I’ve been a Mike Carey fanboy for a good long time, and have been meaning to read The Unwritten for over a decade now. I finally got around to getting the damn thing four or five years ago, and it has been taunting me on my bookshelf ever since. Just one of those things where there was never really a good time for it. Well, thanks to the need for a graphic novel for Bingo (less than a month and a half folks! Time to panic read!) I finally decided to make the time for it. I’m glad that I did.
The protagonist of this series is a man named Tom Taylor. His father, Wilson Taylor, wrote a series of books rivalling Harry Potter in popularity, starring a young boy wizard named Tommy Taylor, modeled on Tom as a child. Between Tom’s childhood and the present, his father mysteriously disappeared, and Tom makes a living on the convention circuit as the “real” Tommy Taylor. It’s not the most fulfilling existence, but it pays the bills.
Things get complicated when a young woman brings up evidence that Wilson Taylor was not, in fact, Tom’s father, and indeed Tom’s past is all rather vague. Most people denounce him as a fraud, but some believe his thin past is covering the fact that he’s the real Tommy Taylor, come into the real world as the final novel suggests happens.
It is very, very clear that this is “Volume 1,” because it introduces lots of questions with very few answers. This is shaping up to be a story about stories. We get glimpses, to varying degrees, of a series of figures who are plotting … something mysterious and probably sinister, but I really have no idea what. All I can guess is that it has something to do with the power of stories.
The final section of the volume is perhaps my favorite part. It stars none other than Rudyard Kipling, and shows how these shadowy conspiracy theorists helped him rise to fame and used him for their own ends - whatever those ends may be. Kipling, of course, was a racist, an imperialist, and a colonialist (he’s the guy who coined the phrase “White Man’s Burden”) and that is not glossed over in this story. It’s not critically analyzed - nothing is really presented to suggest that there’s something wrong with Kipling’s view of the British Empire as an objectively good thing for all the savages lucky enough to be subjugated by it - but it isn’t glossed over either. It does a good job of presenting him as a sincere and passionate man, albeit one with rather reprehensible views. He just doesn’t see them so. I’m spending a little too much time on analyzing Kipling as a character, because I was continuously impressed by how well Carey and Gross made me sympathize with him while not concealing his racism. So I’m going to move on.
I don’t have much to say about the art one way or the other. It does its job. I never found myself stopping to admire the artwork for its own sake, but I never found myself distracted or frustrated by it either. It was well done enough to allow me to lose myself in it, which is really what I expect out of a graphic novel. Art that I can enjoy for its own sake is a bonus.
It’s always a bit challenging to write a review of one volume of a graphic novel series, because I’m writing a review of what is essentially one-eleventh of the story. If I wasn’t trying for a Hero Mode Bingo card, I honestly probably wouldn’t bother trying to review it until I was finished, but here we are.
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