Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *
When those who drove you from your home, took your families hostage, killed, murdered, those you love and destroyed everything you have peaceably raised and seen flourish begin to come into the land you have settled in, made new homes and lives but with always a rememberance to the past in your heart, then do you make a stand and draw the biggest line possible; do you say no more or do you run once more?
That is the fate facing the Fabled community hidden away in plain sight in New York City, their lives are under threat, not by the politics of children’s and adult’s memory and devotion to the stories but in the very real danger that even in reality they will be subsumed by intolerance and design of dangerous, unchecked power. If ever there was a way to deliver a parable for modern times then Fables: March of the Wooden Soldiers is the right and extraordinary tale in which to judge those that will take by force that they have no idea on how to live alongside. The intolerable rise of fanatical fascism in whatever form, religious, political, mental, physical, is something to be fought and fought well.
Some fairy tales and parables are so well envisioned that they give hope to the oppressed and troubled, that they speak across what could be considered a timeless vacuum and give hope that right will always conquer might. To have Red Riding Hood as one of the main protagonists in March Of The Wooden Soldiers is key to the success of this particular graphic novel. The story of the girl seduced by a wolf is an old and favourite tale but not all wolves wear their fur on the outside and not all women lost in the woods should be trusted when their stories don’t add up.
Evil spreads where there is mischief to be had, where harm can be caused through jealousy, unchecked suspicion and distrust, evil never sleeps, it just spreads its tentacles far and wide and the wooden soldiers, brothers of the little wooden puppet who wished to be a real boy, are that visual representation in a world that threatens to wipe out individuality, to annihilate original thought and replace it with rhetoric and terrifying vocabulary. It is a tale of morality versus the choice we as a society are being offered in the name of nationalistic fervour and Bill Willingham has caught the mood just right in the fourth instalment of the much lauded Fables series.
March Of The Wooden Soldiers is not only an enjoyable read, it is a guide to making a choice in a world where the world teeters continually on an abyss of its own making.
Fables: March of The Wooden Soldiers is available to purchase from Worlds Apart in Liverpool.
Ian D. Hall