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The writer behind Fables and Shadowpact talks about his characters and the worlds they inhabit
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Posted June 13, 2006 10:15 AM |
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 When Bill Willingham first pitched the concept of Fables, folks at DC were skeptical as to how long the premise could last. Willingham had no such doubts.
With an almost unlimited amount of characters to pull from, Willingham felt that Fables could remain fresh and exciting forever. Thanks to his inventive stories and a loyal fan base, Fables reaches its 50th issue in June and launches its first spinoff, Jack of Fables, in July.
In addition to penning the Fables books, Willingham also writes the adventures of DC's only magic-based superteam in Shadowpact. Willingham opened up his big book of fairy tales and told us all about his newest projects.
WIZARD: What can we expect to see out of Fables' milestone 50th issue?
WILLINGHAM: As you may have guessed by issue #49, Bigby is in this issue. For Bigby, we decided that when he finally does return to the storyline, he returns in a big way. Fables #50 completes that promise. Bigby is in it. He's in it big. He does lots of glorious, wonderful stuff. He does some of the things that readers have been waiting for him to get to all the way through the first 50 issues. Snow White is in it. Not as much. We solve a lot of things. The thing that I'll admit we take care of is what happened with Jack's bean from Jack and the Beanstalk. That's finally revealed. Boy, what else do I want to give away? There's so much I don't want to give away about this.
Let's run down some of the characters that are in the issue. Pinocchio is in it. Gepetto is in it. Bigby, as we said, is in it. Bigby's cubs are in it. Snow White is in it. Rose Red is in it. Boy Blue, King Cole, Prince Charming, Reynard the Fox. Almost, not quite, but almost everyone in the main cast and everyone who's appeared in Fables so far is in it.
WIZARD: What can we expect to see from Fables after issue #50?
WILLINGHAM: The first thing after issue #50 is issue #51 with a one-issue Cinderella adventure where Cinderella is following up on some of the things that occurred in issue #50. She's dealing with giants. She's dealing with Lilliputians. She's running all over. In one world she's too small. In the other world she's too big. That creates some problems.
Starting with issue #52 and the next four issues after that, we take a look at the Homelands. Gepetto, Pinocchio, a few other characters like the Snow Queen and some we haven't met yet, get together because they've decided to finally determine the fate of Fabletown. What is the empire's official policy going to be? Are they going to do a final solution type thing like the Nazis tried with the Jews? What are they as an empire going to do with Fabletown? So that's an exciting political type thriller and that will be four issues. It will introduce some new characters, some of which, when they come on stage, our readers will be surprised and say, "Why haven't we seen these people before?" and, "Oh my goodness, here they are."
WIZARD: Looking back on the first 50 issues, what single issue stands out as your favorite?
WILLINGHAM: That's a good question. I think it changes from time to time. To a certain extent it's based on the artist doing it. I love getting surprised by great art. The ones I'm most fond of right now are actually two issues, the two Rodney and June issues. The love story between the two wooden soldiers in the Arabian lands. The reason I think I'm fond of that one is that we get to explore in detail a type of creature that only exists in fairy tales and what would their culture be like and their attitudes and in what ways are they different from us.
In another way, it's a story that only resonates if you know a lot about Fables so far. If you've been a loyal reader for all 50 issues, this one comes along and because you know so much about the various worlds, the fictional places we've created, this story makes sense. So it's kind of a reward for being a good reader and I like it on that level. Plus, I guess I'm a sucker for tragic love stories.
WIZARD: What has been your favorite cover thus far?
WILLINGHAM: Oh boy. Now that's another one that changes all the time. The first time I think when I went, "Oh my god, I can't believe there can be a cover this wonderful," was issue #10, the Snow White in bandages in the wheelchair cover. Then there was, in the "March of the Wooden Soldiers," the cover of the sad and lonely little Pinocchio with the suitcase that looked like he was going to have to leave Fabletown and go to the Homelands forever. In "Storybook Love," my favorite when that came out was the Snow White portrait cover where you don't notice it immediately, but you realize that she's wiping blood off on her shorts. It was just a wonderful, subtle image. Issue #18 with Thumbelina inside the tulip was terrific. It was just wonderful.
Each new cover [James Jean] does, there's just so much stuff in it that everything else is forgotten and I say, "This is my favorite cover now." I think James is a godsend. He came into the DC office looking for work at just the right time. We were able to snatch him up. I pray he loves Fables enough never to leave it even though the big commissions he's getting from other places like Playboy and Scientific American have to be paying much more than we can afford. The man is terrific.
WIZARD: What storyarc do you think has worked the best so far? The one you've knocked right out of the park?
WILLINGHAM: For success as a storyline, I think "March of the Wooden Soldiers," even though you kind of had to read everything before that to really get it. "March of the Wooden Soldiers" was one of those things we were building towards for some time and then we get to have lots of big operatic things occur. I think that was the first one that really paid off as far as showing what this series could be.
The other one I think is "The Homelands," where Boy Blue goes back in his vain attempt to secure Red Riding Hood. I think that's another one that, once again, you sort of needed to know the characters before it began. However, if you didn't know a little about Boy Blue and his tragic love and all that stuff when he goes on this personal quest to do this, how wonderful and exciting it is. I think those two.
WIZARD: Is it difficult to follow-up a huge story like "March of the Wooden Soldiers?"
WILLINGHAM: Well, it's not for me. I assume it is for the readers but I think that we have a pretty loyal readership and you can't just pile on like some movies do. Like, if we have a car chase in action feature one, we've got to have a bigger car chase with more explosions in action feature two. I think that gets a little tedious to the point where pretty soon car chases and explosions are just mind-numbingly horrible and boring to you.
So my attitude is to build to a climax, settle things down a bit and then start slowly building towards another. I think that's a good way to go as long as the readers are willing to come along. You get a sense of let down after something big and exciting happens but then slowly the pressure starts building up again and you know you're on your way to some other big event. I hate to use the clichéd term "rollercoaster ride," but as far as the sudden ups and sudden downs, what metaphor is more apt?
WIZARD: How far along do you have the Fables saga plotted in your head?
WILLINGHAM: There are almost three stages. I have the grand stage in broad strokes. I have years worth planned ahead, including what I suspect the last story will be if we even get to the point of having a last story. In more practical terms, I have about a year's worth plotted out with actual writing and parts of dialogue written down at any given time. Then the six months coming up immediately are thoroughly plotted. That's where substantial parts of each issue are written as I get spare time for them and the plot is already locked in.
The six issues yet to come are hard to make changes to because things are so locked in. The year ahead planning is a little more open, so if something occurs to me that I want to capitalize on we can switch some things around. Then, of course, the grand planning is changing all the time.
WIZARD: Is this a series you'd like to continue doing for as long as you can?
WILLINGHAM: Yeah. When the series first started, even some folks in DC were wondering how many stories you could really get out of this premise, but I knew we could get no end of stories out of it. I think now they know as well that the cast is huge and you can do permutations on every cast member forever. So my personal plans are to continue doing this as long as someone's willing to publish it. The sales are pretty steady. I'm quite humbled and thankful for that and as long as they remain so we'll keep doing it.
WIZARD: Are there things you would like to go back and change in the first 50 issues?
WILLINGHAM: Oh, constantly. I know we're not supposed to admit that as writers, but part of that is just the curse of anyone who's doing this kind of work where if you reread old stories all you can see are the things that are mistakes and that you wish you could have done better. The biggest thing, and I'm going to publicly shoot myself in the foot here but what the hell, if you read all the issues you'll notice that the timeline has certain mistakes in it.
For the most part I've got a steady timeline. Everything fits where it's supposed to fit. However, because the "March of the Wooden Soldiers" arc came up and I wanted it to actually occur in the month of March. I thought that would be a good additional play on that, I had to squirrel something around timeline-wise and as a result I think Snow's pregnancy actually lasted for about 12 months rather than nine. Either that or it was a real short one and only lasted for seven months.
Little things like that that. I wish I could have been so meticulous in planning where someone could look back and see exactly at any point when this occurs on the calendar and when this does and so on and so forth. There's a fan on the Fabletown forum that has put down a probable timeline and it's pretty good. He's pretty good at adjusting some of the things where I've obviously played fast and loose with the timeline. So that's helpful, although it does point out places where I've made a few mistakes.
WIZARD: Is there a breakout character whose popularity has surprised you?
WILLINGHAM: Sure. I was certain that Snow and Bigby would be popular because they were set up as the doomed romance couple for a long time. Boy Blue, first of all surprised me in his conception. He was only going to be a background character. Someone to help Snow, someone to give Snow someone to talk to when she's in the office from time to time. That's as much planning as I had. It was, "Well who is it? It's some kind of fable. Let's take that Little Boy Blue nursery rhyme. Here he is, he's all in blue." I thought that was as much depth as the character was ever going to have at first.
Then we did "The Last Castle" and I needed someone to be the storyteller for that "the one person who survived the Alamo" kind of story and picked Boy Blue simply because we don't really know about what happened to him in the Homelands. It could be anything. All we know is that he plays a trumpet and he likes to play the blues. So let's give him a really good reason to want to play the blues and it's the big tragedy at the last castle.
So that provided a background for him and that's when I really began to be interested in him as a character. So that set up the whole "Homelands" storyarc. He was a character that was just one line in my initial planning. "Snow White's assistant is Boy Blue." That's it. That was all that was in the original proposal. From only one line he seems to have gotten pretty complex and interesting.
WIZARD: When you introduce new characters, do you select the fable and then find a role for him to play in the story, or do you do the opposite and find a fable to fit the role you've already created?
WILLINGHAM: No one has ever asked that question before. Thank you very much because I get to be more bragging now. The perfect questions are the ones that allow me the opportunity to sound smarter than I really am. The answer, of course, is both. I have characters that I want to bring in at some point just because they're characters I liked in the folk tales and some characters where we need someone able to do this, whatever this is. So I go searching around for someone who can fill that role. For example, Boy Blue with "The Last Castle." I needed someone to be the tragic storyteller of that.
When things are really firing on all cylinders, I can do both, where not only do we find someone to fit the role of some story coming up but it turns out he's the perfect character to fit that role. The one I'm referring to is one we haven't met before. He's in one of the upcoming issues so I won't tell you his name. There's a character being introduced the next time we go to the Homelands to do that final solution story I was telling you about, where the empire's plotting their official strategy for Fabletown. There's a character I introduce there that everyone will know and is the only possible character that could fit the role of what I needed a character for. There was a wonderful congruence of events there to make that work. Everyone is either going to love or hate this character.
WIZARD: Do you have a research library from which to pull characters?
WILLINGHAM: Yes. One of the wonderful benefits of doing Fables as a series is that now friends know what to get me if they're ever going to get me anything. So I get a lot of friends finding old books of fairy tales that I may not have yet and sending them to me. So my folktale and fairy tale library is growing constantly and I'm always on the lookout too for new ones.
The only problem is I'm a disorganized researcher. If I find some wonderful little thing tucked away in some story, I'll write down the information on it on like the back of an envelope and then lose the envelope. Sometimes I've been called more than once from the Nevada power company asking me after I sent in my power bill, "Do you need the information written on this envelope? It looks pretty important." Things like that. So the answer is, I have this great research library and it's too bad the guy operating it can be such a dullard at times.
WIZARD: You're dealing with characters that already have established stories and backgrounds. How hard is it to put your own spin on these characters and give them a new background?
WILLINGHAM: It was difficult in the beginning, but not at all now because it's finally sunk in that they're folktales and the essence of folktales is that they belong to the folks. Anyone who wants to can play with them and change them and use them and mutilate them to their heart's content. So now it's not difficult at all. Every single one of these characters belongs to me because I'm part of the folks out there. Which isn't to say they don't also belong to everybody else who wants to make use of them, but in my versions I can change as I want them and I no longer feel any shame whatsoever about it.
WIZARD: Is it easier to use characters that already have established backgrounds?
WILLINGHAM: Sure. Especially if you look at it in the idea of, "Here's an established backstory, so what wonderful ways can I subvert it?" That's a fun part of the process.
WIZARD: You've got a lot of doomed romances in Fables. What is it about that plotline that interests you so much?
WILLINGHAM: I hope it isn't repeated so much as to become tedious, so I try variations on it. The Snow and Bigby romance, the idea was, "Let's just throw so many problems in between them that it can't possibly succeed." Kind of fulfilling the promise of "no more happily ever after" that the series began with. With others like Rodney and June, it's another version of a doomed romance in the sense that they do get together but there's actually a price that's paid for that.
Don't make this a big blurb comment, but we might even have one coming up here that actually works out just to flavor the book with the full spectrum of how those things go.
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 WIZARD: At what point did you decide to spin Jack off into his own book?
WILLINGHAM: The notion really occurred to me at the end of the two-part "Hollywood Jack" story that occurred in Fables, simply because we got to that point where Jack is told to get out and never show himself in Fabletown again. My first instinct was, "He's Jack, so how's he going to get around that?" Then I thought, "You know, the braver thing to do, the thing that no other series in comics would ever do, is to say 'Okay, that's it. He's never seen in Fabletown again.'" Then try to find some ways to work him into the series as a guy roaming around forever.
Almost as soon as that occurred, as soon as I wrote the last page where we see Jack with his thumb out and who knows where he's going to, I think that's when the idea started to percolate that maybe this was a good time to spin him off on his own. That was kind of reinforced when [Vertigo editor] Shelly Bond, completely on her own, had the same idea and called me up and said, "How about a Jack spinoff?" Since both of us came to the idea independently, I thought that was enough good fortune or good thinking to justify doing it.
WIZARD: What makes the character of Jack so well suited to a spinoff?
WILLINGHAM: The lovable rogue is a perennial storybook character. I don't think we can ever get enough of well-written, lovable rogues, but one thing about them is that by nature of the kind of character they are, they always screw up their relationships. You know that Jack, no matter what happens to him this week, this month or this year, is not going to be stuck in that same place, that same relationship or that same scheme next year. The nature of him is that he moves on.
He's the ultimate rover, the ultimate vagabond. Even if he were to physically stay in place for years at a time, he would screw up every single relationship, every job and every scheme so much that you're always getting a whole new situation with him. So the idea of a Jack spinoff is that it's different from Fables. Fables centers around a specific place where people gather and hold on, whereas Jack of Fables is the wandering character story. What better wandering character to put in a story like that than Jack, who is just perfectly suited to that kind of thing?
WIZARD: Is the fact that Jack is a fairy tale character an important aspect of the series or will he be treated as just another drifter?
WILLINGHAM: Well if that's all it was going to be, we might have to question if that's going to be different or exciting enough to justify his own series. All I can say to that is in the very first issue of the new series, the very first ride he gets when he's sticking his thumb out opens up a whole new world for Jack and Fables readers that no one knew existed. That whole new world has its own fables characters in it that Fabletown doesn't know about, that the adversary and the empire don't know about. Jack being Jack finds out about it pretty accidentally
WIZARD: How are you and Matthew Sturges sharing writing duties on Jack of Fables?
WILLINGHAM: Being a lazy bastard, first I tried the Walt Disney version where, "Matt, you do all the work and I'll just sign my name to it before it ships out the door," but apparently he wanted a real collaboration. So what we did for the first Jack storyarc, which is five issues, we both worked on together. That means lots of phone calls all day and shipping snippets of dialogue back and forth. So together we sort of slowly molded a bunch of ideas into one story.
In the first story it was important to establish Jack, his back-up characters and the overlying premise of the series. After that, we're taking turns taking the lead on the storyarcs. So let's say we have a four-issue storyarc. Matt will take the lead and be the first one to write the first draft of that and then ship it to me. I'll fiddle with it and piss all over it and make it better or worse and ship it back.
The next storyarc after that, I'll take the lead, do the first draft and ship it to Matt so he can do the same and fix my stuff and improve it with his much more wonderful insights. So in one sense we're sort of trading off stories, but it's not that he's going to write a storyarc and then I am because we're both going to be involved in every story, kind of backstopping the other.
WIZARD: Are you concerned about reducing the quality of Fables by creating a spinoff title?
WILLINGHAM: That was, of course, a worry. The way we sort of shored up the levy against that was to first make sure that the Jack book is very much unlike the regular Fables book. We've already talked about some of those differences. The fact that Jack of Fables is a roving series and so on and so forth. The next thing was to make sure that we brought some new insights into the Jack story. Matt was brought on board so that we had a different writer with different loves and passions and insights looking at it and bringing those sorts of stories.
The one thing we wanted to absolutely avoid was making Jack of Fables a kind of "Fables Lite" or "Fables Jr." as a series. I think we've protected against that. Plus, we're going to use artists that from now on they're Jack of Fables artists. Like Tony Akins, who did some Fables stories, but now that's he's doing Jack of Fables he won't be doing the regular Fables stories anymore. So they're going to be pretty severely different looks for the two books I hope. Tony Akins is doing some wonderful work and I can't wait until the readers get to see it.
WIZARD: How accessible is Jack of Fables to new readers? Can you jump on this series if you've never read Fables?
WILLINGHAM: I think you can do that and not have read a single Fables issue. You learn the things you need to know about Jack pretty quickly. Jack also gives us a rundown of the vital information you need to know about everything. Like I said, the world he stumbles into is so different and has been so hidden from the Fables world and the Homelands world all along that even they don't know about it. So in that sense it's entirely its own series. Pick up number one. You don't have to read Fables at all if you don't want to.
WIZARD: Did the introduction of the spinoff force you to change a lot of things in your grand plan for Fables?
WILLINGHAM: A few things but surprisingly not many. In my grand overall scheme, this turns out to be a wonderful way to eventually set Jack up to be right where he needs to be when it all comes together at the end, if the end ever occurs.
WIZARD: Did you know you would get to create a Shadowpact ongoing series when you did Day of Vengeance?
WILLINGHAM: Sort of. The actual first version of Shadowpact was an attempt to do a similar thing for Vertigo, and then Vertigo and I both agreed that it wasn't really fit for that line so we shelved it. So when Dan DiDio and Joey Cavalieri called me about Day of Vengeance, they said, "Why don't you bring that team that you already started working on into this?" and I thought that was a great idea. I re-did it a little bit, took a few characters out and put a few different characters in.
As soon as I had that version of Shadowpact together, the first call I made was, "Okay, but after this I'm going to do this as its own series," and they said it was a great idea. I don't know if saying it's a great idea was an absolute promise that it would be a series, but as Day of Vengeance progressed, whether it was or not, pretty soon Day of Vengeance was over and they said, "Okay, when's that first issue of Shadowpact coming?"
Wizard: Since it was an Infinite Crisis tie-in, how much leeway did you have when it came to writing Day of Vengeance?
WILLINGHAM: Lots of leeway and none at all and sometimes both of those rang true. There were lots of things I got to do where they said, "Wow, that's great. Go with it," but at the same time there was an entire laundry list of, "Somewhere during the series these things have to happen." What's the kind of race in track and field, the hurdle race, where not only do you have to run around the track, you have to leap those things? [EDITOR'S NOTE: Willingham's referring to the steeplechase.] So I used it as that kind of a story. I'm going to run my own race but from time to time, there's going to be this thing I have to jump over or deal with and I used that as kind of an interesting way to stretch my boundaries or challenge myself.
So yeah, I treated their laundry list of things that needed to happen as a set of challenges in which to write an overall story that I wanted to do. It was messy and it was complex. There were things changed at the last minute as all of these big crossovers were, but all in all I'm pretty happy with how it turned out.
WIZARD: Why are you such a fan of these magic based characters?
WILLINGHAM: I like doing magic based characters for a couple of reasons. It's not, like many readers assume, because there are no rules to magic so you can do anything you want. It's more complex than that because magic is something that doesn't actually exist. By the way, for the record, I don't think magic does exist. There's no such thing as sorcerers or untapped powers. There are no ghosts, none of that nonsense.
As a fun thing to write fictional stories about it's wonderful. One of the wonderful things about it is you need to create rules and make strict boundaries for what you're doing. So that's one of the reasons that magic type characters appeal to me, because you're not just creating characters. You actually have to create the laws of the universe in which they function. That appeals to the big grand organizer part of me that wants to not only create characters but to create worlds and everything.
Now that doesn't mean you publish a long list of, "Okay, these are the rules of magic so that you readers can test to make sure I'm staying within them." What's really important is that the writer knows the rules and stays within them. I think that kind of confidence and structure communicated along with the stories, assuming one is doing them well, will make it so that eventually the readers will catch on that, "Okay, I'm beginning to see now how the universe operates."
That's one of the wonderful moments of discovery readers get that they wouldn't get in a normal book where, "I as a reader have finally discovered how the internal combustion engine works. Wow!" They already know that stuff, so the magic type books give the readers not just characters to come to know but entire fictional universes to come to know gradually as the stories unfold. I think that's kind of fun.
The other thing is I like using obscure characters. I've had chances to write Batman and a few chances to write Superman and the problem with those is that there have been hundreds of good Batman and Superman stories. There have been thousands of stories and a percentage of them have been wonderful, but there haven't been hundreds of wonderful Ragman stories yet. There have been some good ones, but he's almost an unknown character to most of the DCU readership. The same goes for the other characters.
I like obscure ones and maybe it's ego on my part. Maybe it's just because that way if they do take off, all the glory is mine. However, I think it's more than that. These are blank slates that have yet to be really well written and there are lots of things you can do with them. You can't start Superman and Batman as a blank slate as a writer and create them from the ground up the way you can do with some of these other characters.
WIZARD: What made you want to both write and draw this book?
WILLINGHAM: Because my career is going well right now and I needed a way to throw a giant monkey wrench into it. I don't know. I like drawing. As people have guessed, I'm pretty slow at it. So the challenge of doing a monthly series seems a little bit suicidal. My suspicion is that before long you'll see other regular artists on the series, but I like drawing. Even if its not Shadowpact, I'm going to keep drawing something from now on. Maybe larger projects that are scheduled when they're done and not with that monthly deadline looming over me.
WIZARD: What went into your selections for team members? Are there some team members you selected because you wanted to draw them and some you selected because you wanted to write them?
WILLINGHAM: A little bit of both. Blue Devil I've always wanted to write simply because I thought he was all potential and very little realization of that potential. He came out of this wonderful swashbuckling character who had done some amazingly stupid things with his life but didn't let that turn him into a kind of "Woe is me, my life is a big mess," kind of character and I liked that about him.
Unfortunately, along the way in DC various people wrote the character and gradually turned him into one of those dour, glum, "Ooh, I'm a real demon. My life is so bad, so sad," kind of things. So with Blue Devil I wanted to just get him back to that kind of larger than life, Errol Flynn, "Life is full of challenges but I'm going to have a good time overcoming them" kind of guy.
I chose Ragman just because of the way his powers worked. There were actually two different versions of Ragman. The first version was a guy in an electrical accident who absorbed the powers and abilities of three other normal people and that was all there was to it. Then they re-did his origin where his suit was a magic thing that was like a living golem and like a living prison for the villains he dealt with.
I looked at those two origins and thought there was a way to make those two sets of powers work together. Now his suit is this living prison but he can draw on those powers the way he did in that first origin and actually make use of them. It's like it's no longer a prison it's a work farm. Not only are you captured in a suit, but we're going to take you out and put you to work.
So I wanted to do that character just to show that, "Look at me, I can take these two origins and combine them in one that makes the best use of both of them." Probably as just showing off, eh?
Nightshade I've always liked just because I like the name. I like the way she looked back in the Charlton comics so I picked her simply because I thought I could get her out of the way she was being drawn now and put her back into a suit more reminiscent of what she used to look like. So in that sense, she was more of the "for the fun of drawing" kind of thing.
Plus she uses living shadow the way Green Lantern uses green light. She can make big giant monsters and stuff out of them and any comic artist loves any kind of character where you get to draw a pretty girl flying around a lot and, "Oh, she keeps coming up with big monsters and things made out of shadows. What a joy to draw that will be."
So those are the kinds of decisions that went into picking who would be in the group. Detective Chimp is in there because Dan DiDio called me once and said, "Is there anyway you can work Detective Chimp into this?" and I said, "Absolutely." So thank him for the idea.
WIZARD: As part of the Infinite Crisis story, you had to jump forward a year later for the first issue of Shadowpact. Was that a big hindrance for you?
WILLINGHAM: Yes and no. My idea with Shadowpact was to, in the first few pages of the first issue, have some other DCU characters show up just to show that yes, Shadowpact is part of the DC universe and to let people who unfamiliar with the team know that they are part and parcel of it. Then, for the rest of the series just take them off on their own and do their own stories so they don't have to participate in giant crossovers and things.
The unfortunate thing about it is that when I picked the characters that were going to be used to sort of establish that Shadowpact were a bona fide part of the DCU, I didn't fully understand how they were going to be affected by the whole crisis and 52 and everything else. So there was a little bit of fixing to make sure everything lined up timeline wise. Unfortunately, there was still a goof in it. So for the benefit of all readers of Shadowpact out there, there is a giant continuity timeline goof and by way of apology for that continuity and timeline goof, I will give out a hearty, "Oops," and move on.
WIZARD: The first few pages of Shadowpact #1 featured Superman talking to himself extensively. Is that how you imagine Superman acting in his everyday life?
WILLINGHAM: Well, [Laughs] no. I don't. For some reason the thought balloon has fallen out of favor and to a great extent for a good reason because it was being vastly overused. We just don't use thought balloons anymore and it's too bad because those probably should have been thought balloons, shouldn't they?
Either that or Superman is one of those kind of egotistical types that's always narrating the adventure of his life. Like maybe he keeps a tiny little recorder in his trousers and narrates as he goes so that someday, long after he's dead, the ultimate historical document of his life can be written. I suspect that's probably not true though. So the new template seems to be that when you have to use thought balloons you just have the character talk to himself. It's not always a good solution. Sometimes it's not ever a good solution, but yeah. What can I say?
WIZARD: What do you hope to accomplish with Shadowpact in the future?
WILLINGHAM: I will try to answer that without giving away what I figure are some fun things coming up. This is the first team ever whose origin is they were in a bar feeling desperate and drunk and full of Dutch courage and figured, "What the hell, we're drunk enough. Let's go take on this guy." It's almost a case of they formed a superteam as a result of a bar bet. Not quite that but it's closer than I figured I could get to it.
Right away that sort of sets a tone that this is not the most grim and serious kind of story. However, they couldn't just be a bunch of frolicsome people running around having a good time thumping the bad guys. They sort of start out that way and they're going to learn there's a price for that. The group in the book is having a great time, then you learn there's a terrible price for what they've been doing and then the tendency or the temptation is to turn them into an introverted bunch of Gloomy Gusses like just about every other team out there has been at one time or another.
What I'm going to attempt to do is have them go a different way. "Look, we were screwing up. There's been some consequences from that so let's get in there and find a way to fix that for the future." Which is the way any real police or commando outfit or army would do. It's like, "Damn the screw-up. We can't let that happen again. Let's not sit around crying in our beers. Let's fix it. Let's fix it now because lives are riding on this."
So it sounds silly to say these are people running around in costumes and they're all magical, which means by nature it's a fanciful kind of story, but into that I want to inject raw pragmatism of a type that I don't think we've seen in a superhero team yet. I sort of did some of this with The Elementals but I think I'm a better writer now than I was then so we'll see if it works better here.
WIZARD: Is there anything else you'd like to let readers know?
WILLINGHAM: Since we don't have letters pages anymore, if anyone is a fan of Fables or Jack of Fables or Shadowpact, I try to run an unofficial letters page on the forum at Fabletown.com. So please go there if you want to participate with other readers of the same books. That's it. That's my ad.
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