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(More customer reviews)Mike Carey is one of the many British comic writers to make his name at DC's Vertigo imprint. Carey began his North American writing career with his famous "Lucifer" series (a spinoff of Neil Gaiman's "The Sandman"), as well as a run on the longrunning "John Constantine, Hellblazer". Subsequently he's spent some time at Marvel Comics, most prominently with a lengthy period on "X-Men", which has met with quite a bit of fan acclaim. Now he returns to Vertigo with his next big indie project, "The Unwritten", which revisits a passel of familiar Vertigo themes and should prove very popular among literary enthusiasts. This trade paperback collections issue 1-5 of the series. Some spoilers follow.
Our protagonist is Tom Taylor, the now-adult son of the famous author Wilson Taylor; much like A. A. Milne and his son Christopher Robin, Wilson integrated his son into his writing, making him the hero of a thirteen-volume fantasy series that (the series helpfully tells us) is popular enough to make Harry Potter look like, ah, I guess the hero of "Eragon" by comparison. The now-adult Tom makes a living at fan conventions and the like, while his father vanished without a trace years before. At least, that's what Tom believes. But after an encounter with a mysterious woman inquiring into his past, the question of exactly what Tom is comes to the fore. This kicks off a strange and as-yet-largely-unexplained journey into conspiracy and metafiction.
In comparison to past Vertigo series, one can very easily see many similarities with "The Sandman", which was also very much concerned with the nature of story and the interactions between fiction and reality. Carey's writing demonstrates quite a wide range of literary influences, with the core of the series being quite obviously based on Harry Potter, the defining literary product of the first decade of the 21st century. But perhaps the most impressive work comes in issue five, a standalone story focused on Rudyard Kipling, the great imperial poet, where Carey manages to reinterpret Kipling's entire literary output and personal life in the context of the series' ongoing plot. It's quite a bravura piece of writing. Peter Gross, the artist, does a terrific job rendering the world of Tom Taylor, and he doesn't miss a beat in the skips between different storytelling styles.
An interesting, if still somewhat inscrutable, start to a new property at Vertigo.
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