Overall I enjoyed reading this collection. Being a huge Fables fan it was fun picking up ideas and stories that Willingham may have reused for Fables. Noticed he likes to write about mythology and folklore, he has thing for bars and drinking in stories, and the use of casino and dinners. Kind of Americana in comic books.

Besides wanting to read more Willingham stuff, I also liked the Sandman mythos too. Nice to read more Merv and Thessaly (besides Death, they were my other favorites in the Sandman series). The endless don't really show up in these books, but you get more of a sense of the Dreaming world.

Nothing in this volume however stood out to me as being spectacular, but it was just a fun read and nice to see some early stuff. This might have remind more of Jack of Fables and Cinderella rather then the whole Fables series, but like I said before if you've read all Fables you'll pick up on some stuff like I did. ( )

There should definitely be more compilations of this sort published, not only because there's so much god material out there to be collected, but also because it's hard to find copies of some of the one-shot story arcs that get published. Most of them don't last long enough to have enough issues to make up a graphic novel (due to their lack of selling power), but collecting a selection of short runs by a well-known author can work from a marketting perspective. For someone (like me) who likes to collect all of the stories by her favourite authors, collections like this are a lot more handy than trying to find the single issues of the comics (often years after the fact).

It also helps that these storyarcs (no matter how short lived) are actually quite fantastic reads. I particularly liked The Thessaliad and Thessaly: Witch for Hire because Thessaly is kind of a bad ass, but the shorts about the Dreaming were wonderful, and the Danny Nod library adventurer story was so amusing that I'm going to be laughing over that one for years to come. ( )

A collection of Willingham comics, both earlier and later, that he has done outside of his work on [Fables]. I love the "Proposition Player" series and am a little disappointed that it got canceled so soon since the ending wraps up a little too fast. "The Thessaliad" is also excellent, but that's not too surprising considering what a great character Thessaly is - she's also good for a little craziness. The shorts are also good, especially the ones involving Sandman characters, but I do prefer Willingham when he gets in his epic mood. It's a nice, 500-page "deluxe" hardback and well worth the price, but if you're not a die-hard Willingham fan, try to get a library copy first, just in case. ( )

http://shawjonathan.wordpress.com/2012/02/20/bill-willinghams-bad-doings-and-big...

This is hefty hardback full of horror comedy. Bill Willingham is best known for his series of comics, Fables. This is not that. It’s a collection of Other Stuff, including a number of adventures of minor characters from the Sandman universe. I don’t know what the uninitiated would make of these, with their injokes and unexplained walk-ons, but the stories stand up by themselves, especially the 60 or so pages of Thessaly the witch.

The opening story, Proposition Player, is the longest (130+ pages) and most interesting. Willingham tells us in his introductory blurb that it was the first thing he wrote for Vertigo, having been an artist with them for some time. It must have been quite a debut: the hero starts out working for a casino and ends up through a series of poor choices and successful gambles as the most powerful God (capital intended) in the cosmos. I wonder if the story’s cheerful blasphemy is a bigger challenge to the cultural authority of established religion than the humourless argumentation of, say, Richard Dawkins. ( )