Down the Mysterly River is by Bill Willingham, who is best known for the Fables comic book series. If you're familiar with that series, it's not too much a surprise nor spoiler to reveal that DtMR explores the same sort of meta-fiction: the characters in this story are characters from other stories thrown together (albeit, here, not from folk tales but actually from imagined works of a fictitious author). Sometimes the meta-fiction thing can feel a bit done, but the characters are great. It's almost a shame that the source works here are imagined—I'd love to read the adventures of the warrior-badger Banderbrock.

FuzzyCo grade: A-