Second-degree Rewriting Strategies: On Jack’s Revisions and Transfictional Crossing from Fables to Jack of Fables

Abstract

Bill Willingham et al.’s Vertigo long-spanning series Fables (2002-2015) has enjoyed considerable critical and commercial success. This is testified by the series’ numerous comics spin-offs including 1001 Nights of Snowfall (2006-2008), Jack of Fables (2006-2011), Cinderella: From Fabletown with Love (2009-2010), Cinderella: Fables are Forever (2011), and Fairest (2012-2015), its transmedial expansion with the novel Peter & Max (2009) and the video game The Wolf Among Us (2013), and a growing body of scholarship that focuses on Fables or its multiverse (Gordon 2016; Hill 2009; Kukkonen 2010; 2011; Lagrange 2019; Zolkover 2008). This scholarship usually celebrates how Fables and its expanded universe re-appropriates folk and fairy-tale visual and narrative traditions in a postmodern-like fashion, sometimes highlighting its transmedial qualities. However, these specific approaches have somewhat overshadowed how Fables and its spinoff Jack of Fables articulate intertwined and complex forms of rewriting that are yoked to culture- and medium-specific issues, including Vertigo’s own multi-faceted rewriting ethos. If Fables can be located in Vertigo’s rich history of re-narrativization and remapping, Jack’s transfictional crossing from Fables to Jack of Fables complicates that history and writes back to some of its underlying tropes and principles. More specifically, this article examines how Jack’s migration to his own series coincides with strategies of rewriting in the second degree that provide meta-commentaries on Fables’ own genre and narrative formulas, the traditions and history of the so-called ‘Jack Tales’, and some principles underlying Vertigo’s own postmodern-oriented rewriting ethos.