By: Mike Carey & Peter Gross (creators), Chris Chuckry (colors) and Todd Klein (letters)
The Story: Tommy continues trying to save his lady love from Hades.
Review (with SPOILERS): This issue is a little hard to react to. For the past 6 months or so, The Unwritten has really poured on the subtext. Every issue was almost hard to review because there were so many subtle things going on, that I just knew I wasn’t doing a thorough job of discussing them all. So, as I braced myself for this issue, I was bemused to discover that it was just…fine. This month The Unwritten gives us a pretty straight-forward story without any subtext. It isn’t awesome or mind-bending or lousy or crap; it’s just “fine”.
The big event of this issue is the return of Lizzie Hexam. I’m not sure how surprising the return is because we all knew that she’d be back at some point. I mean, Lizzie is a literary character made real. I’m not sure how to “kill” her (unless the death of Leviathan killed her). And once we saw that it was Wilson Taylor that Pauly Rabbit was keeping in chains last issue, I suspected that one of these masked characters was probably Lizzie. I do wonder what she’s been doing all this time since she appears to have a fair amount of free-will in Hades? Has she tried escape? Regardless, I’m glad she’s back. Lizzie adds a human element to the story and makes Tommy more enjoyable to be around (he can get a little churlish).
The cliff-hanger for the issue is also worth a mention as the gang seems to have traveled from a Greek Hades to a more Biblical Hell. I’m really not sure what to make of this? Is this somehow meant to be “the REAL afterlife”? Or have they merely passed from one story about the afterlife into another? And if they are story-hopping, why was Pauly Brucker the Rabbit holding court in Greek Hades? Weird. I guess it gives us something to look forward to next month. The Unwritten doesn’t often do cliff-hangers like this, so it’s a nice change-up.
The rest of the issue didn’t have a lot of impact. It’s mostly a lot of Pauly Rabbit swearing. I wonder what Pauly’s role will be in the eventual conclusion to the series. In the big picture of the series, Pauly is kinda a minor character. Is he important because he’s the first person that Tommy whisked off to storyland? Is he showing us how we need to be careful about injecting ourselves into stories, lest we destroy them? My goodness–there’s some subtext! Even in a calm month, there are still interesting spins on the story. Pauly has been around too central to the series to just be a thuggish, foul-mouthed rabbit, but I’m really unsure what is left for the character to do.
The art in this issue was hit-and-miss for me. I mean, the storytelling is A-grade stuff again, but it was hard not to be distracted by oddness of Pauly Rabbit. I’m not sure there is a “right way” to draw an anthropomorphic rabbit, but Pauly changes a lot panel to panel. Honestly, I think he works better as a character when he looks more like a stuffed animal. There’s something wonderfully off-putting about seeing a cute and cuddly rabbit dropping f-bombs and it loses some of it’s shocked the more human the rabbit becomes.
Conclusion: A solid issue. Most of the really deep stuff takes a break this month in favor of pushing the plot forward. Sometimes a series like The Unwritten needs to do that just to make sure that a segment of the readership isn’t being left behind.
Grade: B-
– Dean Stell
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Conclusion