The Unwritten #47 – Review

By: Mike Carey & Peter Gross (creators), Chris Chuckry (colors), Todd Klein (letters)

The Story: Tom Taylor resumes his quest to rescue Lizzie from Hades.

The Review (SPOILER ALERT): At first glance, this is a pretty standard issue of The Unwritten that just serves to advance the plot.  Contrast that with the last few issues that have focused more on building the entire mythology of The Unwritten universe and it might seem that this issue is a little light.

It is actually one of the least obtuse issues of The Unwritten in a long time, very straight forward… And if you start scraping at the story, you find a lot of those lurking complexities that the series is known for.

The basic story is simple enough: Tom goes to rescue his girlfriend, Lizzie, from Hades and runs into Pauly the Rabbit.  Pauly has taken control of Hades and while he is amused by Tom – since Tom is very different than the other folks Pauly gets to hang out with all day – he isn’t about to just let him waltz in and out.  So, it’s a pretty standard set-up: Hero must overcome the big-bad to save the girl.  It’s very understandable and the art is lovely, but when you start to think about it, it does that typical “The Unwritten thing” where it begins to beg thought provoking questions:

• Why are they in Hades? – Pauly and the little French children may not have been regular church attendees, but it’s safe to say they were raised in a more Christian tradition than a Greek one.  Why are we in Hades and not some Biblical “hell”?  Could it be that one of the central concepts of the series is at work again?  Much as “the word became flesh” so can flesh become words.  Perhaps when characters in The Unwritten die, all that is left of them is a “story” and that “story” has to go to an afterlife…..and since the concept of Hades is older than Hell, they end up in Hades?  Makes a little sense, right?  Does that make Hades a library?  Also weird is that the saying “the word became flesh” is from the Gospel of John (right?)…..so it is once again weird that The Bible is important, but not directly involved in the story.  It really is amazing how continued digging at this story keeps revealing new layers.
  
• Role reversal – How odd is it that a real man (Pauly Bruckner) is running Hades while a fake man (Tom Taylor) is invading Hades to rescue a fake girl (Lizzie)?  Pauly is basically defending a literary creation from an invasion of literary characters.  I’m not sure if it means anything, but it is beyond weird when you think about it.
• Why are the French kids present? – At first, it doesn’t make any sense.  I mean, these kids weren’t anything very important except that they died tragic deaths and their death allowed the essence of Count Ambrosio to cross over and inhabit the French prison warden’s body (back around issue #8 or so).  But, one thing that sticks with me was that those kids were SUPER Tommy Taylor fans.  Remember, they actually had wands and kinda thought that they could actually perform magic, right up until their “magic” failed to keep a wall from crushing them to death.  Surely their misplaced belief in Tom/Tommy will play a role here, right?
• Tom remembers the staircase. – Interesting that Tom/Tommy remembers “the staircase”.  Those stairs have been presented as a kind of journey that stories must follow to be born onto the “real” world.  I can’t think of any significance to Tom remembering that experience, but it is interesting.

And, that is all before we get to the big cliffhanger.  I don’t know about the rest of you, but I was pretty sure the masked character was going to take Tom to see Lizzie.  I really didn’t expect to find Wilson Taylor there in a torture dungeon.  It does make a little sense though.  Wilson has had his fingers all over this story and he would surely have a role to play in fixing the mess.

The art is noticeably better this month.  I’m not sure if it is just because there is no third-party inker on this issue or if my supposition about the art being intentionally muddier (to better go with the “death of stories” concept) is true.  Except for a few cases with the anthropomorphic rabbit looks funny, there is nothing but solid storytelling from this art.  My only quibble with the art is that the story is “all time great” caliber, whereas the art is “functional”.  Consider another similarly mind-bending story: Promethea.  That probably wasn’t Alan Moore’s finest work, but what put it over the top was the glorious artwork from JH Williams.  There is a lot of glorious art in comics, and a lot of it is wasted on comics that couldn’t (to paraphrase Larry Holmes) “carry The Unwritten’s jock strap.”  That’s not to say that there is anything “bad” about the art, I’m just saying that more glorious art wouldn’t be wasted on such an important title.

Conclusion: Even a relatively straight-forward issue of The Unwritten has some pretty deep stuff if you’re willing to sit and think.  This is pretty easily the most thought provoking comic being released right now.

Grade: A-

– Dean Stell