Fables creator Bill Willingham continues his impossible run of prolific, high-quality, highly varied stories based on the idea that all the fables, myths and stories of the world are secretly true, and that they all live together, hidden among the real, “mundy” world. The hardcover Werewolves tells the back-story of Bibgy Wolf — his time as a crack Nazi-hunting guerrilla in the dark forests of Germany. This past comes back to haunt him when he discovers a midwestern town populated entirely by werewolves that have been created by a beautiful, ruthless Nazi scientist who isolated a serum from blood that Bigby left behind when he helped foil a Nazi attempt to revive Frankenstein’s monster to fight on their side.
Werewolves draws on the likes of EC Comics’ Two-Fisted Tales and other hyper-violent war comics, with plenty of gory decapitations, ruthless executions, suicides, immolations, and tough talk. It’s just the right kind of story for Bigby, who’s one of the best characters from Fables, which has lots of terrific characters to choose from. The book could conceivably stand alone — it has its own complete storyline — but it’s much richer in the context of the wider Fables universe.