boy&horse

A few years ago a comic premiered, this was not unusual, but the subject matter was a little off…

The main characters were the Big Bad Wolf and Snow White, took place in a small town run by Old King Cole and Little Boy Blue. Prince Charming was a lecherous cad who married Snow White, Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty and Pinocchio is a pissed off eternal child.

Oh, and Geppetto is the original Big Bad!

This comic was Fables, and it is amazing. Fifteen collected volumes have been published, with more to come as the series is still on going. It has inspired a prequel, two spin-offs and a Novel. Fables has won fourteen Eisner Awards and is pretty much the definitive Modernization of Classic Fairy Tales, Legends, Fables and Tall Tales.

The Point…

This is what Once Upon A Timehas to contend with when I watch the series progress.

“We kept circling back to the idea of fairytales. The very first stories that you hear when you’re a kid. They’re full of magic and heroics and fear and joy. But we also found fairytales are full of all these unanswered questions. Like why is Grumpy grumpy? Why is Geppetto so lonely that he’d actually carve a little boy out of wood? And did the Evil Queen really try to kill Snow White simply because of vanity? With Once Upon A Time, we set out to explore those questions and not re-tell these stories but attempt to dig beneath what we all know and try to discover something new.” – Adam Horowitz, Co-Creator/Executive Producer

That is not to say that I’m not going to give OUAT a fair shake. It already has quite a bit going for and against it. (more…)