Customer Reviews

Peter & Max: A Fables Novel (Fables Series)

5 star:		(72)
4 star:		(59)
3 star:		(21)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I am a fan of Fables. Mr Willingham took one of the stupidest concepts ever and made it into a compelling world that I look forward to visiting every few months when a new graphic novel comes out. This book just proved that Willingham doesn't need the artists to make up for any weaknesses in his storytelling ability. Peter and Max follows the adventures of Peter and Max Piper, and their ultimate conflict. Bill does a wonderful job of incorporating all of the legends that reference Peter or Pipers in general, he'll pick a pepper, the pied piper will do what he was famous for etc... If you are a fan of the Fables series I cannot recommend this highly enough, if you are not this is as good a place to start as any, and might be a little less overwhelming as there aren't that many characters within this book. Also, there is less interaction between the Fables and modernity in this book, it pretty much reads as straight fantasy. Wonderful story that hooked me after about twenty pages, a great read and I highly recommend it.

I haven't read comic books in over 20 years, and had never heard of the Fables comic line this novel is based upon. I also initially wondered why, with all the possible fairy tale characters out there, Willingham had chosen to focus his tale on the tongue-twistered Peter Piper. So, I was a bit skeptical when I first picked this up to read. But, I thoroughly enjoyed it, and was relieved that I didn't need to have read the comic books to do so!

The story and characters, if not terribly complex, are entirely imaginative and entertaining. And, kept me turning the pages, even when I should have been sleeping. Willingham is somehow able to combine taking his characters plight seriously with a tongue-in-cheek, dry wit that pokes fun at the zany world he's created - which makes it all the more enjoyable.

While the main storyline is about Peter and his brother Max's rivalry, a whole cast of fairy tale characters make an appearance (Snow White, Red Rose, the Wicked Witch, Beauty & the Beast, Bo Peep, ....). The fun part is that now they're all living together in Fabletown in a modern New York, having joined together to escape an evil adversary.

The ending was a little predictable, but it did resolve as a fairy tale should. And, after finishing this quick-read, I felt indeed that I'd just read a good, imaginative fairy tale.

A Favorite Line: "Fable women tend to be 'the fairest in all the land', which loses much of it's cachet when you have hundreds of such beauties crowded into such a small neighborhood."

Bottom Line: A clever, fun fairy tale whether you read the comics it's based upon or not. Particularly recommended for anyone who enjoys fairy tale re-tellings like Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West (Harper Fiction) or Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister: A Novel.

I'm a huge fairy tale fan and being a long time comic book reader as well I've been familiar with Steve Leialoha's work for ages. This is a great combination of beautiful storytelling and illustrations. A bit on the dark side, not probably good for small kids but fine for older kids. No sexual content but some nasty language near the end and one brief graphic murder near the begining.

Wonderful writing and a facisnating tale thorwing all kinds of fairy tales into the mix. What a great read! I'll be looking into more stuff by this author.

Note: There will be spoilers ahead as I find I am unable to explain what I like and don't like about the novel without them, but I will try to keep them to a minimum.

Peter and Max is a prose novel set in the world of Fables. Fables is a monthly comic book series published by DC/Vertigo, which has been collected into a number of trade paperbacks. The writer puts a few notes in the beginning to explain the Fables universe, in which a good number of characters from your favorite nursery rhymes and fairy tales are real and living together in a community in New York after being exiled from their magical Homelands by the goblin armies of the Adversary. It isn't really necessary to have read the Fables comics, since the major characters in Peter and Max have never been featured, so this is our first time meeting them. In fact, the few parts of the story that take place in Fabletown are easily the most boring parts of the book, possibly because the writer wants to downplay that part of the story.

Peter and Max is written by Fables creator and regular series writer Bill Willingham. The book is beautifully illustrated by Steve Leialoha.

The story is about Peter and Max Piper and Bo Peep. The story bounces between the present, in which Peter receives word that Max is back in the Mundane world (meaning our world, the one without magic), and the past when the Pipers were growing up in the Fables Homelands. The boys' childhood and the Piper family's friendship with the Peep family is very well fleshed out and is the most interesting part of the story. The characters are written well, the family dynamic and childishly innocent romance of Peter and Bo is touching and realistic. The flight through the forest and away from the goblin hordes is dynamic and intense. And the build-up to finding out which of the boys is to become the Pied Piper is dramatic.

However Peter's quest to find Max in the present is handled poorly. With pages spent on Peter thinking about the book he reads on the plane and the automated parking garages in Germany, it feels as if the writer was scrambling to find something for Peter to do in the present before his final confrontation with Max, since his quest isn't so much a mysterious search as travelling in a straight line to his brother.

I find Willingham to be an erratic writer. Some parts of his stories are beautiful and some parts are incredibly weak. His story pacing for instance: Early in the book, Peter Piper confronts the Black Forest Witch in the present and asks her why she gave Max such a powerful pipe to play, and she says that she honestly didn't know how powerful it was. If this had played out more subtly, in defter hands this would have been foreshadowing, but Willingham just flat out tells you what's going to happen, but doesn't show it for another two-hundred pages.

Also Max's corruption in the Black Forest didn't make any sense. Somehow, like Anakin Skywalker in Revenge of the Sith, Max goes from disgruntled teenager to completely evil in the blink of an eye.

Overall I enjoyed the parts of the book dealing with Peter's childhood. His bond with his father, his bravery in the forest and his adventures in Hamelin town are entertaining and exciting. But I found the rest of the novel to be disappointing.

Like many overgrown adolescents, I love escaping into a good fantasy. The "Fables" stories are perfect escapism - clever, often funny remixings of classics stories with updated plots. The alternate universe of "Peter and Max" is intriguing - the characters of classic fables - Bo Peep, Peter Piper, the Wolf, the Beast, and the Pied Piper are all real people living among us. Despite their magical nature, their cares and woes are just as human as ours - they're just more fun to read about.

One of the tricks of this book is that Peter Piper and the Pied Piper - the titular Max - are actually brothers. And these brothers have a sibling rivalry as timeless as that of Cain versus Abel. Thanks to the long lives of Fables, they truly share a hatred for the ages.

The novel follows two tracks - present-day and centuries-past. In the present day, we learn that Peter Piper has married Bo Peep, but they live a chaste life thanks to Bo's charred body - from the waist down she has been horribly, brutally scarred. This has something to do with Max, Peter's older brother. And we know that Max is Out There, waiting for Peter. And so Peter goes to challenge him, although we are not entirely sure why.

The second track gives us the why, and what a why it is! Peter and Max fight one of the timeless feuds - the more talented younger brother gets approvals that the elder brother feels are his by birthright. This is a tale that ends in bloodshed - lots of it. For Max does not take getting passed over lying down. Instead, he becomes the monstrous barbarian of old, capable of leading hundreds of children to their doom without a second thought. Rather than a tourist attraction or a charming PG-13 rogue, the Pied Piper is the stuff of nightmares, for parents and children alike.

All this is told in a fast-moving tale with excellent illustrations. This isn't Great Literature, but it's a fun - and often frightening - read.

Peter & Max is a prose novel that takes place in the universe of Willingham's Fables comic series. The series is based around the premise that characters from folklore have a physical existence; that they are, in fact, a magical race of beings from an alternate reality. When a cruel conqueror takes over their own world, the Fables seek refuge in our own, where they live unnoticed in a corner of New York City they call Fabletown. Peter & Max begins with Peter Piper (of pickled pepper fame) living peacefully with his wife Bo Peep in the countryside. One morning Peter learns that his brother Max (another Piper, whose name you may not recognize but whose reputation you certainly know) is in town. Unfortunately this is not a happy family reunion, as Max and Peter happen to be mortal enemies.

I love the Grimm fairytales, and I love creative retellings. I thought Peter & Max was a nice example of the genre and thoroughly enjoyed it. Characters that are sinister in traditional lore are sinister here as well. Characters who are traditionally innocent or heroic show surprising new sides. This is not to say that any of the characters seemed particularly complex--they were not-- but there was still something fun and clever about the way Willingham weaves them together in his story. The action felt well-paced, even as it switches back and forth between time periods. The book also gets a small thumbs up from me for the delightful line drawings peppered throughout the text. My only complaint is that Willingham's writing style seemed somewhat prosaic and uninspired to me. He tends to tell rather than show, something quickly evidenced by the six page introduction which describes the background of the Fables universe in detail. I have not read the comic series, so I am one of the people this intro is supposed to convenience. Frankly though, I like exposition in a fantasy novel to be a little more gradual and natural. Willingham's "info dump" method left me feeling that he either lacks the skill to do this, or that he assumed his readers would have such poor reading comprehension they wouldn't be able to put the pieces together themselves.

Overall, I expected a pleasantly entertaining, light read, and Peter & Max met my expectations. Parents may want to note that despite the nursery rhyme references and the illustrations, the Vertigo imprint is for comics and books for "mature readers." I think that suggestion is too extreme in reference to this particular title, but Peter & Max does contain some brutality and would be better suited to teens and almost-teens than to young children.

I'm pretty certain that almost everyone picking this up comes to it after having first read the ongoing "Fables" comic book series created and written by Willingham. Amazing stuff it is, and thoroughly satisfying on many levels. You needn't have been following that series to enjoy this current tale, but I believe that your enjoyment will be greatly enhanced if you've gone through at least a few of the trade paperback collections. Many of the characters in this novel are new to the world of "Fables", but a few of them are key players in the series, and your reaction to some of them, particularly Frau Totenkinder, will be more nuanced from exposure to the main saga.

That being said, this tale stands on its own quite nicely. The first few pages seem a bit awkward, but thereafter the story finds its feet, as it were, and then it's off to the races. The adventures of Peter, Max, and Bo are briskly and efficiently related, and with some periodic degree of whimsy and lyricism. The characters act as their nature as Fables dictates they must--they are not like us, the so-called mundanes, but rather they have vast passions and are quick to act, and fight, and love, and they don't spend a great deal of time in soul-searching or enmeshed in angst. Max, in particular, is an interesting character, who turns to evil not through malevolent ambitions to conquer or inherent psychopathy or because of a series of tragedies, but almost simply because it appeared to be in his nature and his destiny to become so, since his archetype called for it.

The text is nicely complemented by the Leialoha illustrations--I've been a big fan since way back to his work on "Spider-Woman".

Strongly recommended that if you enjoy this, you pick up the TPBs that collect the "Fables" comic books to date (Vertigo is very good about putting out new volumes pretty frequently, so you needn't buy the individual issues to stay current).

'Peter and Max,' by Bill Willingham is a difficult novel to review. Willingham has written a stand-alone novel based on the world he conjured up for his comic book series, Fables. The book reads more like a souped up comic book than it does an novel meant for adults. This is not the jokey treatment of characters that are scooped up from fables and forced to interact for the sake of comic relief. It is a more creative rendering of these characters in the spirit of the contemporary, graphic novel.

The writing is sparsely descriptive and the characters approach three dimensions, but are still deeply rooted in pen and ink. However, I found that once I got comfortable with Willingham's style, I found the story strangely compelling and the telling of the story to have a pleasing, mythical quality. I do not believe that all readers will see it this way, so this book may not be for everyone. My guess is that people will either love it or hate it...


The graphic novel may have had its roots in the early 1970s, but for most of us the genre began with the release of Frank Miller's 'Batman: The Dark Knight Returns.' This series changed the way I looked at a comic book. The graphic art popped off the page, but even more so the characters developed more dimension. An extra breath of darkness and reality may have been in the mix. But these stories--abounding with archetypes and a dose of fantasy--still kept their traditional comic book roots.

Playing with characters from fables and nursery rhymes is nothing really new, but a graphic novel-type treatment of these characters is. We're not talking about the jokey, fractured fairy tales that we see in childrens' books or as subplots in movies like Shrek. Or the type of retelling of a fable for laughs from the perspective of the 'misunderstood' villain.

Willingham's characters are drawn from nursery rhymes, fables, and fairy tales but he only uses the names and often sketchy information therein as a springboard for his imagination. He supplies them with motivations, emotions, relationships, and a background story.

And he does this in an almost gravely serious way. The characters are not played for laughs. This new treatment of these characters may be too much for some adults, but I found the approach oddly refreshing. Once I got used to Peter Piper, Bo Peep, witches, Little Red Riding Hood, and The Wolf populating a novel, their appearance in the book became natural. Willingham had won me over. I stopped reminding myself that these were fairytale characters and was able to read the book like... well, a book.

One of the problems with the book is that takes Willingham just over 100 pages to set things up. It's not that the reading was unpleasant, it was simply more perfunctory. There was a lot of background and not too much forward action. This might have been okay if Willingham was a more descriptive novelist. But being more accustomed to cartoon bubbles than a vast sheet of open paper, his prose is sparse and perhaps less engaging than many authors. He is always spinning a yarn, however, he just happened to be spinning a little too slowly for my liking.

Things pick up after the first 100 pages and the plot and characters move forward in quick strides. The book centers on the characters of Peter and Max Piper. It alternates between the past--how one brother became the force of good and the other a force of evil--and the present, where Peter must face Max in a final battle that he is sure to lose. The story is told with that just-short-of-hyperbole mode that is classic for a graphic novel and a little out of place in adult fiction. It even has a quite unexpected, surprise ending.

I do have to say, however, that in the end Willingham won me over. I am seriously thinking about obtaining a copy of his Fables comic book series. There are many comic books made of classic fiction or historical events specifically designed just to get kids to read required, educational material. This may be, however, the first time that a novel was written in order to get adults interested in reading the comic book.

A word about the illustrations. In the reviewer's copy that I received, the illustrations are brilliantly executed in pen and ink. Steve Leialoha does an amazing job of straddling the line between the comic book and 19th century fairy-tale book art. The mix is really on the mark and fits in with that comic books meet the Brothers Grimm feel of the writing.

This is a story about two brothers, one bad, one good. It's also a story about how the Fables came to live in our world. It's also a love story.

Back before the Goblin armies took over the universe, subverting the inhabited worlds to their will, Peter Piper and his older brother Max loved each other the way brothers should. Peter was ten, Max was fourteen. Peter was smitten by a girl named Bo Peep and wanted nothing more than to go on traveling with his musical family. He, his father and brother Max played the flute. But Peter was by far the best flute player and one day his father gave Peter his magic flute called Frost, by passing Max, the first born.

This flute had been handed from father to son for generations and Max thought it should be his. Already turning toward the dark side, this pushed him over. Turning him into a killer. He killed his father, Bo's sisters and was certainly responsible for his mother's death. And he wants more than anything to kill Peter, who he's battled with and lost.

Peter now lives among his kind on Earth, the planet of sanctuary, safe from Max, with his invalid wife Bo. But Max has found them and he's coming.

I knew I wasn't going to like this book as soon as I read the first few paragraphs. How wrong first impressions can sometimes be. I sat glued to my chair on Halloween Eve reading the night away as others went to costume parties and I couldn't have been more happy about it. As silly as the premise of this story sounded, I was drawn into the book's world and before I knew, I believed. This book is simply fabulous.

Follow along with two brothers, whose sibling rivalry could last till the end of time. If you have read other FABLES you might be a little bored with the first chapter, it nearly turned me away, but the rest of the book doesn't disappoint. Set in the present day, find yourself reconnecting with tales you think you know.
The author, Bill Willingham, puts just enough in to keep the story fresh and yet strangely familiar. Steve Leialoha also produced fantastic ink drawings for this novel. The book felt like a mix of the FABLES graphic novels and books like "The Name of the Wind". The only thing I wish this book had was the actual music fabled to be full of magic.

I'm glad that I followed Max and Peter Piper through their very different journeys.