Fables creator Bill Willingham does not draw his popular comic, he merely writes it, but that’s how he started out in the business:
I’ve wanted to write any sort of stories, prose, comics, plays, movies, or what have you, for as long as I can remember. To my regret, I started late though, assuming I could never make it as a real writer. I only finally started writing the comics I was drawing, because I quickly grew tired of some of the less than stellar scripts I was getting. Drawing a page of comics is so difficult, even more so when one has to do it day in and day out, that the effort should never be wasted on a bad script, so I became a writer as a kind of self-preservation. Later, as my confidence grew, along with my ambitions, I wanted to try ever more writing, and more types of writing, and here we are.
Honestly I didn’t recognize or remember his name from his earlier work:
With my Elementals series, I was one of the lesser known pioneers (at the same time as Frank Miller with Daredevil and then Dark Knight, and Alan Moore with Marvelman and then Watchmen) of serious, realistic takes on superheroes. As much as I like some of what I did back then, I’ve come to a complete turnaround on my philosophy of what makes a good superhero story. The more we tried to explain how this seemingly impossible thing works, to ground it more in reality, the more power we leached out of the concept. I now feel that superheroes should be treated more like fairytales and less like science fiction.
In fact, I should have known him from his even earlier work as an illustrator:
Willingham got his start in the late 1970s to early 1980s as a staff artist for TSR, Inc., where he illustrated a number of their role-playing game products. He was the cover artist for the AD&D Player Character Record Sheets, Against the Giants, Secret of Bone Hill, the Gamma World book Legion of Gold, and provided the back cover for In the Dungeons of the Slave Lords. He was an interior artist on White Plume Mountain, Slave Pits of the Undercity, Ghost Tower of Inverness, Secret of the Slavers Stockade, Secret of Bone Hill, Palace of the Silver Princess, Isle of Dread, In the Dungeons of the Slave Lords, the original Fiend Folio, Descent into the Depths of the Earth, Assault on the Aerie of the Slave Lords, Against the Giants, Queen of the Spiders, Realms of Horror, and the second and third editions of Top Secret.