled around a bit differently in the different volume lines. Originally they came out as comic books, not graphic novels, so you could go that route too if you wanted.

[If you enjoy this, almost all the rest of the series is on Hoopla. At the moment they have up to volume 21 out of the 22!]

 official Fables web page on the Vertigo comics site ] | [ official Bill Willingham web site ]

 

Recommended by Kristen A.
Gere Branch Library

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