Broken Frontier

Did you spend that extra $1.00 this week to pick up The Unwritten #1? Good! Then Mike Carey’s commentary on the debut issue will make you enjoy it even more. And if you didn’t spend that buck, well, this piece should make you run to your comic shop over the weekend.

The solicitation for The Unwritten #1 reads:

Everyone's read the Tommy Taylor books, the popular series of novels turned pop culture phenomenon about a boy wizard’s adventures. And everyone knows about Tom Taylor, the boy the novels were based on, whose life was so overshadowed by his Dad’s fictional epic that Tom’s become a lame Z-level celebrity at best and a human viral marketing tool at worst.

But what if the resemblance goes even deeper? What if Tom is the boy-wizard of the books made flesh? And if that sounds crazy, why is it bringing him into the crosshairs of an ancient faction that has never been named in any book or text?

To discover the truth about himself, Tom must search through all the places in history where fiction and reality have intersected. And in the process, he’ll learn more about that unwritten cabal and the plot they’re at the center of –– a plot that spans all of literature from the first clay tablets to the gothic castles where Frankenstein was conceived to the self-adjusting stories of the internet.

A conspiracy mystery a la The Da Vinci Code, THE UNWRITTEN is the eagerly anticipated reunion of Mike Carey (X-Men, HELLBLAZER) and Peter Gross (FABLES, Chosen) – the team behind the multiple Eisner-nominated LUCIFER. Acclaimed artist Yuko Shimizu (SANDMAN: DREAM HUNTERS) joins the duo on covers, and the series kicks off with a 4-issue opening storyarc with the extra-sized 40-page debut promo-priced at only $1.00!

What a long, strange trip it’s been – and this is only issue 1!

We had the luxury, with The Unwritten, of a very long gestation period.  We started talking about it way back in August of 2007, immediately after San Diego Comic-Con, and we got approved in March of last year, after refining and refining the pitch obsessively through six different versions.  Scripting – at first in a loose and let’s-see-what-happens-when-we-do-this sort of way – began in May, almost exactly a year ago, and now (ripple dissolve) here we are.


Page 2

The weird opening, where the reader is thrown into a comic book visualisation of a scene from a novel, was something we decided on very early on.  You could even say that it predates the book, in that Peter was already seeing it as a possible opening before we had Tom as a protagonist.  The idea was always to introduce the reader to the fictional world and then to come to “reality” (Tom’s reality, anyway) through it.

In the first draft of the script, though, the novel scene was written as pure, straightforward prose.  We talked about having mock-up book pages with a header and footer and one full-page illo done in bookplate style.  I even had a wild idea that all this could be done as a fold-out cover, so you then entered Tom’s world with the first page of the actual comic.  But second thoughts came quickly, and we began to doubt that three pages of prose were the best way of sounding the opening fanfare for the book.

“I can dramatise the novel,” Peter said.  “I can do it so it’s a comic book, but still recognisably a novel.”  I was skeptical at first, but as soon as I saw the roughs he produced for the first three pages, I saw the light.  Suddenly, new vistas opened up, and from a storytelling point of view we moved from two dimensions into about a hundred and two.

Todd Klein’s lettering is a big part of the total effect here, too, as it is elsewhere.  The font itself, the reverse-out and outline effects, they’re all pitch-perfect.  So is the watercolour-like coloring, which again sets these pages off in a separate reality, distinct from Tom’s real world.  I get the same thrill every time I open the book and see these pages again.


Page 6

It was such a blast creating the details for the convention – signage, incidental gags and so on.  I’d come up with an idea, then Peter would come up with a better one, and so on.  The Tommy Taylor porn-parody in the background of the photo here was Peter’s idea, and we went back and forth on what it should be called.  Tommy’s Magic Horn won out at the end of a truly filthy series of emails.

We liked the juxtaposition of “I’m Tom, not Tommy” with “Ooh!  It’s Tommy Taylor!”  Poor Tom gets ironically undercut right after his spirited speech – and his defeated slouch in the last panel shows that he knows it.

Peter is always great at body language.  The other thing I love here is the forced smiles and stiff, not-quite-believable bonhomie of the photograph – and Swope’s bland expression as he delivers his very British put-down in panel 2.


Page 11

Another page that takes us out of Tom’s reality into a different sort of story – in this case, a scene from one of the Tommy Taylor movies.  The colouring, font and balloon design again work to reinforce the shift, and the mobius-strip effect of having the first panel wrap around to become the last seems to fit, somehow, with the general weirdness.

This is the first time that we see Tommy’s wheel tattoo, which will play a very important role in later issues.  Not the first time we see Mingus, because she appears briefly in Tommy’s tragic death scene on page 3, but this is the first time we really see her in action: Peter makes her into a very personable and believable cat, skittish and affectionate at the same time.

Charlie Mingus, of course, was a famous jazz bass player and pianist.  Maybe, in retrospect, I should have gone for a trumpeter.  Armstrong the cat.  Or Gillespie, maybe.  Might have worked.

I love the rain of salt effect here, by the way.  It really looks like the end of the world to me.


Page 18

We worked and worked and worked at the news pages.  Peter became obsessed with layering in as much information as possible – as many references as we could get to the minutiae both of Tom’s life and of the wider world.  It was his idea to put in the changing captions as well as the scrolling ribbon at the bottom of the panel.  It felt like we were pouring ideas into a bottomless cup.  But I think the overall effect is to give a sense of how the Tom/Tommy story slots into the ever-changing mosaic of the news cycle.  It’s a very dynamic page, despite being constructed on a regular grid.

My favourite touch, though, is the sinister Tommy silhouette behind Wilson Taylor in panel 4.  His blunked-out eyes remind me of the scary gas-mask faces in the Doctor Who episode The Empty Child.


Page 26

One of Peter’s great strengths as an artist is that his pages never, ever look cluttered.  He made forty per cent of the page available for that final panel, but the overall effect is still clean and elegant, with a beautiful build from the five panels on the top tier, through panel 6 which is full-width but vertically compressed, to the explosive final panel.  It’s like three screaming violin notes in a horror movie.

In the first draft, Ambrosio’s tirade continues in a single unbroken sentence right through to the last panel:

AMBROSIO:        Tell that to the Greeks who fought at Troy, Tommy.

AMBROSIO:        Tell the women burned as witches.  The Rosenbergs.  Sacco
and Vanzetti.

AMBROSIO:        Tell the martyrs of all the religions and the millions who fell in
all the wars since time began - -

AMBROSIO:        - - that it’s not worth dying for a f*cking story!

That final beat worked fine, but once we’d decided to use STORIES ARE THE ONLY THING WORTH DYING FOR as the tagline on the cover, the logic of swapping it into the final panel here was irresistible.  It states one of the central themes of the book, and although it’s an outrageous statement on the face of it, I think we’re going to justify it to a very large extent before we’re finished.