Corporealizing Fairy Tales: The Body, the Bawdy, and the Carnivalesque in the Comic Book Fables

Through a series of inversions of the structure and content of canonical European literary fairy tales, Bill Willingham’s comic book Fables functions, at once, as parody, commentary, and as an ongoing fairy tale in its own right. The classic fairy-tale characters of the Grimms and Charles Perrault are given corporeal form—given sexuality and sensuality in the comic’s pages—and through this transformation are reshaped into a refracting lens for the moral precepts of those collections. The result is a postmodern literary endeavor that is neither condemnation nor celebration of the material from which it draws, but something in between.