Growing up, I remember the woods as small spaces between corn and wheat fields. They were staccato bursts of green between the yellow-beige that surrounds nearly every small town in the midwest. But those woods were always a constant, as isolated as they were. Stories inevitably crop up about them—who was lost in them in the past or who lived deep in that little island or what happened on Halloween nights. But then there’s always more to those stories and whatever truths are at their roots. It’s what Juni Ba and Aditya Bidikar look at in their new graphic novel, The Fables of Erlking Woods.

Mynislyvix sits at the edge of the Erlking woods and in that village lived a girl named Vivianne. Orphaned after her parents were taken by an illness, the villagers distrust her. They tell their stories about her, none true, and isolate her further and further from their conclave. But when she discovers Goupil the Fox snared in a trap, she remembers the tales the villagers told about him. How true could those be when all the things they said about her were also untrue? Foxes, though, are cunning. Even trapped and indebted to this girl, Goupil still schemes of a way to take advantage of the kindness. From here we dive deeper into the history of Mynislyvix and the Erlking—a being who has haunted the woods and made deals with desperate villagers for their very souls.

Ba and Bidikar know how much we’ve heard stories like this before, though. Fables are finite in their stories, but the people inhabiting them have more behind them. A Fox may be crafty, but Goupil’s crafts have led him to losing his only friend. The Erlking may be a wicked shadow looming over the woods, but he was a young boy a time ago who just wanted to feel less lonely. The facets of the mythology of the woods end up being reflected in the characters who inhabit it. There is never one true interpretation of a fable as there’s always some background we can never know—either because it’s too old or because we just never ask. Just as Vivianne still stays near the village as she gets older, known to the children as a kind of witch, their parents still come to her to aid their maladies and cure whatever sickness befalls them. The woods contain their multitudes, but most only stand at the edge.

Even at under two-hundred pages, The Fables of Erlking Woods feels like we’re getting a complete history of the woods and their inhabitants. But as the story itself shows, there’s only so much we can get from the tales themselves. No matter the tale, there’s always more to know, always a context to discover that can re-frame what we know. But then there’s always who gets to choose the tales and what details to deliver—even the best narrators can only tell us so much. 

Get excited. Get deeper.

Drew Barth (Episode 331, 485, 510, & 651) resides in Winter Park, FL. He received his MFA from the University of Central Florida.