My initiation to Bill Willingham was back in the early 1980’s. I was probably 11 years old, and thumbing through an early edition of Dungeons and Dragons. I saw this drawing, and my creative energies started flowing:
I look at it now and I see all kinds of issues, but that one drawing sparked a lot of changes in how I drew. I spent a lot of time looking for Willingham’s work after that. Flash forward about ten years, and I find Willingham writing and drawing a fantasy comic. With sex. Lots and lots of sex. Needless to say, I bought the damned book. Ironwood was a revelation! The artwork was stunning, and after getting over the initial shock of a dude boning a centaur, I found that the story was even better. So good, in fact, that the gratuitous sex was getting in the way!
One of the few pages we can show you without blushing...
Willingham went on to bigger and better things, namely Fables. Fables takes all of the fairy tale tropes that we know and love, and puts them in a modern setting. You may have seen some television shows doing the same thing, but Fables came first, and does it better. Willingham’s writing is crisp and clever, and he seems to have been set free creatively by having other illustrators handle the art. Fables is still going strong, and we’re all the better for it.
Willingham is working on a prose novel called Bifrost, with woodcut style illustrations provided by Frank Cho. The novel takes place in contemporary Seattle, but with a twist:
This is a story about Mary Fimbul, illegitimate daughter of a Valkyrie and a certain hammer-wielding god of the north. Mary’s tough and strong, can see ghosts, and also happens to be the only survivor of Ragnarok, the final battle that ended the gods and their rule over mankind. As the sole surviving descendant of the royal line, Mary now controls Bifrost, the Rainbow Bridge, which still connects our world to Asgard and the other nine worlds, even though they’ve been unlivable wastelands for untold millennia.
Today Mary is a licensed private hero (still serving out her one-year probationary status), working out of Spokane, Washington.
Mary’s partner in the hero trade is Mr. Finn (short for Infinity Chimp), an immortal talking chimpanzee. He’s an amateur gourmet cook, a recovering biblioklept, and such a savant at pattern-recognition so as to make him quite possibly the greatest nonhuman detective who ever lived.
He’s the brains. She’s the muscle. Got it so far?
You had my money with “immortal talking chimpanzee”. Throw in Frank Cho’s incredibly art, I’m giving you a hell of a lot more cash. Seriously, if you haven’t seen Frank Cho’s work, take a look at this:
Cho draws everything insanely well. But when you throw in women, dinosaurs, and other assorted beasties, Cho transcends mere genius and translates heaven itself through his pen. If you haven’t read Savage Wolverine yet, stop reading this and get to it!
The Kickstarter for Bifrost is currently about half way to their funding goal of $30,000. Willingham and Cho have promised that the higher the dollar amount goes over the goal, the more illustrations Cho will be providing for the book.