The new Vertigo Comics title The Unwritten, created by writer Mike Carey and artist Peter Gross, mines familiar territory if you’re into pop culture: A book series about a prodigal boy wizard is a worldwide phenomenon, and the author’s son/character’s namesake is making the most of that infamy. Yet if you’re thinking it’s just a Harry Potter retread, you’re falling down the wrong rabbit hole, Alice. Carey and Gross have created an expansive world where audiences are in love with a man they think is the living embodiment of their fandom, all while a shadowy cabal manipulates popular fiction for its own ends. You know Dan Brown is drooling somewhere right now. “Fiction has tremendous consequences in the real world,” Gross says. “Story is the driving force of civilizations, wars, religions. It’s pretty easy to make a convincing argument that story is the most important thing that humans have ever come up with.” The first issue (which is only a buck!) was released this week, and I caught up with the creators to find out more about this fascinating landscape they’ve conjured up — no wands necessary. Click read more for the full report and three pages from the debut issue.
Art courtesy of DC Comics
Carey realizes that a lot of people will make a connection with Potter and the Twilight series because The Unwritten is “partly a meditation on fame, and on publishing phenomena that go unfeasibly stratospheric.” (The first time we meet our protagonist, Tom Taylor, he’s signing copies of Tommy Taylor and the Golden Trumpet for a line of adoring fans at TommyCon.) But the real model for Tom was Christopher Milne — the Christopher Robin of A.A. Milne’s Winnie the Pooh books. “Christopher Milne grew up thinking of his fictional alter ego as a burden that he had to carry, and Tom Taylor in The Unwritten is in very much the same predicament,” Carey explains. “He’s famous, but he’s famous as a fictional character — as the real-life inspiration for the lovable boy wizard, Tommy, who made his father Wilson’s fortune and reputation. Now, as an adult, he’s servicing that myth.”
But then, as they say, the plot thickens. Identity issues arise to plague Tom publicly, and he’s determined to solve the riddles of his past and find out what happened to his long-missing dad. The second issue (due out June 10) has Tom traveling to Villa Diodati in Switzerland, the last place Wilson Taylor was seen many years ago. But as Carey also points out, it’s a house with a literary history that goes back at least six centuries: John Milton penned Paradise Lost there, and it’s famously where Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein was conceived. During his trip to the house, Tom runs into a workshop full of nutty horror writers and an enigmatic agent for the group behind the major conspiracy.
While Carey is quick to point out that The Unwritten is a fantasy tale and not a literature course, Frankenstein is only the first of many fictions referenced — but it does become important in the course of Tom’s story, he teases. The writer mentions that popular and influential tomes such as Moby Dick, Pride and Prejudice, and The Jungle Book will pop up, as well as those less familiar to a modern audience, like La Chanson de Roland and Feuchtwanger’s Jud Suss. “The conspiracy, as we finally get to see, is inconceivably huge: big enough to encompass all other conspiracies, and a large chunk of human history,” Carey says. “But — to use a favorite metaphor of mine — it opens up in stages, like Chinese boxes or Babushka dolls. When you think you’ve got it, you haven’t necessarily got it. Even the characters in the story who think they know everything aren’t always right. Only one person in the whole of our sprawling cast knows everything.” “Well, maybe two,” Gross adds, “but Tom certainly isn’t one of them.”
The Unwritten marks the return of Carey and Gross as a comics dream team — the twosome collaborated from 2000 to 2006 on the Vertigo title Lucifer, a spinoff of Neil Gaiman’s acclaimed The Sandman series. Carey resides outside of London, Gross is entrenched in the wilds of Minnesota, yet they work so well together they might as well be next-door neighbors. The secret? Carey says it’s knowing how to play to each other’s strengths after so many years, and that they can be honest without “pussyfooting around.” Gross concurs: “It’s almost like the story is there already, and we’re archaeologists unearthing it by digging deeper and deeper. It’s really a thrill to work on.”
Gross remarks that The Unwritten is a book with hooks that can reach into just about every other story imaginable. So I asked both of them who their favorite storytellers were. Also a prose novelist, Carey says in comics, it’s the “holy trinity” of Gaiman, Alan Moore and Grant Morrison, sci-fi and fantasy writers such as Ursula Le Guin and Mervyn Peake, and modern authors China Mieville and Ted Chiang. For Gross, his list dates back to what he read growing up, “when things really get experienced with less baggage to wade through”: Robert Heinlein, Ralph Ellison, J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis. “Oddly enough, a couple of them are going to be working their way into the pages of The Unwritten.”