More than 'interesting dead things': Reanimation of the oral tradition through narrative subversion and visual narrative performance

This project examines the relationship between the oral tradition and graphic narrative as evidenced in Bill Willingham's Fables series. It specifically analyzes the written narrative retelling and subversion of traditional folktale motifs and the ways in which Fables subverts contemporary expectations of folk and fairytales. An examination of visual narrative performance explores the ways in which the graphic narrative form mimics the oral tradition in its tendency toward performance. Both narrative subversion and visual narrative performance lend to a reanimation of the oral tradition, which select scholars have labeled "dead" upon their commitment to paper. Folktales, in conjunction with graphic narrative, replicate the oral tradition in a way unheard of in other media and remove the folktale from our culture's expectation of it as a genre for children.