By: Mike Carey & Peter Gross (story), Gary Erskine (art), Lee Loughridge (colors), Todd Klein (letters), Yuko Shimizu (cover), Joe Hughes (assistant editor), Karen Berger (editor)
The Story: A kinda origin of Wilson Taylor set in World War I.
Review: This was a very well done comic that left me cold for some reason. I’m very much an “art first” reader, and this art is lovely, and that makes all the weirder that it didn’t really connect with me. Gary Erskine has a great style for a WWI comic. Depicting battles in trenches is hard because you don’t want to see the first hint of anything light-hearted. Honestly, regular series artist Peter Gross has exactly the type of “almost realistic/slightly cartoony” style that wouldn’t quite work on a WWI comic, so I’m glad the creators brought in Erskine for this story. You almost wonder if they knew that Gross would need some help during this time of double-shipping and highlighted THIS issue as a good candidate both from a workflow and subject matter standpoint? Regardless, Erskine has a very straight-forward and direct style that is appealing for the subject matter. The colors also play a big part and Lee Loughridge shows that there’s a LOT you can do with shades of brown.
So, the art checks out…
But, the story itself just failed to light my socks on fire and certainly didn’t approach the heights of previous .5 issues of The Unwritten: #32.5 [I gave this a B-, which was probably too harsh in hindsight] and #33.5. Perhaps that is simply because this story focuses on Wilson Taylor and we already know quite a bit about Wilson, whereas the other .5 issues explored new areas of The Unwritten universe. We also saw a good bit of Wilson’s relationship with The Cabal in the On To Genesis storyline and while that story didn’t show how he first met The Cabal, I’m not sure I was curious about that event. Hopefully it connected with other readers more.
The one highly cool element to this issue was the reveal of the Leviathan. This “creature” is becoming almost as fascinating to me as The Cabal. Is the Leviathan truly some kind of creature? Or is it some kind of representation of peoples’ desire for stories? Or is it both? Something about the way Erskine and Loughridge depicted the Leviathan in this issue made it seem more like Leviathan was some kind of inter-dimensional creature that sucks off story energy from our world. Hmmm…..
One odd place where this issue missed for me was the font choice by Todd Klein. I really had a hard time with the scripted font in the narration boxes and that might have been why the issue didn’t quite connect with me. I’m curious if it bothered others as well. Seeing a font mistake from Klein is kinda like seeing Kobe Bryant score zero points and shoot airballs the whole time. Oh well, I guess when you’ve won as many Eisners as Klein and are universally recognized as “the best letterer currently working” one is entitled to the occasional mistake. 🙂
Conclusion: It’s difficult to say much bad about this issue. The art is splendid and the story is well written. The only complaint is that I don’t feel as if much NEW ground was covered and that’s what I’m looking for at this point in the story.
Grade: B
– Dean Stell
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