Bill Willingham announced this week that his new fantasy novel trilogy, Outrider, will be published in 2027. The first book in the series will be released through a publisher not yet named publicly. Willingham described it as an epic fantasy with scope and ambition, distinct from the urban fantasy territory Fables occupied for twenty years.
The announcement lands about eighteen months after the most dramatic creator rights moment in recent comics history. In September 2023, Willingham unilaterally released Fables into the public domain, declaring that DC Comics had “broken the agreement” governing his royalties and creative control over the series. He told readers directly: “I no longer believe DC Comics, when given the opportunity to do right by me, will take that opportunity.” DC disputed his account, and the legal situation remained murky enough that the public domain declaration did not function cleanly in practice. But the statement itself reverberated across the industry for months.
Willingham spent the following year quiet. Outrider is his public return to active writing, and the choice to write novels rather than comics is not incidental. Novel publishing gives him full ownership by default. There is no DC, no work-for-hire agreement, no royalty dispute waiting at the end of a twenty-year run. Whatever Outrider becomes, it belongs to him.
He has been in this territory before. The dispute with DC was not the first time Willingham experienced the friction between creator ambition and corporate ownership. Fables ran 162 issues from 2002 to 2015 and won fourteen Eisner Awards. At its peak it was one of Vertigo’s most commercially and critically successful titles. Willingham watched DC acquire Vertigo’s entire legacy and treat Fables as a catalog asset while he continued to receive less than he believed the contract entitled him to. The public domain declaration was the end of a long deterioration, not a sudden rupture.
Outrider is the answer to that deterioration. It is a creator who spent two decades building someone else’s universe now building his own, in a medium where the rights are unambiguous from page one.
The 2027 publication window is a long lead. Willingham is not rushing. Given what the last two years cost him, that patience makes sense.
Does Willingham’s pivot to novels make you more or less likely to follow his work after Fables?
Six books. One unforgettable world. The Adventures of Baron Von Monocle is steampunk adventure with the kind of worldbuilding and heart that made you fall in love with fantasy in the first place. Start the series on Amazon.
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