Fairest #4

Written by Bill Willingham
Art by Phil Jimenez, Andy Lanning, and Steve Sadowski

Having recently come to the decision to let Fables go, I find that I'm predisposed to find Fairest, it's spin-off title, a little tedious. 

Ali Baba's attempt to escape the Snow Queen's clutches doesn't go well for him, and it results in his bottle imp now becoming the Queen's servant.  The Queen is addicted to stories, and so the imp, Jonah, has to keep providing her with these.  This leads to Ali Baba's origin, and the final conclusion to the Sleeping Beauty story started a couple of months ago.

In a scene that reminds me of the old, better days of Fables, we also learn about how Gepetto had been drugging her for all the years that she thought she was his ally, as Jonah tries to help her recover her former self.  This scene works very well, until the sudden and unexplained appearance of one character who has been mentioned often in this series, but not previously seen. 

In that scene, I couldn't help but hear the thoughts of some of the classic comics editors, who would point out that you can't have a character suddenly appear within a scene without showing them come in.  This bad guy is just there, with no teleportation effect, or walls breaking, or anything.  I thought I'd missed a page.  I don't know if the fault for this lies with Willingham or Jimenez, but I guess we can blame it on the editor.  It's just one more example of how 'phoned-in' the entire Fables line has felt over the last year or so.