Part of an ongoing series revisiting graphic novels and collected editions from days gone by....

I'll be honest, back when I read the first several Jack of Fables collections nearly 20 years ago, I don't remember why I skipped reviewing this one. It's time to make up for the oversight. Jack, in case you aren't familiar with the series, is the far-famed Jack of the Tales; he is Horner, Beanstalk Climber, Giant Killer and B. Nimble, among others. We first met Jack in Bill Willingham's excellent, long-running Fables series, but Jack got himself banished from that isolated New York City neighborhood and, in this spinoff series, is out on his own. One of the first things he did was get captured.

When Jack of Hearts, the second volume, begins, Jack is newly escaped from the Golden Boughs Retirement Community, where the living characters from fables and fairytales are imprisoned in relative comfort until their stories are forgotten and their power is sapped. He is hiding from his former captors in the mountains with fellow escapees Pecos Bill, John Henry and Alice of Wonderland fame. To pass the time, he tells them the tale of how he seduced the Snow Queen (who was pretty naive back then) and gained the powers of Jack Frost.

Then, after relating how his callous nature turned the Snow Queen evil, Jack sets off for warmer climes, reuniting along the way with the Pathetic Fallacy, aka Gary, a fellow escapee, whose special rapport with inanimate objects can bring them to life. Of course, Jack figures out how to use that power to his own benefit in Las Vegas, where he wakes up unsurprisingly rich, surprisingly married and somehow at odds with the Belgian mob. Gary, meanwhile, finds romance with a mannequin named Noelle.

Everything goes rather sideways from there, with death and destruction, fortunes made and lost, a golden horseshoe that gives its wielder too much good luck, and Lady Luck herself taking a hand in matter -- and, it turns out, feasting on the brains of the truly fortunate.

Meanwhile, the assistant librarians at Golden Boughs are still doing their level best to track down and reacquire Jack for their collection. They really, really want him back in their custody.

Jack of Fables is not, in my view, nearly as good as the flagship Fables series, partly because it lacks the diversity of characters and highly developed tapestry of storylines. Jack is not a terribly likable protagonist, far too self-centered, arrogant and indifferent to the welfare of people around him to be the hero of his own book. As an antihero, though, I feel compelled to see where his story takes him -- largely because Willingham is such a damn fine writer.