Who other than the old carver would want everyone turned into his puppets? When they defeated him, the underrated Mr Dark became the principal villain – with his great catchphrase, “I’ll eat your teeth”, and Frau Totenkinder, the worst of the wicked witches, was revealed to be heroic, hurt and humble.

So the role was assigned to Pinocchio’s “father” Gepetto – in some ways a much better choice. The Adversary was originally intended to be Peter Pan, but the Barrie Estate still held the rights. The looseness of Fables meant it was peculiarly adaptive. Its success has demonstrated the resilience of fairytales themselves – I can imagine editorial meetings where they might have said “Can we really stretch Cinderella into a covert Modesty Blaize figure without the sexism? Or the Frog Prince, can he be a bit like Dostoyevsky’s Prince Myshkin? And that crazy badger, Brock – OK to make him a religious fanatic?” They stretched it and stretched it and it did not break. Then it shifted to political thriller, to comedy, to romance, to caper, to horror, to metafictional gallimaufry, to tragedy, to farce, to elegy, to slapstick. The first few issues were a gumshoe detective mystery, with Bigby Wolf, who used to be both big and bad, trying to solve the mystery of Rose Red’s death. The genius of Fables was to be as expansive as the fairytales themselves.

Made glamorous by their magic, they create a safe haven for themselves in New York and an upstate hideaway for the Three Little Pigs, Chicken Little, Reynard the Fox and Tom Thumb (who’s dating Thumbelina, OMG) and all the other Fables who wouldn’t quite manage to pass themselves off as “mundanes” if you met them in Central Park. The huddled masses of familiar faces – Cinderella and Snow White, Little Boy Blue and Prince Charming, the Wicked Witch and Bluebeard – find sanctuary in our world.

In Fables, there has been a coup d’état across the realms of the imagination, orchestrated by The Adversary. The idea was so brilliantly simple it was immediately complex.

Fables de bill willingham