The Unwritten #53 – Review

By: Mike Carey (writer), Peter Gross, Mark Buckingham & Dean Ormston (pencils/finishes), Chris Chuckry (colors) and Todd Klein (letters)

The Story: The Fables characters come up with a plan to defeat Mr. Dark.

Review (with SPOILERS): I’ve been really hard on this crossover between The Unwritten and Fables.  The major problem being that it isn’t much of an Unwritten story.  It’s just a nice, cute story of Good battling Evil in the Fables universe….with the Tommy Taylor literary characters merely guest stars.  The story is much more about Frau Totenkinder, Fly, Bigbie Wolf, Mr. Dark and Snow White.

None of those problems has vanished in this issue and I still think it is a darn shame that The Unwritten has to finish its Volume 1 run with a paint-by-numbers Fables story.

However, there are a couple little glimmers of hope peeking through in this issue.  It’s nothing as deep as The Unwritten was before this crossover, but it shows that the series isn’t totally killing time until Volume 2 launches this winter.

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 #52 – Review

By: Mike Carey (writer), Peter Gross (some layouts & inks), Mark Buckingham (some pencils), Dean Ormston & Inaki Miranda (finishes), Chris Chuckry (colors) and Todd Klein (letters)

The Story: The Fables miniseries being published under The Unwritten title continues.

Review (with SPOILERS): I’m amazed that this story-arc isn’t getting any better.  To put things in context, I just finished prepping some recent issues of The Unwritten for binding.  Doing that reminded me of those really powerful stories that we got over the last ~20 issues of The Unwritten and it really illustrated how vapid this crossover with Fables truly is.  Even though the first couple issues of this story have been poor, I hoped that at some point, we’d get back to some of the themes of The Unwritten, but it doesn’t seem likely at this point.

This is just a crummy story and a crappy publication gimmick.  The story within these first three Fables/Unwritten issues just isn’t very deep and it isn’t even much of an Unwritten story.  It’s Fables characters fighting a Fables villain….ergo it is a Fables story.  Furthermore, there isn’t much more to the story than Good Guys vs. Bad Guys.  The Unwritten is/was so much more than that.  It was never a story about a “bad guy” who was plotting to kill everyone.  It was about the power of stories themselves to alter reality.  Maybe that was too esoteric of a concept for the comic market because I don’t think The Unwritten has ever sold that well….and maybe that’s why they crossed it over with the much more popular Fables?

The Unwritten #46 – Review

By: Mike Carey & Peter Gross (creators, writer and pencils), Dean Ormston (finishes), Chris Chuckry (colors), Todd Klein (letters), Gregory Lockard (assistant editor) & Shelly Bond (editor)

The Story: Didge seeks a way to end the zombie killings.

A few things (with SPOILERS): 1) Meta-commentaries continue.  – Last month, there was a lot of meta-commentary in The Unwritten #45.  This issue made it pretty clear that my perception of those meta-commentaries are true and accurate.  This current storyline is ALL about something metaphysical causing our “real world” to have tepid storytelling.  This issue we resolve the zombie issue and learn that people were killed by similar fictional constructs the world over, but that all of these people were left severely brain damaged by their encounters with crappy stories.  I love it!  This is Mike Carey and Peter Gross saying that watching American Idol and reading the National Inquirer makes you stupid.  I can’t quite tell if they’re brave enough to include Big 2 superhero comics in that generalization or not.  Interpret things in your own way.

The Unwritten #45 – Review

By: Mike Carey & Peter Gross (creators), Dean Ormston (finishes), Chris Chuckry (colors), Todd Klein (letters), Gregory Lockard (assistant editor) & Shelly Bond (editor)

The Story: Braaaiiins!!!  The shambling undead make an appearance in The Unwritten.

Review (with SPOILERS): It’s no secret that I really love The Unwritten and this issue exemplifies what I love about the series.  The funny thing is that it is a hard series to review because the good issues (like this one) have multiple interesting things going on and it can be hard to meld my thoughts about everything into a coherent ~700 words.

The best thing about this issue is that the creators laid out why the “death of stories” is such a bad thing.  Ever since the wounding/death of Leviathan in the finale of War of the Words, this series has discussed this concept that stories are somehow dying.  We’ve seen the effects in “storyland” where characters from popular fiction are living in a sort of post-apocalyptic wasteland.  That theme has been interesting, but it was never expressly clear why this should matter to us in the real world (or even the “real world” of the comic).  Sometimes I can be pretty literal and I wondered, “Death of stories?  Huh?  What does that mean?  Does it mean words vanish from the pages of books?”  This issue uses narration from the vampiric Savoy character to establish the consequences of the “death of stories” and show us that we’re living with the consequences right now in the real world.  It isn’t so much that the stories vanish from the page, but that we humans lose the ability to pay attention to a good story and instead focus on less demanding forms of entertainment like reality TV, porn, sports, etc.

The Unwritten #32.5 – Review

By: Mike Carey & Peter Gross (co-creators), Dean Ormston (finishes), Fiona Stephenson (colors), Todd Klein (letters), Joe Hughes (assistant editor) & Karen Berger (editor)

The Story: Another one of the .5 installments that looks at stories through history.

Three Things:

1. Lots of good nuggets in these .5 issues. – It’s funny, but the .5 issues of this stretch of The Unwritten are much more enjoyable than the “normal” issues that are focusing on our “main” characters.  These .5 issues are showing the roots of this Cabal that it trying to rule the world through the power of stories (if that is their goal since it is a little unclear what they’re up to).  30+ issues into this series, we need some answers.  That doesn’t mean that Carey and Gross have to end the series, but they need to give the readers some resolutions to mysteries that have been building since issue #1; these .5 issues are doing MUCH more towards that end than the “normal” issues.  This issue takes place in ancient Egypt and features Pullman (at least I’m pretty sure it is him) guiding an Egyptian king on a hunt for the Leviathan who gains his powers from consuming stories.  Seeing ancient Pullman, the birth of written language, the links between the Leviathan and the WHALE that have appeared throughout this series, the concept that characters can survive their own death via story, etc… It was all very neat.

2. But, kinda slow paced. – This first half of this issue dragged badly to the point where I fell asleep reading it 3 nights in a row before deciding that this was a comic I couldn’t read in my comfy chair in front of the fire at night.  That kinda methodical complexity is both The Unwritten’s biggest strength and its biggest weakness.  There is a LOT of meat on the bone, but the reader MUST bring more mental focus than for an issue of Astonishing X-Men.  All that being said, this issue still had some pacing problems in the first half.  I’m not a writer, so I can’t offer too much in the way of suggestions for improvement, but it seems screwed up to have an issue with  ~5 really cool things in the last 10 pages yet the first 10 pages put you to sleep 3 nights in a row.  And I appreciate that this series is being “written for the trade” but if it’s going to be released in single issues there should be greater effort to make each page of each issue snappier.