In 2002, a comic that I would come to love deeply started coming out. It was a story of fairy-tale characters trying to live in the ‘real world’, and built on how deeply flawed all of these characters tended to be. I was still years away from moving past superhero comics, I had yet to dip my feet into any Vertigo books whatsoever; not Sandman, not Hellblazer, not even Swamp Thing. Fables was my first introduction to different types of stories being told by the comic medium, and I started collecting the series with issue #19 in January of 2004. Over all my years of comic fandom, it is the only series to which I got a print subscription, so that I’d never miss an issue. The series ended with issue #150 on its own terms back in 2015, with a supersized final issue to wrap everything up. It was a good ending, and it gave the characters I’d spent a decade with their own “happily ever after.” Recently an Absolute Edition collecting the beginning of the series was announced, and I felt the desire to reread the series.
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