Koh: Fables and the Problematisation of Everyday Life … 142 “Put Not Your Trust in Princes”:Fables and the Problematisation of Everyday Life.

DC Comics's Fables is a postmodern pop culture pastiche which involves both the extraordinary vision of fairytales and a carnivalesque counter-cultural subversion of Disney-inflected norms. Accordingly, this paper explores the ways in which Fables's narratives and semiotics reveal everyday life to be a construct normalised by its subjects. Issues such as intertextual dialogue, carnival, active audiences, and the neo-Victorian prosocial diadecism of the fairytale genre are discussed. Fables is an ongoing comic book series published by DC Comics's mature-audience-targeted Vertigo imprint. It has proven popular enough to warrant a spin-off companion series, a prestige-bound hardcover collection, and a script order for a television pilot (Futoncritic.com np). The series is written under two central conceits: that public domain fairytale heroes and villains—such as Snow White, The Big Bad Wolf, Baba Yaga, Sinbad, and Prince Charming— all exist in a shared narrative continuity, and that they live in present-day New York, having been driven from their homelands by the evil Adversary. It thus subverts the traditional fairytale structure where the hero(ine) is plucked from a comforting domesticity, and called to adventur