"Put Not Your Trust in Princes": Fables and the Problematisation of Everyday Life‪.‬

Fables is an ongoing comic book series published by DC Comics's mature-audiencetargeted Vertigo imprint. It has proven popular enough to warrant a spin-off companion series, a prestige-bound hardcover collection, and a script order for a television pilot (Futoncritic.comnp). The series is written under two central conceits: that public domain fairytale heroes and villains--such as Snow White, The Big Bad Wolf, Baba Yaga, Sinbad, and Prince Charming--all exist in a shared narrative continuity, and that they live in present-day New York, having been driven from their homelands by the evil Adversary. It thus subverts the traditional fairytale structure where the hero(ine) is plucked from a comforting domesticity, and called to adventure in a wonderland that becomes curiouser and curiouser with each turn of the plot (Campbell 12): the Fables adventure and live their immortal lives in a quotidian--for the audience--chronotope characterised by all-night diners, deserted back alleys, and apartment buildings. This paper thus explores the ways in which the narratives and semiotics of Fables problematises everyday life, and reveal it to be a construct normalised by its subjects. As a postmodern pop culture pastiche which involves both the extraordinary vision of fairytales and a carnivalesque counter-cultural subversion of Disney-inflected norms, Fables provides a uniquely potent case study around which to do so. Issues such as intertextual dialogue, carnival, active audiences, and the neo-Victorian prosocial diadecism of the fairytale genre will be discussed. To begin, both the everyday and the extraordinary are mutually-reinforcing contradictory constructs; they depend largely on being their opposite number's Other to define themselves. Where the everyday is the sphere of 'routine, repetitive taken-for-granted experiences, beliefs and practices; the mundane, ordinary world' (Featherstone 160), the extraordinary is an ever-changing sphere where imagination and possibility are both given free rein and which '[does] not claim to be definitive or knowing. Lacking finality, it interrogate[s] authoritative truths and replace[s] them with something less certain' (Jackson 15). The extraordinary is thus 'the sphere of danger, violence and the courting of risk' (Featherstone 165) where its 'juxtaposition of incompatible elements and resistance to fixity' (Jackson 15) serves to 'threaten ... the possibility of returning to everyday routines' (Featherstone 164). It also dramatically contrasts the notion that 'the characteristic mode of experiencing the everyday is that of habit' (Felski 18), and that this familiarity further 'combines with the promise of protection and warmth to create the positive everyday association of home' (Felski 22).Yet, the everyday remains integral to understanding the extraordinary; it 'constitutes a base, a taken-for-granted grounding which allows us to make forays into other worlds' (Felski 22), and foregrounds the latter's associated exotic points of departure from it.