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Title: Fables: 1001 Nights of Snowfall
Score:
Author: Bill Willingham and Todd Klein
Rating: Not available
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Review of Fables: 1001 Nights of Snowfall

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Comments for Fables: 1001 Nights of Snowfall

• Posted on 2009-08-15
  Fresh and Original With Stunning Artwork
  
  1001 Nights of Snowfall is a modern twist on the Arabian Nights story by Bill Willingham, award-winning comic book writer. In it, Snow White tells several fables, explaining how "fairy tale creatures" ended up in an alternate world. It is a collection of stories by the same writer, drawn by a variety of extremely talented artists.
  
  I really enjoyed this Vertigo title. The variety and quality of the artwork was stunning. The stories were surprisingly fresh considering they were all derivative of classic nursery tales. The author brings a slight edge and wit to traditional fairy-tale stories, tying them together neatly with an Arabian nights motif. All of the artwork in this volume is excellent and some of it is truly extraordinary.
  
  As other Vertigo titles, I would not recommend this for children, but for teenagers and above it is fine - limited cartoon nudity and a smattering of violence. Highly recommended for a nice afternoon of entertainment.
  
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• Posted on 2008-10-02
  antoehr great volume
  
  If you like the series, this one will not disappoint. The art *IS* spotty in some places but the story makes up for it
  
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• Posted on 2008-09-19
  A Must Have for Fables Fans
  
  If your a fan of Fables or your looking for a nice quick read Fables: 1001 Nights of Snowfall is a great graphic novel worth checking out. While it helps to have some invested interest in the series to understand why each story's relevance and why it lends so much insight in to the background of the main characters of the series, that is not to say that this is not also a stand alone read. The book has great interesting stories, some as short as a few pages, others that are much longer they are all compelling, sometimes funny and occasionally disturbing but have so much heart and an underlying sense of humanity and universality that anyone can enjoy these tales as much as the Sultan threatening Snow's life in the story.
  
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• Posted on 2008-09-07
  Great read
  
  I definitely loved this book. It was a bit disappointing knowing that it wasn't Scheherazade telling these tales, I would rather have seen her do this, but the stories themselves were nonetheless fantastic, so for that, I give five stars. it was a good way to tell backstories/past stories of various Fables, and gave dimension to a few characters that had been previously not much talked about.
  
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• Posted on 2008-08-06
  Orientalist interludes
  
  The artwork is beautiful but the framing narrative and first story has very little cultural sensitivity, indulging in all the tropes of 19th c. Orientalism with gusto and lack of any self-consciousness that I could pick up. The "Snow-White-in-the-Land-of-Arabian-Fairy-Tales" framing narrative even manages to re-appropriate all of Scheherezade's original wit and cunning to Snow White instead, so that Show White--as the enlightened diplomat from the industrialized, colonizing West--is the one who shares the key to survival with Scheherezade. How lovely for Scheherezade that a white woman was there to help her!
  
  Even when we're removed from the court of the Sultan (which is full of tawdry 19th c. cliches, although in text more than images), the first story-proper artist seems bent on making sure we remember this is an Exotic Story. Thus he meshes and combines all sorts of Eastern visuals willy-nilly, and so in the first story we end up with a Snow White who looks bizarrely Asian, in a more-or-less European land, except that for some reason some of the Prince's men wear medieval Russian costume. The Prince himself alternates through all sorts of time periods and cultures in his clothing. The anachronism and cultural hodge-podge could have been made into a witty commentary on the universality of fairy tales, or their multi-cultural existence (a version of "Cinderella" exists in almost every culture), but the specific cultures here chosen were not suitable for that. Instead, I got the somewhat distasteful feeling that the artist just wanted to give the book a "Gee, how exotic!" feel and considered all non-mainstream-Western cultures as equally exotic and somewhat interchangeable, useful for giving "flavor" to the story and nothing else. A dash of Chinese, a handful of Russian, a spot of Korean, a root of Turk thrown in...
  
  Happily the ensuing chapters do not take this route, but it was a bit of a sour taste to start off on.
  
  The overall story stumbles along at first, as well. It works a lot better once we're done with the framing prose narrative and get into the comic format. The prose-pieces suffer from overwrought, mannered, cliche writing. Of course it is consciously drawing on the way 19th c. fairy tales were written, but clumsily so, amateurishly. Since most of the book is in comic format though, this is not really damning.
  
  However, the art IS gorgeous and most of the stories ARE compelling. I just wish the book opened on a better note.
  
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