Bill Willingham

Stephanie Horn played the outre party game Cards Against Humanity on Friday night with multiple-Eisner-Award-winning “Fables” artist Mark Buckingham, but the devoted fan isn’t ratting him out. It was “hysterical,” she says, “and that’s all I want to say because I don’t want to get anyone into trouble.” Interactions like hers and Buckingham’s were an aim of the Fabletown and Beyond gathering in snow-white-blanketed Rochester, Minn. Horn, who traveled from Ventura for the show, had enjoyed limited interaction with several of its special guests at larger events, but relished “deeper access than a standard convention,” a common sentiment during the weekend from readers and professionals alike. In addition to the usual signings, artist sketches and comic-book discussions, attendees could see Cthulu dangling his legs over the edge of a pool, a veteran of local theater performing the Bard’s Sonnet 71 […]

This weekend, an acclaimed comic-book creator, colleagues and fans will attempt to open a portal between our mundane reality and the worlds of legend. Fabletown and Beyond, “Fables” mastermind Bill Willingham’s convention devoted to “mythic fiction,” becomes a reality this Friday through Sunday at the Mayo Civic Center in Rochester, Minn. But will the gathering itself enter lore? When the creator of the long-running, mature myths-in-modernity Vertigo series spoke with Hero Complex in November about plotting the con, named for the New York neighborhood where many fables reside in his comic, he said he’d learned that “good convention hosts must be just a little bit suicidal” and “this is not something I would wish on anyone.” Willingham was kidding (a little). But the goal of the gathering is to create an environment where fans and creators “talk about the meat […]

Bill Willingham can trace his love of mythic fiction all the way back to his childhood, when he first became fascinated with comics starring a certain hammer-wielding Norse god. “I assumed Thor was just another Marvel superhero made up just like Spider-Man…. But one day my brother insisted that Thor, in his terms, was ‘stolen’ because the same character is in the encyclopedia,” Willingham said. Determined to prove his brother wrong, he checked the encyclopedia. “And sure enough, there was Thor, right there, wonderful mythological character. That just kind of opened my mind and probably started my love of folklore and mythology right there, just the realization that these modern stories we’re reading can be drawn from old sources, and that those old sources are wonderful…. That stayed with me forever, the fact that just normal guys like me can […]