The Unwritten, Volume 1

Tommy Taylor and the Bogus Identity
written by Mike Carey
art by Peter Gross

No comic, perhaps ever, has been more rooted in the literary tradition than The Unwritten, Mike Carey's epic series on the power of story.  He has literally invested his world in the stakes of the literature that comes before him.  As a result, the boundary between the literary world and the real world is as porous in the comic as it is from the outside.  Carey blends together factual details from the known biographies of historical authors and the circumstances behind their most famous publications, fictional details from independent works of literature, and his own inventions, characters and story, into a single literary universe.  And his characters must themselves negotiate these treacherous and blurred borderlands.

The Unwritten's foundational premise is that story is a powerful cultural mechanism, one that can open up or control the way we think and act, even without our knowing it.  As Pullman, Carey's muscleman for the series' villains, so memorably puts it during his chase of aspiring author Lauren Sedgewick at the Villa Diodati:

"It does no good to run.  And it does no good to hide.  But I know what it's like.  Your brain shuts down, and you follow your instincts.  Or you think you do.  But you know what you're really doing?  When you flee through the night, or crawl into your little bolt-hole?  You know what's really guiding you?  Controlling you?  Pushing you on?  Genre conventions."  (The Unwritten #4, pp. 8-9)

All said, like the literature it recalls and invokes, The Unwritten points to a world on the brink of an apocalyptic endgame fueled by story, those who would use it to open up the world, and those who would use it to bind and control it.  Although this conflict undergirds most of Volume 1's main narrative, it only comes into sharp relief in the final collected issue, "How the Whale Became."  Featuring cameos by fellow authors Mark Twain and Oscar Wilde, it tells of Rudyard Kipling's recruitment by The Unwritten's antagonists, his subsequent regret, the personal consequences of his regret, and his final literary counterpunch, a short story called "How the Whale Got His Throat."

Peter Gross's artwork admirably tackles the task of turning large portions of Carey's prose "excerpts" of Wilson Taylor's novels into comic formats, a task the TPB's meager extra features does elaborate somewhat.  What's more notable is that visually sequences taken or adapted from prose are more interesting and more finely wrought than the artwork for the main narrative thread.  This is particularly true of "flashback literature," for lack of a more accurate term.  Gross's two-page introduction to Chapter 3, featuring Frankenstein and his monster, and his illustrations in the Kipling-centric "How the Whale Became" are easily Volume 1's finest art.  Even Tommy Taylor sequences, which fail to achieve this quality of representation, regularly exceed the standard.  While this discrepancy might be somewhat thematic and intentional—even within The Unwritten story is more "real" than reality—it still contributes to an overall disappointment in the series' artistic output.  Although most of The Unwritten's interior artwork is functional and, even if in keeping with the series' literary tone, not particularly interesting in its own right, something should be said for Yuko Shimizu's gorgeous cover illustrations, which get somewhat lost in the compact, continuous TPB format.  Her covers unfailingly feature fine sinewy lines, which give a lush texture to the page and along with the slight variation in color density, contribute to an general print aspect; rich, warm antique colors, even which derived from a cool palate; and delicate, finely articulated facial features on Tom Taylor, a stark contrast to the flat, line-less faces in the interior.


Collects The Unwritten #1-5:  Tommy Taylor and the Bogus Identity, Chapters 1-4; "How the Whale Became"

ISBN:  978-1401225650