By: Mike Carey & Peter Gross (script, story, layouts/creators), Al Davison (finishes), Chris Chuckry (colors), Todd Klein (letters), Joe Hughes (assistant editor) & Pornsak Pichetshote (editor)
The Story: Pauly Bruckner, the foul-mouthed rabbit from issue #12, makes a return in a tale that revolves around animal storybook characters trying to journey their way to the top of a mysterious stairwell.
What’s Good: Every ~6 issues, Unwritten gives us one of these gems where we take a break from the main story of Tom Taylor and see some very different aspect of the Unwritten world. Back in the outstanding issue #12, we were introduced to a foul-mouthed rabbit. The rabbit remembered that his name was Pauly Bruckner, but he had been cast into a Winnie-the-Pooh type story, supposedly by Wilson Taylor (Tom’s father who is somehow behind the whole of the Unwritten story). In that issue, it was somehow implied that the other animals in the story were also real people who had been tossed into the story, but had forgotten their true nature, but Pauly was NOT going to forget even though this fairy tale existence was driving him nuts.
This great issue starts with a motley collection of animals making their way up an eternal staircase in a quest to reach the top and some doorway to salvation. All is going well and we the readers are left to consider that this stairway is surely the same one that we’ve seen in a few other issues of Unwritten and the fact that these animals are clearly story animals and that perhaps they are bubbling up out of some “primordial soup” of stories that exists at the absolute bottom of the stairs. Hmm? Then, from a side door…who should pop in but Pauly Buckner!
This is cool from a story standpoint: Is it possible for storybook characters to escape the story through force of will? How do the doors off the stairs relate to the fulcrums between stories that Tom Taylor and Frankenstein discovered a few issues ago? It is implied that the stories progress in complexity as one works oneself up the stairs…Does this mean that children’s books with animals are at the bottom and more elaborate adult fiction is at the top?
Through it all, Pauly is a really captivating character. In issue #12, you could really feel the dementia setting in as none of the other animals could remember their former selves and insisted on calling him “Mr. Bunn”. But, by now, Pauly has gone bat-shit insane and his intensity to do anything to get to the top of the stairs is palpable.
The art is again something really special as Davison just does an awesome job with the inks and captures a lot of very complex emotions coming off the anthropomorphic animals. It can’t be easy to make a rabbit look insane, but Davison pulls it off. And, again, Todd Klein is showing that he seems to be one of the few letterers who looks at his work as an art.
What’s Not So Good: Nothing. Great issue.
Conclusion: This is probably the strongest issue of Unwritten since issue #12, and that is even accounting for the last few issues, which have been very powerful. One of the things that make this series great is that it is written for smart readers, BUT it doesn’t commit the cardinal sin of just being deliberately obtuse. The story is just served up and the work on the surface is enough to have a fun story with, but it has another level that allows you to think and ponder the meaning of everything.
Grade: A
-Dean Stell
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