Vertigo Quarterly: Cyan #1 – Review

By: Too many to list—or even to review. Just check out the issue.

The Story: It’s impossible not to feel blue after reading this.

The Review: Of all the showcase titles out in recent years, the ones from Vertigo have been the best by far, with a good mix of known and unknown writers confidently spinning self-contained yarns from the chosen motif. Until now, I haven’t had a proper appreciation for the choice of motif, which provides some degree of unity to what would otherwise be jumbles of disparate, unconnected stories. But revolving stories around a color doesn’t quite do the same trick.

The big difference is that a color is an abstract concept in comparison to, say, witches or ghosts, which are somewhat more defined, even if a writer takes the notion in some radical direction. In theory, you can write any story and shoehorn a bit of cyan in there, which is what a lot of the features in this issue do, whether it’s Shaun Simon’s unconvincing “Serial Artist” or a metaphysical numbers extravaganza in Mony Nero’s “Much Ado About Nothing.” It’s easy enough for the colorists to dab a bit of sharp light blue in any given feature, but difficult to grasp the color’s effect on the story.

The Unwritten: Tommy Taylor and the Ship that Sank Twice – Review

By: Mike Carey (writer/creator), Peter Gross (layouts/creator), Kurt Huggins, Al Davison, Russ Braun, Shawn McManus, Dean Ormston, Gary Erskine & Gross (finishes), Zelda Devon, Davison, Chris Chuckry, Eva de la Cruz & Jeanne McGee (colors)

The Review: While this OGN isn’t all I hoped, it is worthwhile to consider the status of The Unwritten franchise before really diving into any serious criticism.

For the first 49 issues of its Volume 1 run, The Unwritten told a story as complex and nuanced as any comic currently in publication.  In those issues, it dug deeply into the power of stories to shape reality, propaganda, religion, and what happens when humans lose the ability to create.  It was truly wonderful….but it never sold very well.  By the end of its 49-issue run, sales had slipped to ~8,000 issues/month and that usually leads to cancellation of the series.  However, what we got was not a rushed conclusion to The Unwritten.  Instead, Volume 1 run is ending with a (pretty terrible) crossover with the Fables Universe.  The crossover is a cute enough story, but it has absolutely none of the complexity of The Unwritten and has nothing to do with the first 49 issues.  Now we get this OGN (which I’ll discuss in a minute) and a relaunch of Volume 2 sometime this winter.

On one hand, I could complain that *they* aren’t finishing the story that I – and ~8000 other people – was enjoying for the first 49 issues.  On the other hand, I could be grateful that the series didn’t just have a rushed ending – The End.  Someone at Vertigo fought to keep this series going despite low sales and decided to try this as a strategy to bring in some new eyeballs because an audience of 8000 fans isn’t very profitable.

With that out of the way, it’s natural to expect this OGN to be “new reader friendly” and it is.  If you are one of those intrepid 8000 fans and you hoped this OGN would pick right back up with the story of Tom Taylor in Hades, you will be disappointed.

The Unwritten #24 – Review

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?