Dust and Spores

We're all very into books here, but Microbe Monday is more about the blurb. The article. The short story. The haiku.

So over the weekend, I'll seek out a new literary magazine or open a collection to a random poem or just pick a story I remember from my past and riff on it. Briefly! I don't expect this to turn into a meme, but feel free to gank my little graphic and do it yourself too!

This week I discovered a comic book series I think I'm really going to enjoy. As usual, I think I'm last in line in finding out about it. It's called Fables, and as far as I can tell, it's about all of these storybook characters like Snow White, the Frog Prince, and the three bears fleeing an enemy in the land of fables and taking refuge in New York.

All I've read so far is half of a graphic novel outside the main series called 1001 Nights of Snowfall. It's a collection of short works about Fable characters, each done by a different artist.

"The Runt" is one of those short tales. Illustrated by Mark Wheatley, it's the story of a wolf pup sired when the North Wind takes the form of a wolf. Being so small, he's constantly teased and bullied by his six older brothers until he's left bitter and feeling useless. He vows to hunt a larger animal every day until he is strong enough that he will never feel useless again.

Although it may have been obvious to anyone else reading, it didn't occur to me right away that this was a Big Bad Wolf origin story until the cameos of the Three Little Pigs and Little Red Riding Hood, all victims of the wolf pup's gradual descent into corruption.

This is a time where you can't spit without grossing out a fairytale character's origin story, but this one stood out to me because it also felt very much like a fairy tale on its own. It didn't modernize anything or take a contemporary tone, and it would fit right into a Grimm collection. Also, since you sympathize with the "cute little puppy dog" so much at first, his transformation is all the more jarring. (Not to mention the fact that even though you always knew he was Big and Bad, you've probably never seen a painting of him standing among a sea of bodies with a bloody human arm in his mouth.)

Anyway, I'm already a huge an of this series even though I haven't even gotten volume one yet. The wolf story alone makes this collection worth checking out.