Consumer Confidential

I am a consumerist whore. I don't feel complete unless I'm buying shit all the time. I know I have a problem, and I know that I don't want to deal with it. I have taken steps though to not make the credit hole any larger by actually using my own money to make most of the recent purchases from the last couple of months. Just this past weekend, when my wife was chiding me on to buy a couple of DVD's, I could have easily taken one of my Mastercards or Visas and paid for it. But, instead, I reached for the Debit card and paid with that instead. What did I buy that night? Labyrinth Superbit Edition, Appleseed & Millions. She bought Maria Full of Grace. We're starting to split costs. Sure, her's was only 1/3 of my total purchase, but it's nice that she's pitching in.

Since today is payday, and I have made all necessary payments to creditors/services, I decided to cruise on over to Amazon.com to pick up a couple of trade paperbacks that I've been meaning to buy for quite some time. I would have made the purchase from Grasshoppercomics.com, my prefered comic book online store, but they've been down for a month or so revamping their site, so I had no other choice. Here are the three books I purchased (along with synopsis provided by Amazon.com) that will not be read by my wife at all *wink-wink*. (Your secret is still safe sweety).

The third collection of Fables, the Sandman spin-off about fairy-tale characters exiled in New York, contains four stories. The longest, "Storybook Love," is the most satisfying, but the others have their fairy-tale-like (i.e., grisly) charms. Revealing that the Jack of beanstalk fame and the Jack of the eponymous tall tales are identical, "Bag o' Bones" spins a Civil War yarn in which Jack detains the Grim Reaper, so that no one can die. In "a two-part caper" (all that's given in the way of a title), the Fables community puts Briar Rose, aka the Sleeping Beauty, back on slumberous hold to prevent exposure by a scandal-rag journalist. In "Barleycorn Bride," Bigby Wolf relays some of the Fables' early history in America to explain why 18-year-old Lilliputian boys try to steal magic barleycorns from a jar at the Fables' Manhattan headquarters. The long story concerns a plot to seize Fables leadership by Bluebeard and Goldilocks; it includes some Fables mainstays' apparent demises and begs for future development. Deucedly cleverly written, yeomanly drawn. Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Willingham's happy idea of bringing the Fables--that is, the characters of Europe's best-known fairy tales--to contemporary New York rolls merrily, dangerously along in two stories. The former, "The Last Castle," guest-drawn by P. Craig Russell and Craig Hamilton, flashes back to the Fables' last stand in their home world; echoing the Disney and John Wayne Alamo flicks and Peter Jackson's Two Towers, it winningly introduces the long title story, in which Boy Blue reencounters the love he loses in "The Last Castle"--the grown-up Red Riding Hood. But is this the same Red? Reason for doubt precedes her in goblin sightings near a door between this and the Fables' worlds--and goblins can only be harbingers of impending attack by the Adversary, who drove the Fables into exile. Meanwhile, what's with these toughies in black suits who look like Pinocchio? Willingham never sacrifices a joke for the sake of a thrill, or vice versa, and artist Mark Buckingham continues matching Willingham joke for thrill, and vice versa. Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Fables, the comic about fairy-tale characters ("Fables") living in exile in Manhattan and upstate New York, started with a jaunty mystery (Legends in Exile, 2003) full of irony, but it has steadily darkened. Some major figures--Bluebeard, for instance--have been killed, and in March of the Wooden Soldiers (2004), the Manhattan enclave was attacked by forces of the Adversary, which drove them from their home world. The title story here depicts the year after the attack. Summer sees the birth of Deputy Mayor Snow White's sextuplets (the father is Sheriff Bigby Wolf); fall, Prince Charming's election as mayor; winter, bad decisions by the new administration; and spring, plans to counterattack the Adversary. Two shorter pieces show Bigby Wolf on a secret mission during World War II and Cinderella entrapping a Fable who is collaborating with the Adversary. Tony Akins draws the shorter stories with less detail than Mark Buckingham does the big one; both uphold Fables' snappy good looks. Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved