By Jared Gardner
With summer upon us, it is time for me to
catch up with that stack of comics on my desk and see what
is worth following into the dog days to come. Today begins
the first in a series of reviews of new series, most of
them only in their first few issues, with suggestions as to
which are worth adding to your pull list and which are
worth letting go the way of so many one-hit wonders of
summers past.
As I made probably too clear in an earlier
review, Mike
Carey’s last Vertigo series left me both bewildered and
terribly, terribly cold. I never believed he knew what
he was up to with that story, and the whole thing felt
like a fairly calculated attempt to get all hip to the
manga vibe while continuing to tap into the whole
Lucifer/Sandman mystique that earned him his stars in
the industry. Well, Crossing Midnight
is no more, having been
unceremoniously dumped by DC, after 19 issues. And as he
well deserves, Carey has been given a second chance,
this time teaming him back up with his brilliant
collaborator on the deservedly long-running
Lucifer
series, Peter
Gross. The
Unwritten still feels, I must confess, as if it
is not entirely in control: there is enough story in the
first issue to fill out about a dozen issues of
House of
Mystery (and about 100 of Echo), but there is no doubt that Carey
and Gross have something special here.
The basic premise alone is complicated enough to make me
pause, uncharacteristically, in trying to find the most
efficient way to lay it out. Unwritten tells the story of Tommy Taylor, the son
of a famous novelist of a wildly popular series of books
which happen to bear his name. Many years ago, his father
disappeared, and Tommy has for years been cashing in,
reluctantly on his very minor celebrity status by doing
endless rounds on the convention circuit signing his
father’s books for fans. Like Tommy himself, Wilson
Taylor’s legions of fans have been left in the lurch
following the disappearance of the author many years ago.
The comic interweaves pages from the Tommy Taylor novels in with the story, deliberately
collapsing further the space between the (real) Tommy
Taylor’s life and the fictional Harry-Potter-like hero.
Seems like enough for a series right there? We haven’t even
begun.
At a convention talk, Tommy is confronted by a graduate
student who claims to have unearthed information
questioning his relationship to his father and pointing
potentially to a larger conspiracy—including the
possibility that Tommy himself was secretly adopted from
Bosnia. Tommy is whisked away by his publicist before he
can learn more, but the damage has been undone and
mysterious forces have been unleashed. Tommy’s devoted fans
turn on him as a fraud, and he sets off to learn the true
story of his origins and to uncover the truth. Phew! Surely
that is enough…
But no. Carey weaves in a junkie’s stash of literary
allusion and geography, quite thick meditations on the
meaning of truth, literature, and identity, and a
conspiracy which turns out to extend far beyond a
self-serving publicist and a deadbeat dad. In fact, the
conspiracy, such as we can begin to trace its outlines in
the first two issues, seems to cross all kinds of
boundaries, between the “real” and the “fictional,” between
this world and otherworlds quite possibly much more real
and meaningful than our own.
By the way, my summary doesn’t even cover half of the first
issue (we have vampires, nail bombs, the transformation of
Tommy from pariah to messiah), but I am going to leave the
rest for you to uncover on your own. Because this is
definitely a book to follow, well into the summer and
beyond. Unlike its predecessor, Crossing
Midnight, this
one deserves a following and a good 60-100 issue run. Of
all the newer Vertigo titles that are eagerly trying to
fill in the void left by the end of Y: The Last Man
and 100 Bullets, this is the one I am most
enthusiastically rooting for.
