I really am reading slowly lately. How else to explain a four month turnaround to cycle through my graphic novel serieses? At long last, I’ve made it to the second Fables volume, Animal Farm. As alluded to in the initial book of the series, not all of the exiled fables can mix with the mundanes in New York City. Talking pigs, just to toss out a random example, would be remarked upon in ways that a high-powered businesswoman, no matter how coal-dark her hair or snow-pale her skin, would not. And so, the giants and the dragons and the Three Bears and Louie from the Jungle Book and Chicken Little and pretty much anyone else you can think of along these lines are kept in a spacious preserve upstate.

As the arc opens, Snow White is off north to perform her biannual inspection of the farm, addressing the residents’ concerns and the government’s alike. She also hopes to reconnect with an estranged family member. What she does not expect is what she finds: a populace tired of being caged away, on the verge of full revolt, and planning an armed insurrection against the Adversary who has driven them from their original homes. An insurrection that, notably, hopes to keep its secrets until the plans have ripened. And thanks to his lack of popularity among the quadruped populace, there will be no Bigby Wolf to protect her this time.

Although the storyline flowed directly from the events of the first book, the tone was quite different. Rather than breezy noir, Animal Farm was packed with political rhetoric and literary references and a fair bit more darkness; thinking about it now, in fact, it was dark on a scale that you’d expect to see in the original fairy tales, before Disney and Charles Perrault took to clean them up. As much as I enjoyed the noir tone of Legends in Exile, Animal Farm pulled all kinds of strings with my more firmly entrenched literary scholar side. Good stuff, and I’m once again looking forward to volume three.