by Mike Carey (writer), Peter Gross (layouts), Ryan Kelly (finishes), Chris Chuckry & Jeanne McGee (colors), and Todd Klein (letters)
The Story: Lizzie/Jane’s past is revealed and Savoy and Tom make a daring rescue effort in a special “pick-a-story” issue.
What’s Good: Is have to give props to Carey and Gross for having the balls to even attempt a “choose-your-own-adventure” issue. The experience of reading this comic is quite unlike anything I’ve experienced reading comics, the layouts are unique, and it’s all clearly the result of an extremely labor intensive creative effort.
Format aside, the story that Carey tells here is a good one, equally divided between exploring some of the series’ early moments in greater detail while also surprisingly trucking the plot forward. The scenes detailing Lizzie’s past do a fantastic job of illuminating events from the Unwritten’s first issues that were clouded in mystery and completely puzzling at the time. Now, Carey clarifies them, while also showing how much sense it all makes knowing what we know now, something that’s quite pleasant when recalling how mystifying these happenings were back when we read them.
Meanwhile, the present day events deliver a satisfying feel of the gang “coming together” as character relationships are stronger than ever. Tom and Lizzie’s relationship has never felt more meaningful, even if it ends up being solidified by a fiction, while Savoy and Tom’s banter livens it all up. An interesting parallel between these scenes and those from a Tommy Taylor novel also give everything a heavier and more significant tone.
The art is also really solid and the choice to have Ryan Kelly on finishes was a good one. The pages, divided in half, could have made for messy, cramped artwork. Instead, Kelly and Gross use the confined space to conjure some of that old school Vertigo style.
What’s Not So Good: It’s a good thing that the story itself is solid, because the choose-your-own-adventure experiment isn’t exactly a resounding success. I suppose it’s the nature of the beast, but during portions where readers make the choice what page to turn to, scenes usually feel too short and the links between scenes often feel tenuous at best. This makes sense, given that any one scene could link to a number of options, but it still makes the product feel off-kilter and unnatural.
Worse still, only half this issue is truly a “choose your own adventure” experience. About halfway through the issue, once we get to the current events, Carey clearly has a very defined story he wants to tell, one which he can’t deliver outside of a linear experience. The result is that midway into the book, there isn’t any more choosing to be done. The book just devolves into having us flip between random pages as directed instead of choosing where to go, or what we wish to explore. In this sense, the whole “pick-a-story” thing feels disingenuous; we get to make a few decisions early in the issue, but that quickly stops as the book instead makes a feeble attempt to feign choice and randomness simply by not following standard page-turns.
With each page actually being two pages and things rarely following a standard page order, this also means that you’ll often end up spoiling things for yourself. With so many pages in such close proximity despite being disparate chronologically, it’s impossible not to get unwanted glimpses of the future while reading.
It’s also worth noting that you have to read this entire book awkwardly turned sideways. I hate that with a passion, even if I understand the necessity.
Conclusion: A good story backs up a bold, but failed, experiment.
Grade: C+
-Alex Evans
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