Joining Nursery Rhyme Comics and Fairy Tale Comics, editor Chris Duffy's Fable Comics breathes fun new life into the moralizing tales of Aesop, the Indian Panchatantra and others.
Twenty-six cartoonists--among them Jaime Hernandez (Love and Rockets) and Corinne Mucha (Get Over It!)--put their quirky creative spin on 28 fables. Each colorful comic strip reflects the distinct style of the artist in sometimes weird, always wonderful adaptations. Some cartoonists take the straight-up approach, depicting a fable in a completely recognizable fashion--"The Boy Who Cried Wolf," for example. Stories such as the dreamy "Fox and Crow," however, require more from the reader to get to the moral. Not intended as an introduction to fables, this stylistically eclectic compendium of "bossy stories" is an exciting gift for the literary aesthete or comic book fiend. --Emilie Coulter, freelance writer and editor