Happily Ever After: Bill Willingham Announces Fables To End With Issue 150

It’s a good thing that, for good or ill, Vertigo Comics has got some Sandman back in the fold for at least a little while, because their arguably final big series from their second wave of glory days is coming in for a landing.

That’s right: Bill Willingham has announced that Fables will be ending with issue 150 in about a year and a half, with its spinoff book Fairest closing out at about the same time.

This is… not particularly welcome news.

So what’s up, Bill?

After more than ten years of publication, and hundreds of issues of Fables, and various Fables-related works, I have decided the time has come to begin the process of bringing our sweeping story to a close. And, along the way, I’ve decided to retire from a great deal of my comics work.

Retirement in the storytelling trade means, still working and writing every day, but being a bit more selective in what projects I take on. Pushing 60, I thought it would be a good time to start making concrete plans for those remaining good writing years.

Fables will end with Issue 150, which will be a larger than usual size, as were many of the other milestone issues. Fairest, our companion series, will also come to an end just before the big final Fables issue.

Both DC and I will announce more details later on, but first and foremost I wanted to let our wonderful readers know about this as soon as I could, and note that our story plans leading up to Issue 150 made it increasingly clear that this upcoming saga should naturally be the final story. After more than ten years of publication, and hundreds of issues of Fables, and various Fables-related works, I have decided the time has come to begin the process of bringing our sweeping story to a close. And, along the way, I’ve decided to retire from a great deal of my comics work.

Retirement in the storytelling trade means, still working and writing every day, but being a bit more selective in what projects I take on. Pushing 60, I thought it would be a good time to start making concrete plans for those remaining good writing years.

Willingham gave some additional details on the decision and some of the concrete details on how this is all gonna wrap up in an interview with Newsarama:

Well, we have the end of the “Camelot” story. We have, following that, a two-issue story that’s sort of a side story, but it sets up the final, big saga. And that story is called “The Boys in the Band.” And it’s all about Boy Blue’s Band up at The Farm. They go off on an adventure together. The adventure sort of lays the groundwork. It asks a few specific questions that, the answer to those questions are the last big Fables saga…

If the timing works out, the last arc of Fairest will end one month before issue #150 of Fables…

But you know, the story was good enough, the scheduling kind of fell into place, and I will make one promise — the ending of this will not be everyone dies.

I’m not gonna lie: it’s been a while since Fables was at the top of my to-read pile on a month-to-month basis anymore, and in fact, somewhere along the line it worked its way to my co-editor Amanda’s pull list rather than mine. But I’ll never forget picking up that first issue, back in the early 2000s when Sandman and Shade The Changing Man were over and it felt like Vertigo’s best days were behind it, and knowing that it was something special. And while I think the book isn’t what it was in the early days, when the list of characters was limited and the scope was just a block in New York City, it still beat the hell out of a lot of the books on the shelves. And the fact that we’ve got Grimm and Once Upon A Time thriving on TV by basically aping what Fables did first is a good indicator at the power running under that book’s hood.

This is a bummer… and it bums me out that we missed Fablescon last March.