The Unwritten Volume 1
(Issue #1 can be found here.)
Tommy Taylor, the boy wizard, is one of the most beloved fictional characters of all time and a pop culture phenomenon. Everyone has either read Wilson Taylor’s bestselling TOMMY TAYLOR books, seen the movies or played the videogames. Nearly everyone also knows the story behind the story: Wilson Taylor disappears after the publication of the thirteenth and final book in the TOMMY TAYLOR series, leaving his son, Tom, an orphan. And much as Christopher Robin Milne saw Christopher Robin and Winnie the Pooh as an exploitation of his childhood, Tom Taylor resents being the real-life embodiment of his father’s fictional creation. In fact, Tom Taylor hates Tommy Taylor.
Welcome to the world of THE UNWRITTEN one of the most magical, entertaining, complex and thought-provoking books you’re likely to read this year. THE UNWRITTEN Volume 1: Tommy Taylor and the Bogus Identity (on sale from Vertigo on January 12, 2009) is the first in an ongoing series of graphic novels about the joy of storytelling; it is a book for discerning readers who love to lose themselves in fiction, by two creators who know that every story has a story—and that some stories are considered quite dangerous. Graphic novel writer (and occasional prose novelist) Mike Carey and artist Peter Gross deliver a compelling story that more than delivers on its meta-premise; the narrative blurs the lines between fiction and reality and introduces a conspiracy that spans all of literature from the first clay tablets to the internet.
THE UNWRITTEN is chock full of mystery, magic, cameos from famous writers (Rudyard Kipling, Mark Twain and Oscar Wilde) and allusions to fictional characters (Frankenstein and Lizzie Hexam, from Charles Dickens’ last completed novel, Our Mutual Friend). It is a literary scavenger hunt, one that stretches across the globe from the India of the British Raj to the Villa Diodati, the Swiss Villa where John Milton penned Paradise Lost and Mary Shelley conceived Frankenstein.
More on Time.com:
The 50 Best Inventions of 2009