By: Mike Carey & Peter Gross (writing & art), Chris Chuckry (colors) & Todd Klein (letters)
The Story: Mysteries abound…. Will Wilson Taylor reveal himself? Where is Lizzie Hexam running off to? And can Tom Taylor and Savoy evade the cops and Count Ambrosio?
What’s Good: A lot… This has been such a pleasurable series because it is clear that Gross and Carey have a legitimate plan for the series: they’re telling a story instead of a series of adventures. There have been many teases throughout this series, but two of the biggest are the role of Wilson Taylor (Tom Taylor’s missing father and author of the famous Tommy Taylor boy-wizard books) and how exactly are these literary characters manifesting in our reality. Both of those get answered in this issue.
I especially like the revelation that the characters in all stories are coherent entities that have the capability to possess (for lack of a better term) human bodies in our reality. We see this most starkly with Count Ambrosio (a Tommy Taylor character) who possessed the French jailer, but it also clearly going on with our heroine Lizzie Hexam (who is a character in Dickens) too. And, it ties in interesting with the issues from several months ago about the Nazi propaganda that had so tortured and perverted the story Jud Suss from its original that it became a “canker” (the creators’ term) that was somehow dangerous. It will be very interesting to see how this plays out because I’m sure many other characters will have some sort of literary basis.
It was also finally nice to see Wilson Taylor. He has been hovering in the background for this entire series, so I am very excited to see what his role will be going forward.
The art is again very sharp. There is nothing in this book that makes you gasp in amazement at the sheer sense of style, but there are also zero panels where you cannot tell what is going on because the artist was so busy showing off!
What’s Not So Good: Very little, but if I have to pick at something I’ll pick at the opening scene from this issue. As with many issues of The Unwritten, the scene is taken from a Tommy Taylor novel. I hadn’t thought of it before, but the Tommy Taylor novels are novels……not graphic novels, so it is a little odd that they are illustrated when they are shown here. On an intellectual level, I know why it is this way in the comic, but you have to admit that it is at least a little odd.
However, the Tommy Taylor scene shown here is funny as hell as it both spoofs the second Star Wars trilogy AND emphasizes what crap the new Tommy Taylor novel is by “revealing” that Tommy’s magic is due to “meta-condrians”. Brilliant!
Conclusion: A really strong issue. I cannot recommend this series strongly enough. There hasn’t been a poor issue yet and there have been a few “picks of the week”.
Grade: B+
– Dean Stell
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Conclusion