This review originally appeared at Green Man Review.
Bill Willingham, in his introduction to The Unwritten by Mike Carey and Peter Gross, talks about the emergence of a new genre in comics: he calls it the LAF triumvirate, a “new wave” of literature-based fantasy, animal fantasy, and fairy-tale fantasy, which seem to bleed into each other and pop up in ever-varying permutations. I’ve seen a fair amount of this myself, including Willingham’s own Fables series. Carey and Gross are coming at it from the literature-based leg, with a story about Tom Taylor, son of the late (presumably) author of the best selling fantasy adventures of Tommy Taylor, a boy wizard with glasses, although his familiar is a winged cat.
One of the salient memories of Tom’s childhood (and, in spite of the disbelief of the world at large, he stoutly maintains that he is Tom Taylor, not “Tommy”) was his father teaching him literary geography. He even had a map with the locations of various works of literature marked. Let it be said right up front that Tom’s relationship with his father was not terrific, but Wilson Taylor disappeared when Tom was a child, so at least it never had a chance to get worse. His immediate problem is that too many people think he is the fictional Tommy, including the nutcase who thinks he himself is Count Ambrosio, the villain in the Tommy Taylor books. And, lest you think this is going to be simple, there’s even a cabal of shadowy, evil men who control what the world thinks by controlling what writers write.
One could wish there were more to this. What we are given is a journey through every literary cliché you can think of, complete with mysterious woman who is either an enemy or an ally, but who seems to have her own agenda, and a slasher loose in a remote villa in the Swiss Alps, where a group of writers, of more or less bitchy temperament, are having a workshop — which also happens to be the villa where Tom lived with his father. The fact that Wilson Taylor, Tom’s father, disappeared when Tom was a child doesn’t stop some people from wondering about Tom’s complicity in the disappearance. Tom himself is not a particularly admirable character — whiny, self-centered, and more than willing to play victim. There is some attempt to play with identity and reality here, but it never quite jells, as evidenced by the fact that Lizzie Hexam, the mysterious woman and a literary reference herself, has to explain it to us.
In fact, one of the shortcomings here is that, presumably for those of us whose reading may not have been as comprehensive as someone seems to think it should have been, all the references are explained quite plainly. There’s even a final chapter centered on Rudyard Kipling that, I suppose, is meant to provide some back story on the Evil Cabal and its pernicious influence. Don’t ask me what this has to do with Tom Taylor, because, even though he reappears at the end, I didn’t care. (The one saving grace of this last section are the appearances by Mark Twain, by far the most interesting character in the entire story.)
The art is appealing, although it doesn’t stretch any boundaries. Clean, somewhat reductive in character designs, and quite expressive, it’s a perfect fit with the flat color, although page layouts could have been a little livelier. The high point is the covers done by Yuko Shimizu for the original single-issue series, which are rich, inventive, and visually sophisticated.
This one was somewhat frustrating, since both Carey and Gross can do better, individually and as a team. In spite of Willingham’s applause, I’m not going to take The Unwritten as a benchmark for LAF fantasy comics. At least, I hope not.
(Vertigo Comics, 2010)
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