An Unwritten Entry

Most comics I buy because I like the characters, either because I like the new spin a writer has put on the characters, like Ed Brubaker’s fantastic run on Captain America or Geoff Johns’ run on Green Lantern. I also buy comic titles because I think a character has unmined depths, like the recently ended Power Girl series. But very few comics I pick up because they fill my head with new ideas to the point of bursting, and I have to pick up each new issue to not only see what the writer is going to do next, but also to see what new ideas they will introduce. Neil Gaiman’s Sandman was one such title. Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing (among other titles) was another. So was Grant Morrison’s Animal Man.

I added Unwritten to the list with the graphic novel.

Almost from the first issue this series grabbed me. It starts with a series of books about a boy wizard—a fantastically successful series of books about a boy wizard who, shall we say, greatly resembles Harry Potter. There are some definite changes—the Lord Voldemort analogue is a vampire named Count Ambrosio—but you can tell where the writer of Unwritten ,Mike Carey and Peter Gross, was aiming.

In the world of Unwritten, the boy wizard is named Tommy Taylor. The writer of the Tommy Taylor series is named Will Taylor, and he named the boy wizard after his real-life son. Then Will Taylor vanished off the face of the earth, after publishing thirteen Tommy Taylor books.  Tom Taylor, as you might expect, doesn’t really care to live in the shadow of Tommy Taylor, but still makes the sci-fi/fantasy circuit, signing books as “the real Tommy Taylor.” It’s at one of these conventions where a man claiming to be Lord Ambrosio tries to kidnap Tom, a man who seems at some points to be a crazed fan in a poorly-done costume and at others to be much more realistic. Tom is saved by a woman named Lizzie, but she saves him “the right way”—the way that makes millions of Tommy Taylor fans worship Tom Taylor.

After that, as they say, things get strange.

As I mentioned before, I love characters in a story. Unwritten gives you plenty of those. Even minor characters are given interesting personalities, and the way characters interact with each other is not only realistic, but fun. I would pay to read an issue of Unwritten where people do nothing but talk to each other. Seriously, sometimes the action can only take away from the talking. But then if there were no action, there’d be nothing to move the story along, and I am loving this story. The whole point of this story is to talk about stories—how they influence us, the power they have over us, the way they can affect us, and how a good story, told at the right time, can even alter reality. Of course, Unwritten tiptoes over that fine line that divides reality from fiction, but consider this—in the last election, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and John McCain all wrote books. In this election, Rick Perry, Tim Pawlenty, Michele Bachmann and Sarah Palin all have books that they have written, three-hundred page manifestos, each one telling the story of that candidate to hundreds of thousands of readers, building up their narrative slowly but surely. At the debates, the candidates aren’t answering questions—they’re building up their own personal narrative, while their opponents try to deconstruct it with ill-fitting facts.

Stories matter—the study that found vaccinations give children autism was a story, told properly, and published by the right people. You may have thought you were reading a factual study, but it was a story, told in language that made it seem plausible. Mike Carey and Peter Gross know that, and the Unwritten is as much a story about stories as it is about a young man named Tom Taylor.

The big problem when you get to a story that has so many mysteries and so many allusions that the answers are out there is that you risk disappointing your audience if you don’t already know the answers. Battlestar Galactica suffered from this. I think Lost did, too. What’s nice in comics, though, is that the story isn’t necessarily driven by sales. It ends when the writer or writers think it should. I really hope that Unwritten is plotted out and that the big ideas are thought through beforehand. I’m optimistic that they are, too. For one thing, I can understand where Carey and Gross are coming from. When they talk about the “negative space” of a story, for instance, I can understand what they mean, and why it would be particularly frightening in a children’s book.

I should also mention the artists. There are a few of them, but the main ones seem to be Kurt Huggins and Zelda Devon. They do a great job of portraying the real world, and they do it so well that when fantasy starts to creep in it feels like the real world, and yet somehow out of place. Kurt and Zelda do expressions particularly well, which gives the entire book a sense of groundedness that is missing in other comics.

In case it’s hard to tell, I love this book, and I highly recommend going out and reading it at the first opportunity. Don’t blame me if you find it hard to put down.