Thinking it over, Fables is a great example of what M John Harrison meant when he said 'Half the problem with contemporary commercial fantasy is its sophistication of everything but the central imaginative act.'

Reducing the fantastic to purely mundane and soap operatic norms hardly seems worth the effort to me. On the contrary, there's something like the book I just read, The Beast by Sharman MacDonald, which takes the mundane and soap operatic - two couples out on a picnic in the park - and lifts it to a dreamlike, mythic level.