This is what happens when Techland goes to the comic book store: we end up talking about what we picked up. This week, Douglas Wolk, Lev Grossman, Mike Williams and Graeme McMillan discuss The Unwritten, Vol. 2: Inside Man and Ultimate Avengers 3 #1.
DOUGLAS: As a series, The Unwritten has never quite done it for me, even though it’s by creators whose work I often find interesting. As of Inside Man, I think I’ve realized that it’s done in by the terribly weak, amorphous concept at its core. It’s metafiction, right; it’s all about the way that stories leak into the world, and it’s built around the most culturally effective new work of fiction of the last couple of decades (that would be “Harry Potter,” which is way, way too thinly disguised here). Except its thesis is basically nonfictional history, so Mike Carey has to throw so many contrivances at it to get it moving that it ends up being badly cluttered. You can tell the first story in this volume pulls in all its “Song of Roland” material just so Carey can get off that line about how “this place was on the map… not because of the battle, but because someone told the story of the battle.” And the second story needs to be about stories whose function changes drastically, so Jud Süss gets pulled into it (by the way, would it have killed Carey to mention Lion Feuchtwanger or Wilheim Hauff by name?). But the problem for me is that these don’t work as stories; all the characters get to do is bang the symbols and references into place.
That said, I really did like the last issue collected here (“Eliza Mae Hertford’s Willowbank Tales,” from #12). Its conceit–Beatrix Potter x A.A. Milne, except with the central bunny character desperately trying to escape from the story and cursing like a Warren Ellis who’s just hit his thumb with a hammer–is pretty funny, and the art (Peter Gross with Kurt Huggins and Zelda Devon) captures that sweet, painterly, illustrative vibe spot-on.
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GRAEME: I think I like The Unwritten more than you do, Douglas; enough to follow it in serialized form, anyway. But I agree that the issues in this collection never really come together as stories for me. They’re the issues that, theoretically, show that the series is about something more than the Harry Potter analog at its center, but the problem for me is that I’m much more interested in Tommy Taylor than I am prison escapades or Nazi art propaganda. Both the first collection and the most recent set of issues – in which the new Potter (I mean, Taylor) book is released amid a wave of fan craziness that hides the real life craziness – seem much more successful to me than what’s in this book, sadly. It all feels very… dry, I guess. I can tell that Carey’s done his homework, but he just doesn’t really manage to get me to connect with the story at all.
But Yuko Shimizu’s cover artwork continues to almost be worth the price of admission by itself, I have to add.
DOUGLAS: No kidding. This is one handsome-looking comic. Actually, you can say that about basically the entire Vertigo line at this point–their cover-art is stellar nearly across the board.
LEV: I’m either the best or the worst qualified person in the world to comment on The Unwritten, since I wrote a whole novel the premise of which is perilously close to that of The Unwritten.
Obviously I’m very on board with what they’re trying to do here: interrogate via metafictional means what is (as Douglas says) a very culturally central fantasy, that of the Magic Boy. And just as I did, they’ve even hybridized it with a Narnia/secondary-world fantasy story, to avoid getting trapped in too much of a straight satire of either one. No wonder Vertigo passed on adapting The Magicians.
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They’ve definitely got a very good feel for the source material, good enough that they can improvise on it excellently. The winged cat and the magic doorknob both feel like authentic artifacts from a well-built fictional world.
I guess where it goes astray for me — and not so far astray that I don’t read it, but astray — is that it doesn’t seem to be enough for them. Instead of delving down into that well-built fictional world, they seem to be running the story anywhere but into it, taking on horror and German-Jewish fiction and The Song of Roland and whateverthefuckelse they can get their/Tommy’s hands on.
The results feel dangerously eclectic to me. The excursion into the writing workshop and the prison and now Nazi Germany just feel perverse. I feel jerked around. Don’t they realize they’re sitting on the motherlode? And it’s not Jud Süss or whatever? I get the impression they feel like they can bring down bigger game, conceptually, some idea about the Nature of Story Itself. Better writers than them, or me, have wrecked themselves on that idea. Leave Roland alone! You’ve got Harry P where you want him, and the Pevensies too. Interrogate the bastards! It’s like they don’t trust that there’s enough there.
That last little romp through the 100 Acre Wood was fantastic, though. Magnificent. I wish I’d written it — so sweet and nasty. Like A.A. Milne rewritten by Harlan Ellison (I Have No Mouth But I Must Eat Some Delicious Honey). See, Bill Willingham would have gotten an 8-volume series out of that one premise, but they’ll probably kiss it goodbye after another issue or two.
DOUGLAS: On to Ultimate Avengers 3 #1. Wait, so this is the vampire story that Mark Millar was having a hissyfit over the possibility of the new X-Men series duplicating?
Getting Steve Dillon to draw a story involving jerky dumbass fashionista vampires cannot help but recall Les Enfants du Sang from Preacher–the last word on pretentious vampires, you know? Except I suspect Dillon spent a lot more time and effort on Preacher; this looks like an “okay, I’ve drawn some close-ups of the characters’ faces, am I done now?” job. It’s also interesting to see Millar’s version of Blade a week after the non-Ultimate version turned up in Paul Cornell and Elena Casagrande’s entertaining little Spitfire one-shot–with a much more complicated (and much more interesting) relationship to the idea of hunting vampires.
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MIKE: Speaking of Dillon’s work, I couldn’t count how many panels had zero background art to speak of. Those first few pages of Blade fighting vampires looked like they took place in the staging area of the Matrix.
At the end of that sequence, though, we got a two-panel glance at what looked like an old school Mark I Iron Man armor. The person inside was just watching the fight, presumably. It’s never revisited or explained in any way. Dillon’s sparse style just might be perfect for that particular set of armor, whereas I’m sort of dreading what he’s going to do with the new War Machine armor.
DOUGLAS: Mostly, though, this issue’s about setting up the new Ultimate Daredevil. The Ultimate line has the advantage that creators get to break the toys if they want to, and the disadvantage that other creators might want to use the toys again later. And so Millar gives us his “what if Kick-Ass were Daredevil?” scenario, trying to construct a new version of the character who got killed off-panel a year and a half ago for no particular reason. This read like a dashed-off, phoned-in comic; relaunching it with a new number for every storyline makes it seem even more like a direct-to-video tie-in. (And, really, the only series I think that works for is Marvel Zombies, where being off-brand is kind of the point.)
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MIKE: Can we even call him the new Daredevil? His origin story seems precisely the same. I can only assume that this new kid’s father is a washed-up prizefighter. This all smacks of the Spider-Man totem animal story line that I groaned at. There must always be a blind acrobat crime fighter in New York City? Is that the lesson here?
Mark Millar may be right about X-Men. A team of Avengers squares off or teams up with Blade because vampires are targeting super humans? They sound pretty similar to me. If anything I would bet that Millar is angry that he can’t resurrect Dracula because Victor Gischler is doing that over in X-Men.
Oh, and that final splash page of Cap clenching his fist and proclaiming that Nick Fury puts teams of bad-asses together, oof. That was an eye-roller, and I had steeled myself for some Millar-isms.
GRAEME: This issue read, to me, like it was some meta-parody of Millar’s tics and cliches; it’s as if he hadn’t had time to write it himself, but gave it to someone and said “Make it sound like me.” From the unconvincing “cool” of Blade – Hey, those vampire chicks fucked him so he’d be too tired to fight, but HE’S NOT TIRED AT ALL AFTER FUCKING THREE WOMEN OMG HE’S SUCH A MAN – to the narration of the “new” teenage Daredevil – and Mike’s right, he’s EXACTLY THE SAME as the first Daredevil, to the point where it’s just surreal, and cheapens not only this character (who was, it seems, created solely to be turned into a vampire) but also the original – to the scene of the Ultimates at the end, it’s… what’s the stage beyond “Millar By Numbers”? It’s almost comically bad and overfamiliar.
Agreed about Dillon’s art, as well; I don’t know if he was rushed (he only does pencils here, which suggests that he was), or bored, but he’s done so much better almost everywhere else.
I actually bought the second issue of the new X-Men series yesterday as well, and as bad as it is – and it is pretty bad – it’s way above Ultimate Avengers 3 #1 in terms of execution.
MIKE: Agreed on execution, but reviving Dracula? This is what Cyclops is going with? It’s like a Treehouse of Horrors episode. When Wolverine says that sometimes a Hail Mary play is the only play, I don’t know if he’s ever been more out of character. (End rant.)