By: Mike Carey (writer), Michael WM. Kaluta, Rick Geary, Bryan Talbot (artists), Chris Chuckry (colorist)
The Story: What a day, what a day for an auto-da-fé!
The Review: While some people would like to dismiss stories as just that—stories—they must have something more to them, otherwise why would people react to them with such passion and even violence? Most of us understand that at the heart of every story is a message. Sometimes that message is clear and harmless; other times it’s more subversive; and there are times when a story seems straightforward, but then reveals complex undertones when examined more deeply.
This series makes the premise that if you take control of storytelling, you can likewise control an entire society or culture’s consciousness. History seems to support that theory, as this issue shows. We begin with a rather dramatic example, the burning of books and burying of scholars during the reign of Emperor Qin Shi Huang of ancient China, which results in the elimination of the Hundred Philosophies. When you consider a philosophy as a mode or outlook on life, what the Qin Dynasty did during this time was eliminate entire ways of living.
And to what purpose? We get hints from several lines of soon-to-be-burned books recited by soon-to-be-buried scholars: “Disorder is born when the untruth is received into the air” (the danger of straying from absolute virtue); “While some enjoy ease and rest, I am worn out in the service of the state” (the burdens of government); “Born to prosperity, he feared always its loss. The man who has nothing fears nothing” (a rebuke against materialism).
These ideas clearly fly directly against legalism, a Chinese school of thought that advised how rulers could force citizens to act as they desired, even against their will, a school that endured the entire Qin dynasty and arguably still survives in the country today. We can easily see how such a suspect philosophy would be a very attractive one to the similarly suspect cabal (whose name, we discover, is the Unwritten) that’s plagued Tommy Taylor all this time.
Next we see the rise of American political satire through the eyes of cartoonist Homer Davenport. While this sequence assumes a little too much about the power of cartoons (“The war with Spain. I—I think I started it.”), it nonetheless shows how influential even the humblest form of expression can be. We’ve seen the Unwritten support various wars by literary method before (e.g. Rudyard Kipling and British imperialism), but to what end, we still don’t know.
One thing is clear: whatever the ultimate goal of the Unwritten, it involves controlling people’s knowledge through the manipulation and monopolization of stories. Hence, you have Bishop Adolphus’ rage at Johannes Gutenberg’s printing of a grammar book: “It teaches—people—to reeaaaad!!” Again, the role of the Catholic Church seems entirely secondary to the cabal itself; they don’t support the Church’s goals so much as the Church’s goals fall in line with their own.
Kaluta, Geary, and Talbot offer a deceptively simple style of art similar to regular series’ artist Peter Gross. Kaluta’s fuzzy lines takes some getting used to (and I still don’t really care for it), but it does capture both the austere and ornate aesthetics of that period of Chinese history. Geary’s slightly exaggerated figures reflect the same exaggeration that characterizes Davenport’s cartoons, while Talbot’s aggressive hatching emphasizes the hostile intent in Bishop Adolphus’ war against church reformation.
Conclusion: While not clearly illuminating on the secrets behind the Unwritten, there’s a wealth of information to be gleaned from between the lines of the issue, the very kind I suspect they would wish to destroy. As always, this title is amazingly and compellingly literate.
Grade: A-
– Minhquan Nguyen
Some Musings: – Too bad Davenport really didn’t ever attack newspaper mogul William Randolph Hearst in his lifetime. Perhaps he could have saved America from decades of yellow journalism.
– “…the book shall live as long as he does.” Okay, honestly, who here wasn’t totally onto where Pullman was going with that offer? This just proves that the wisest men lack the most common sense.
Grade
Conclusion