The Unwritten: Apocalypse (2014-2015): written by Mike Carey; illustrated by Peter Gross, Dean Ormiston, Yuko Shimuzo, and others: And so Mike Carey and Peter Gross' grand, meta fantasy comic-book series comes to its 12-issue conclusion. It's magnificent and funny and clever, and if you haven't read the rest of The Unwritten, you should start there before coming to the end.
Writer Wilson Taylor spent decades trying to create a human being who straddled the worlds of Story and Reality. That was Tom(my) Taylor, his son whose namesake is the young magician-hero in a series of insanely popular children's books written by Wilson Taylor. Why?
Well, that's what a lot of The Unwritten was about. But in Apocalypse, Tom must finally use his strange powers to save the world from collapsing into an endless series of pocket-realities, or perhaps even complete oblivion. Why?
Because the great beast Leviathan, living repository of all of humanity's stories, is dying. As it dies, it bleeds stories into reality. The world is disintegrating into a battlefield of narratives. And all this, ostensibly, because the man known best as Pullman wants to die. Pullman is the first villain of humanity's stories. And because he's become an archetype, he cannot die. This really pisses him off. For Pullman to die, humanity has to die. So what?
Our stalwart heroes Tom, Liz Hexam, vampire-journalist Richie Savoy, and a few others must figure out how to stop Pullman's plans and buy Leviathan time to heal. To do so, they'll quest through the shifting landscapes of Story now erupting into London, England.
Main artist Peter Gross gets tested to the limit by the various artistic styles required to depict everything from Medieval Romance to 21st-century children's books to the events of Moby Dick. And he's great, though his fine, clean cartooning for the 'baseline' world of Tom and friends remains my preferred mode. He's been terrific for the entire run of The Unwritten. So too cover artist Yuko Shimuzo.
To save both Reality and Story will require unlikely allies (Mr. Bun? Madame Rausch?). It will take the stories to the den of the Inklings, and to the haunts of anthropomorphic animals, and to the carnage of London under siege by a seemingly infinite array of fictional beings.
It's all thoughtful, sometimes sad, often funny. Comparisons to that other long-form fantasy comic series about Story, Neil Gaiman's Sandman, are apt. Carey is a lighter, funnier writer than Gaiman, however -- they may have similar bone structures, but the two series nonetheless look a lot different on the surface. The conclusion of this story is utterly apt, clever, and possessed of that white whale from "the only book where the whale wins." Read the rest of The Unwritten and then read this, and you'll understand why it's Highly Recommended.
The Unwritten Volume 9: The Unwritten Fables: written by Mike Carey and Bill Willingham; illustrated by Peter Gross, Mark Buckingham, and others (2013): With the last story arc of The Unwritten debuting in January 2014 in a whole new, restarted book, this volume brings the original run to an end in what is a bit of a curious fashion, a crossover with DC/Vertigo's other long-running series about myths and stories, Bill Willingham's Fables.
Despite not having read Fables for several years, I didn't have any problem following the basics of this crossover. But it still didn't exactly work. I have no idea why the antagonist of the series, Dark, is such a world-destroying badass, at the beginning or the end of the arc. I don't much care about any of the characters other than our Unwritten regulars, who only actually appear in the first and last issues. Well, technically only Tom Taylor appears. I think. Or maybe not.
There are still many fine moments herein, including some truly awful stuff involving a witch's last ditch gambit to save all of existence (Dark's arrival makes for strange bedfellows), and a very moving final sequence that sets up The Unwritten: Apocalypse with, well, a preliminary apocalypse. Still, this arc remains something of an oddity, the least satisfying storyline from The Unwritten's excellent run. Lightly recommended.
Astro City: Through Open Windows: written by Kurt Busiek; illustrated by Brent Anderson and Alex Ross (2013): Busiek's Astro City returns, complete with interior artist Anderson and cover artist Ross, in fine style. While a major story arc gets set up in the first issue, the book mostly focuses on stand-alone stories and short arcs.
Life in the superpower-filled universe of Astro City is a fascinating affair, both metatextual (Busiek creates analogs for virtually every comic-book character you can think of) and emotionally satisfying (the analogs rapidly become their own characters, while the lives of what would be minor characters in a typical superhero book are richly explored).
For instance, the first few issues deal with the exciting adventures of someone who staffs the Hot-line for this Earth's version of the Justice League or the Avengers. Busiek gets to world-build here in what seems to be a perfectly reasonable fashion (I mean, a hotline's going to need staff, isn't it?) while offering a groundlevel view of life on a world packed with supernatural superscientific shenanigans.
Brent Anderson's interior art, superheroic without being super-exaggerated, is as good as ever, which is to say absolutely perfect for the writing of Busiek. There's a nice balance of the mundane and the Super-loopy throughout Anderson's Astro City work.
We also get a look at what people with superpowers who don't want to either fight crime or commit crime do with their lives (find jobs that can use their specialized skills), and look in on a retired super-speedster. Meanwhile, the Over-Arc involving mysterious observer The Broken Man offers glimpses of some world-shattering Crisis to come. Recommended.
John Constantine Hellblazer Volume 5: Dangerous Habits: written by Jamie Delano and Garth Ennis; illustrated by Will Simpson, Steve Pugh, Sean Phillips, Dave McKean, and others (1991; collected 2013): Brit Jamie Delano was the first full-time writer for occult detective/punk mage John Constantine, a character created by Alan Moore, Steve Bissette, John Totleben, and Rick Veitch over in the pages of Saga of the Swamp Thing in the mid-1980's. Constantine got his own adult-oriented book in the late 1980's, with Delano tapped to write it.
Delano wrote 40 issues and a few annuals and miniseries entries before passing the baton to the up-and-coming Irish comics writer Garth Ennis. This volume collects Delano's last handful of regular Constantine issues and Ennis's first six-issue arc.
Constantine, hardest of the occult hardasses, is in something of a downward spiral in Delano's final issues. The psychic cost of fighting evil -- and inevitably getting one's friends and lovers killed during the battle -- has taken its toll. Delano probes Constantine's childhood in a striking horror tale, "Dead Boy's Heart," before turning to the incandescent wrap-up to 'his' Constantine.
What a wrap-up! Issue 40 of Hellblazer contained rare interior artwork by Dave McKean (probably still best-known today for his covers for Neil Gaiman's Sandman). I think it's one of the artistic highpoints for nominally mainstream comic books during the 1980's, dense and detailed to go along with a dense, detailed prose look at Constantine's life and works. This could have served as a fitting end to the series had it been cancelled, but Ennis came aboard with issue 41.
Under the circumstances, Ennis wisely went with the tactic of briefly mentioning the events of issue 40 and then never, ever mentioning them again. DC's decision to put Ennis on the book was something of a stroke of genius. He and Delano are both gifted horror writers, but of almost completely different stylistic modes. Where Delano is baroque and intellectual, Ennis is visceral and bleakly comic in a punk sort of way. To some extent, splatterpunk had come to Hellblazer.
Delano did benefit from some lovely, horrifying artwork at the end of his run, other than McKean. Steve Pugh's grotesques worked perfectly for the Grand Guignol two-parter he illustrated, while the cooler Sean Phillips meshed perfectly with Delano's writing on their issues together. Ennis wasn't quite so lucky early on -- Will Simpson, who pencils Ennis's first six issues, is not a gifted artist when it comes to horror, though he rises to the occasion at points.
Anyway, the first five volumes of the re-edited and re-compiled Hellblazer are marvelous, though why this series didn't get the hardcover treatment the second time around is a puzzle. Unless DC is about to scrap this reprint series and start another one in hardcover. Which, given the mercurial nature of DC's publishing habits these days, is entirely possible. Hidey ho! Highly recommended.
The Unwritten: Tommy Taylor and the Ship That Sank Twice: written by Mike Carey; illustrated by Peter Gross and a host of others (2013): Brilliant companion piece to the equally brilliant, ongoing comic-book series The Unwritten delves deeper into the backstory of the series while also offering the reader a dead-on pastiche of Young Adult fantasy novels.
Indeed, the world Carey, Gross, and other artists conjure up for the first volume of the imaginary Tommy Taylor series is filled with more wonder and interest in 60 pages or so than the entire Harry Potter series. And it comments on the sinister implications of a separate race of magic users walking among the powerless mundane. A great work on its own, and a great and rich expansion of the series, which has about 12 issues left to run in its storyline. Highly recommended.
The Unwritten: Tommy Taylor and the Bogus Identity: written by Mike Carey; illustrated by Peter Gross, Yukio Shimizu, and others (2009-2010); The Unwritten: Inside Man: written by Mike Carey; illustrated by Peter Gross, Yukio Shimizu, and others (2010):; The Unwritten: Dead Man's Knock: written by Mike Carey; illustrated by Peter Gross, Yukio Shimizu, and others (2010); The Unwritten: Leviathan: written by Mike Carey; illustrated by Peter Gross, Yukio Shimizu, and others (2010-2011); The Unwritten: On to Genesis: written by Mike Carey; illustrated by Peter Gross, Yukio Shimizu, and others (2011); The Unwritten: Tommy Taylor and the War of Words: written by Mike Carey; illustrated by Peter Gross, Yukio Shimizu, and others (2011-2012):
Carey and Gross's epic metafantasy pulls out a lead character modelled upon Christopher Milne and Harry Potter and throws the whole of fiction, poetry, myth, legend, and religion at him. Tom Taylor starts the narrative as the bored, drifting son of mysteriously vanished children's literary titan Wilson Taylor. Wilson seemingly modelled the hero of his incredibly popular series of children's books upon his own son, much as A.A. Milne did with Christopher Robin in Winnie the Pooh.
Well, at least his own son's name and general appearance. And then Wilson vanished, leaving Tom Taylor to make his own way in the world by attending various literary and fantasy conventions as the "real" Tommy Taylor. He signs memorabilia. Sometimes he gets lucky. Mostly he's bored.
But why did Wilson make Tommy memorize an encyclopedic array of knowledge related to "literary geography" -- both the places where works were written and the places where works took place? When Tommy gets kidnapped by an obsessed fan who seems to be an actual vampire modelled upon the literary Tommy Taylor's vampiric nemesis Count Ambrosio, things start to get weird. Especially when he's saved by a young woman named Lizzie Hexam, who knows more about the real Tom Taylor than he does, though less about herself than she's aware of. And all this is just in the first issue of the ongoing series.
The Unwritten is a lot of fun as a narrative, as a metanarrative, and as a fictional meditation on the nature and meaning not just of stories, but of Story itself. And as conspiracies are revealed, the nature of Story assumes geopolitical significance: control a society's narratives about itself and one controls the society.
A complex, funny, and scary piece of work, with lovely art on the stories themselves by Peter Gross and the occasional helper, and by Yuko Shimizu on the gorgeous covers. Highly recommended -- I'd guess there are maybe 20 issues to go before the whole thing wraps up.
