By: Mike Carey & Peter Gross (as creators since they don’t specify what they each do), Vince Locke (inks on ~5 pages), Chris Chuckry (colors), Todd Klein (letters) & Pornsak Pichetshote (editor)
The Story: Big event happens in the relationship between Lizzie and Tom as they tackle the story of Moby Dick.
What’s Good: This issue really made me feel that The Unwritten was “back”. If you read my reviews of the last few issues, you would see that I was becoming a little disenchanted with the series as the narrative started to get a little too confusing. Carey and Gross don’t fix that by stopping to explain things in this issue, but by using a trick that worked so well for Lost: Just keep moving! This issue starts to throw out all sorts of new mysteries and gives us reminders of old ones that we enjoyed. I don’t want to spoil too much, but it is a nice approach and it keeps us from fixating on some of the more confusing aspects of the last few issues. Anyone who enjoyed the first few story arcs of Unwritten when it was all about the “power of stories” and the concept that stories are almost living, breathing things once they have been created, will enjoy this back to basics issue.
Again, the art by Peter Gross is very effective for this series. It is very easy to overlook this sort of art because the majority of it is talking heads, but every so often we get a page where Gross is called upon to draw something more elaborate (such as a big architecture page in this issue) that remind you that he’s very talented.
What I’m neutral about: There is a big (and I mean BIG) event in the relationship between Tom and Lizzie. There were no ill effects from it in this issue, but we’ve all seen a LOT of dramas and comedies collapse after an event like this. I’m intentionally being vague because I want everyone to get that “Whoa!” moment when they open the book. Let’s just say that I hope this doesn’t mess things up.
What’s not so good: I’m calling a slight BS on the revelation that Tom and Lizzie have known each other since they were kids as Tom suddenly “remembers” that his dad would bring Lizzie home to play with him. I hope this is in service to something that the creators want to do with the story because it just seemed a little suspect that this is only being remembered in issue #20
Conclusion: The Unwritten is back. This wasn’t a contender for “issue of the year” or anything like that, but it did make me feel that this title has its feet back under it after a couple of shaky issues. Even with a few odd things about this particular story, I feel a lot better about the future of this series than I did a month ago. It is also probably an example of why “trade waiting” on some of these Vertigo series isn’t a bad idea because if you were reading these in collected editions I doubt you’d even notice the lull.
Grade: B-
-Dean Stell
Grade
Conclusion