Whose Fable Is It, Anyway?

Bill Willingham is a sad little man.

It’s not just that he used to write a column for Breitbart. Or the fact that he moderated a ‘writing women-friendly comics’ panel staffed entirely by men. Or that time he spent an interview decrying ‘liberalism’ and ‘decadence’ in the comics industry, ending it by saying that writers should ‘take chances’ by portraying ‘white businessmen’ and ‘catholic priests’ as morally good. Or that he tried to use a character he wrote being revealed by another author as a gay man to make an utterly misguided point that authors should be ‘careful’ when taking work-for-hire gigs, as you never know what those evil comic book publishers will do with the character after the writer exits the title.

It seeps into his work. Fables is known for the characters all being mouthpieces for Willingham’s own political views, whether that be on rent control, politics in the MENA region, or his pro-life stance on abortion rights.

That’s relevant, because he made Fables public domain today.

Fables is a mess. It’s a Vertigo comic series from an era that, with the benefit of hindsight, was the beginning of a tumultuous second decade for the imprint that would see it go from an unofficial position as the ‘third-best selling comics publisher’ in 2003 due to it outstripping all of Marvel and DC’s competitors and being run within DC as an almost independent entity to losing its editor-in-chief Karen Berger in 2013, its top talent to a resurgent Image Comics after they shepherded Robert Kirman’s The Walking Dead into a trans-media juggernaut, and, ultimately, its commercial and cultural relevance as it slid towards desperately attempting to recapture its glory days under the stewardship of various unworthy editors-in-chief who tried unsuccessfully to snag top talent back from Image before the imprint ultimately suffered a mercy killing in January 2020, seven years after the cancellation of the line’s only stalwart with Hellblazer’s 300th and final issue (John Constantine had been moved to the main DCU with 2010’s ‘Brightest Day’ in preparation of planned films and television shows, so keeping his less child-friendly version around was no longer tenable) and about fifteen after anyone really cared.

Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman, whose work in the 1980s demanded that DC establish Vertigo as a home for the mature and transgressive stories they wanted to tell, had long left DC for greener pastures. Gaiman was less hesitant to return to his old stomping ground than Moore, a notoriously curmudgeonly hermetic wizard known both for his hatred of DC Comics's treatment of his work and his ongoing wizard feud with Grant Morrison, but by 2002 he had bigger and better projects on the horizon than the occasional six issue Sandman mini-series whenever he didn’t have a book or television show to promote.

Their replacements were starting to move onto bigger things, too. Garth Ennis’s run on Preacher ended in 2000 and, with it, Ennis and Dillon left for Marvel to revive The Punisher after a storyline in which Frank Castle became a ghost angel or something tanked the popular perception of the character right as Marvel, still reeling from their brush with bankruptcy, had an upcoming Punisher movie in development. Ennis returned to DC from his foray into ‘mainstream’ superhero comic at Marvel so despondent at the state of the industry that he launched The Boys for Vertigo-adjacent Wildstorm, which was shunted from the imprint to the independent publisher Dynamite Entertainment because editorial saw its pastiche of the genre too much as biting the hand that fed them.

Grant Morrison, after finishing their work on The Invisibles the same year, was similarly poached by Marvel to revitalize their flagging X-Men line after decades of rot, just in time for the production of the X-Men film franchise. When Morrison returned to DC, Vertigo largely became a home for their obvious ‘b-projects’ like The Filth and We3, with the bulk of their time being devoted to expansive rebuilding projects of the principle DCU’s Batman and Superman mythologies after they similarly suffered decay due to years of editorial interference and muddled takes on the characters by writers like J. Michael Straczynski.

Now-disgraced pervert Warren Ellis found much of his work shunted to Wildstorm after the end of Transmetropolitan (itself shunted to Vertigo after the collapse of DC’s sci-fi focused Helix imprint), ultimately jumping ship to Marvel to, again, revamp one of their underutilized characters in time for a movie they planned to produce. This time, it was Iron Man, precipitating the rise of the MCU.

Fables was regarded as one of three critical and commercial bright spots during the prolonged decline and fall of the Vertigo empire, the other two being Brian Azzarello and Eduardo Risso’s 100 Bullets and Brian K. Vaughn and Pia Guerra’s Y: The Last Man.

Like 100 Bullets, Fables is a gritty crime thriller. Unlike 100 Bullets, Fables focuses on the lives of various dark re-imaginings of public domain fairytale characters in a magical district of New York.

It’s the kind of now-passé ‘what if a children’s property was evil’ reimagining that was once groundbreaking but has since been done to death in an era of Simpsons creepypastas and schlocky horror movies starring Winnie The Pooh. The Big Bad Wolf is now Bigby Wolf, a Sam Spade-esque sheriff who fought in the World Wars and struggles for acceptance after all those times he blew houses down and ate people in the fairytales. Snow White is now a ruthless mayor, with a backstory dealing with her sexual assault and trauma at the hands of the seven dwarves. Cinderella is now a super-spy, who fights evil witches who want to open abortion clinics in order to use the aborted foetuses to facilitate magical rituals. The conclusion of the story claimed that Fables (the term for any supernatural being, in-universe) were superior to humanity, as none of them would ever consider being pro-choice.

Yeah. Fables is kind of like that.

I imagine this comes as a surprise to most people who would casually consider themselves fans of the property, because the most prominent thing about Fables is that it was used as a basis for a noir crime drama by Telltale Games, The Wolf Among Us, released a year after Fables ended in 2012 that vastly repackaged the series as a more thoughtful and human look at a seedy urban underbelly where society’s subaltern had to police their own affairs because no institutions were ever going to save them and the hierarchies that replace formal infrastructure are all violent and exploitative.

Including Bigby Wolf himself, the player character. Even on a ‘kind’ Bigby run, your actions as a player and Bigby’s authority as a character are built on the threat of violence. The button is always there in every dialogue option to go apeshit or be an absolute asshole, and its that threat which drives the witnesses, victims, and perpetrators Bigby interacts with over the course of the driving mystery, even as the player stays Bigby’s hand. On a more brutal Bigby run, the story is driven by relentless violence and torture. It runs antithetical to Willingham’s call for a ‘good’ authority figure in comic books-- Bigby is a creature of violence and oppression, even if he tries futilely to be a ‘good’ cop, and the game refuses to let you shy away from that.

Wolf Among Us was good. It was dark in tone and rich in narrative and themes, carried by stellar voice acting from Telltale’s troupe of house actors. Despite being a commercial flop, the game emerged unscathed as a critical darling that still has fans clamouring for a sequel even after Telltale spent a decade tanking their own reputation with dozens of lesser titles, allegations of mismanagement, and the studio ultimately collapsing under the weight of their licenses before reforming as a new entity that has, in four years of development, released one outsourced episode of a game based on The Expanse by the unfortunately beleaguered DeckNine, a haphazard port of their old Batman titles, and several trailers for The Wolf Among Us 2 with no game or release date in sight.

Wolf Among Us was just that damn good.

Willingham hated it, apparently. He hates the sequel more. As part of the essay he dropped when he declared that he was ‘firing’ DC from stewardship of the franchise and releasing the characters into the public domain, he revealed a laundry list of complaints he had with DC’s stewardship of the Fables brand; not least of which was that they had tried to hide the script for Wolf Among Us 2 from him and that it had, he believes, fundamentally misrepresented his characters and his world. Will Wolf Among Us 2 be good? I’m not here to pass judgement on a game that isn’t out yet, but that is largely immaterial to this discussion, because Willingham views it as something that is part of a publisher’s unwillingness to honour his contractually-obligated demands for the brand.

I’m also not here to defend DC Comics over an independent creator. Their treatment of Siegel and Schuster, co-creators of Superman, is both well-documented and absolutely repugnant to read as anyone who has even the slightest fondness for comics as a medium. As was their back-pedalling and deciding that Batman was created by Bob Kane ‘with’ Bill Finger, in order to deny true co-credit to the co-creator of Batman. As was their treatment of Alan Moore, who was legendarily fucked over in the contract for Watchmen, eternally waiting for DC to stop exploiting the brand of a book that was always supposed to revert to him after a limited run even as DC held the employment of his best friend over his head at a time in which his best friend’s brother was dying to force him to agree to the further exploitation of Watchmen. As has been their treatment of J.H. Williams III, and numerous other creators and artists who were forced off books in an already precarious industry while DC editorial protected and enabled abusers for years.

But I can’t help feeling like this performative releasing of Fables’ trademarks into the public domain is just a spiteful move by a hateful man, designed to give him catharsis to the detriment of everyone else who worked on the property. Mark Buckingham and James Jean defined the visual identity of Fables, the style that formed the basis of Wolf Among Us's iconic visuals, but Willingham retained sole copyright on the work. He is doing this, explicitly, because he believes that ‘good people’ will get their hands on the franchise now, and not the ‘bad people’ who make his characters gay, or use them to make games that explore systems of oppression.

There’s the question of whether he can even actually do this, legally speaking. Nothing legally binding has been declared, outside of a vague intent to allow others (as long as they’re ‘good people’) to do whatever they want with the characters, and the question of whether authors can voluntarily release the copyright to their own work is a legal grey area.

Willingham built his grimdark interpretations of fairytales on top of public domain works, but his own interpretations of them are subject to US copyright laws. It’s impossible to copyright a character, only the works they appear in, and Willingham has not collaborated with either DC or his co-creators in order to release the work under a creative commons license of any kind, which means that the characters as depicted, their personalities, appearances, and distinguishing traits, are still copyright of… whoever owns the books. DC has already released a statement claiming that they will be taking legal action to protect their copyright, which means they must think they have a good claim to it. With many of their most popular characters, like Blue Beetle, Peacemaker, and Captain “Shazam” Marvel already in the public domain due to copyright registration SNAFUs in the 1950s, their lawyers probably know better than anyone.

It’s also uncertain that Willingham owns the trademarks. Searching the US Patent and Trademark Office shows no registration for Fables or any of the named characters, likely because any attempt to try and trademark ‘Snow White’ and ‘Cinderella’ would fall afoul of Disney if not dozens of others who use those characters in their works, with only a trademark for Wolf Among Us that was indisputably filed by DC Comics.

Even if it’s the case that Willingham is sitting on dozens of trademarks for the franchise that he believes he can weaponize against DC, trademarks are registered for a period ten years, and a core component of them is the intent to use. If Bill Willingham is declaring his intent to let everyone but himself use them, all he’s really doing is hastening DC snatching up as many of those trademarks as they can as soon as any he holds onto expire. Clock’s ticking.

At best, Willingham has raised a fuss. This is likely going to lead to a long and protracted legal battle, in which I don't think anyone is going to emerge the winner. Unfortunately, as a fan of the creative commons, there’s nothing to be happy about here.