The Culture

This is volume 8 of the Jack of Fables paperbacks and it collects issues 41 – 45. It was again written by Bill Willingham and Matthew Sturges. The art was by various combinations of Tony Akins, Jim Fern, Andrew Pepoy and Joe Rubinstein.

With Jack Hornet’s transformation complete at the end of the last book, the stage is set for his altruistic and naive son Jack Frost to take centre stage. In this book, Jack sets out to slay the giant that is demanding an annual tribute from the world of Landfall. He soon finds that all is not what it seems and almost everyone he meets has been using him for their own ends.

Although the book consists of a perfectly good story set in the Fables homelands, the adventures of Jack Frost are not nearly as exciting, or funny, as those of his father – or at least they are in a more conventional sense. So reading this book I found myself missing the antics of the Jack of old – despite the extreme depths that he sunk to in The Great Fables Crossover. With the next book collecting the last of the series, I am not sure if this is an attempt at a reboot that failed or if this is part of the planned route to the end of the series – to be honest it feels like the latter when taken with volume 7.