Once she was the beloved of Prince Charming, the greatest swordsman who ever lived. Warning: This is volume 19 of an ongoing series – it’s going to be impossible for me to avoid spoilers for previous volumes. Series: Fables, Volume 19 (issues 124-129 & backup stories for 114-123)Īrtists: Mark Buckingham, Steve Leialoha, Shawn McManus, Andrew Pepoy But I just couldn’t get into it enough for it to rank in the four stars. She does things for herself and the story can be (and probably should have been) told without the male love interest. It avoided a lot of the things I complained about in Wide Awake – Hidden Kingdoms is written by a woman (Bill Willingham is credited as ‘consultant’) and Rapunzel is very much the lead of this book, she has her own agency, and her presentation isn’t filtered to us (much) through the eyes of a male character. I enjoyed the story of The Hidden Kingdom a lot more than I did the previous volume, Wide Awake, but it still gets three stars from me because I’ve become a much harder marker since then. Now, centuries later, the ghosts of her past have returned to haunt her, and Rapunzel must travel to the Land of the Rising Sun to discover the truth about her long-lost children – as well as the fate of those others, loved and hated, that she left behind. In that Hidden Kingdom, home to the Fables of Japan, Rapunzel found new love in the arms of a beautiful seductress with a soul of foxfire – and a new enemy in the person of a brutal warlord. Some of its strands, however, are more tangled than others – including the prince she bedded, the witch she infuriated, the children who were stolen from her, and the faraway realm to which she fled to get away from it all. Rapunzel’s romantic history is as long and full as her legendary golden locks. At the centre of this conflict stood a single woman – and a whole lot of hair. Once upon a time, before the FABLES saga began, a war was brewing in the East. Series: Fairest, Volume 1 (Issues 8-14) – Spinoff from FablesĬolourists: Eva de la Cruz, Andrew Dalhouse

Fables de bill willingham