The Unwritten, Volume 3

Dead Man's Knock
written by Mike Carey
art by Peter Gross
additional finishes by Ryan Kelly (#17)

It's not at all shocking to discover that Wilson Taylor once belonged to the power-hungry cabal he would eventually contrive to undo.  He's callous and utilitarian and sometimes brutal even as he defends an honorable idealism: freedom from the hegemony of story, or rather, freedom to tell the stories we choose.  A shadowy presence at the edges of The Unwritten for many of its early issues, frequently spoken of but never appearing—like Harry Lime in The Third Man, presumed dead if under mysterious circumstances, a commanding personality even when long absent—when Taylor finally does appear, he's just as cold, willing to murder Chadron for the slight chance Ambrosio may once again use him as a doorway into the world.  He freely admits, with no discernible guilt, that he stole Tom away from his real mother and fabricated a myth to take her place so that he could shape his son into a savior.  If he's calculating with his son, he's inhumane with Lizzie/Jane, experimenting on an orphan to create a bridge between real and literary worlds, then brainwashing her into believing herself a Dickens character destined to aid Tommy in his quest.  He and Callendar may angle for different ends, but they're cut from similar cloth.

Volumes 1 and 2 of The Unwritten are immersed in the intellectual possibilities of Carey's meta-literary premise.  The mechanisms by which stories work in the world, by which they shape the way we understand it, are well articulated, particularly in the two-part "Jud Süss," but Volume 3 gives the concept an emotional resonance and more meaningful stakes.  By the time Tom finally realizes the real implications behind his father's revolution, so do we.

"That most times, the truth is like a close-up conjuring trick.  You can look straight at something and think you're seeing the truth of it.  But really, you're seeing what someone else wants you to see.  So fuck the truth.  We don't know where it is, and we probably won't know it when we see it.  She just chose the story she needs right now.  The story that keeps her standing.  That's probably all any of us get to do."  (Dead Man's Knock: 131 [The Unwritten #17: 31])

Unlike the earlier volumes, which are rich with surprises but play far less on expectation, Dead Man's Knock pulls off a very clever sleight of hand on both its characters—even the cunning and suspicious Pullman—and its readers.  The double-deception of the false Tommy Taylor book and its last-minute replacement by a real Tommy Taylor book were both well earned.  Nevertheless, the finest single issue in the collection is "The Many Lives of Lizzie Hexam," which borrows, at least superficially, the structure of a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure book.  Even now, I'm not entirely convinced how the issue should be read.  Though I perhaps prefer a sequential reading, one which ignores the "instructions," since its juxtapositions and time-skips are suggestive the way they are, the more traditional participation in the issue's chosen structure is also effective.  In the end, its strongest commendation is that it sustains both readings.

Also, we finally discover who Pauly Bruckner is and what he did to deserve being transformed into a talking rabbit in a waistcoat.

Collects The Unwritten #13-18:  "Dead Man's Knock: Monsters," "Dead Man's Knock: Atrocities," "Dead Man's Knock: Bloodletting," "Dead Man's Knock: Conversations," "The Many Lives of Lizzie Hexam," and "MIX"

ISBN:  978-1401230463

The Unwritten, Volume 2

Inside Man
written by Mike Carey
art by Peter Gross

Arrested and arraigned in Switzerland after the mysterious and murderous events at the Villa Diodati, perpetrated by The Unwritten's goon Pullman but pinned on Tom Taylor, Carey's protagonist is transferred at the request of the French to the Donostia, Maison d'Arrêt de Roncevaux, made famous by the massacre of Charlemagne's rear guard and its commemoration in the anonymous medieval poem La Chanson de Roland,  where he will stand trial.  Extradited with his future cellmate and (unknown to him at the time) undercover blog reporter, Richard Savoy, Taylor is forced to navigate prison life, at which to his surprise as much as the reader's he proves alarmingly adept; confront continued incursions of the literary world into his own at his command, sort of; and make his escape from bribed prison guards and agents of the Committee.  However, the "Inside Man" portions of Volume 2 are more about the transformation of prison governor Claude-Louis Chadron, whose love for his children and their faith in Tommy Taylor leads him to compromise his principles, cooperate with the Committee, and suffer the consequences of his interference.  Like Tom, who must face the ramifications of being written into and therefore transformed by his father's novels, Chadron becomes what literature tells him to be.  Bereft of his children and consumed by his blame of Taylor, Chadron becomes exactly the enemy that has already been written for him:  Count Ambrosio.  If literature can make and remake people, like Frankenstein's monster or Taylor himself, it can unmake others.

Following their escape, Tom Taylor, Lizzie Hexam and Richard Savoy find themselves IN Jud Süss, on a different kind of rescue mission, to reclaim the "unhappy novel," as Savoy calls it, from its unstable heritage.  A story whose multiplicity makes it a "canker," a monster created by conflict between its composition and its appropriation by Nazi propagandists.  Tommy, by virtue of his sporadically appearing and glowing hand-tattoo, restores the novel.  It is a prime example of the un-writing Paul Cornell points to in his short but unusually fine introduction when he comments, "The title of the series itself might refer not to something that hasn't been done, but to something that's being undone, a tapestry that's being unpicked."

However, the real gem in this collection is the final issue, "Eliza Mae Hertford's Willowbank Tales," which like closing issue of Volume 1—"How the Whale Became"—is tangential to the primary story.  A sort-of parody of children's animal literature (à la The Velveteen Rabbit or The Wind in the Willows) which is re-imagined as a singularly cruel punishment.  Pauly Bruckner, a man who crossed Wilson Taylor, is banished into a geographically finite children's story as a white rabbit in a waist coast named Mr. Bun.  Gruff and disgruntled at his capture, Bruckner repeatedly makes attempts at escape, always to find himself whisked back home for tea with the other forest animals.  If the premise is cruel, and the ending quite grim, its execution is very comical. 

Collects The Unwritten #6-12:  "Inside Man,"  "Inside Man: The Song of Roland," "Inside Man: Interlude," "Inside Man: Conclusion," "Jud Süss, Part I: The Liar," "Jud Süss: The Canker," and "Eliza Mae Hertford's Willowbank Tales"

ISBN:  978-1401228736

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