The Unwritten, by Mike Carey and Peter Gross. Recommended for mature readers. Published by Vertigo Comics.

The Unwritten is a story about stories, and the impact fiction has on reality. It’s told as an adventure, filtered through today’s media-crazed society, modern fantasy (especially the Harry Potter phenomenon), occasional moments of horror, and centuries of popular literature.

It was also my favorite new comic book of 2009.

The Plot

Years ago, author Wilson Taylor vanished after writing 13 immensely popular children’s fantasy novels, leaving his son Tom — the real-life inspiration for “Tommy Taylor” — to grow up as a Z-list celebrity. A question at a fan convention sets the adult Tom onto a path of adventure and danger that has him doubting even his own past, as the world begins to wonder: Did Tom Taylor inspire Tommy Taylor? Or is he Tommy Taylor made real?

By the time of the third major arc, Tom has been proclaimed a messiah, framed for murder, and declared dead. He’s acquired a power trio much like the heroes in his father’s novels (naturally, in the Harry/Hermione/Ron mold), with one ally who may be a fictional character brought to life, and one who plays the sleazy reporter but has his own connections. They’re on the run from a secret cabal, its hit man who can transform objects (and people) into their component ideas…and the surprisingly real vampire nemesis from the Tommy Taylor books, Count Ambrosio.

Stories

Although Tom is just now figuring out his role in events, the villains have been pulling strings for centuries. They’ve shaped the world through stories: by controlling how history was recorded, and by ensuring that stories were written that promoted their goals. One early issue flashed back from the present to Rudyard Kipling, who was quite happy to write stories for them promoting the British Empire…until they asked him to change his tune, and he lost everything.

Of course, since this is a fantasy series, stories can also impact reality directly. Magical objects cross into reality, people travel into stories, and in one case, a particularly tormented story actively threatens the heroes.

Every few issues, the focus moves away from Tom Taylor to reveal another piece of the puzzle. One focuses on two children caught up in Tommy Taylor fandom to the point where they aren’t quite sure where playing ends and believing begins. Another focuses on a servant of the cabal trapped inside a Winnie the Pooh–like setting by a writer who was prepared to stop him.

The Unwritten frequently mixes in excerpts from media commenting on the events of the story: television news, magazine articles, blogs, even Twitter conversations. In one issue, Tom is kidnapped by a deranged fan and threatened on a live webcam feed, while viewers debate whether it’s real or just a publicity stunt. In another, a TV news network focuses on the launch of the latest Tommy Taylor novel, while the ticker at the bottom of the screen runs through a series of dire headlines which would normally be the top stories of the day

The latest issue reveals the past of Tom’s ally and guide, Lizzie Hexam…in a choose-your-own-adventure format. She always ends up in the same place, but the path she takes varies…along with the most important parts of her back story. They’re all equally canonical, and you as the reader get to choose which version is “real.” In a sense, we do that with everything we read or watch. We have our favorite versions of stories, TV episodes and comic book issues that “don’t count,” and our own ideas of what’s going on off-screen or between panels.

The Unwritten is up to 17 issues so far, collected in two trade paperbacks with a third on the way. Carey and Gross have a complete story in mind, one that they hope to tell over 60 or 70 issues.

Interested in reading more? Good! I’ve written up a more traditional super-hero comic, Astro City, at Speed Force. And there are more bloggers out there. Check out the lesser-known titles reviewed in these other blogs and read these, too!

• Adam Strange at It’s A Dan’s World
• American Vampire at Doom Patrol
• Astro City at Speed Force
• Booster Gold and Zatanna at Red Tornado’s Path
• Essential Man-Thing at Firestorm Fan
• Forgetless at Girls Gone Geek
• Franklin Richards digests at Once Upon a Geek
• Glamourpuss at Being Carter Hall
• Peter David’s Hulk at Fortress of Baileytude
• Jonah Hex at Boosterrific
• Scott Pilgrim at Toyriffic
• Son of Tomahawk and Thor the Mighty Avenger at Aquaman Shrine
• Spelljammer at HeroPress
• Spire Christian Comics: In His Steps at Mail It To Team-Up
• Strange Science Fantasy at Siskoid’s Blog of Geekery
• R.E.B.E.L.S. at Indigo Tribe
• Welcome to Tranquility at Girls Gone Geek

Every new relationship comes with baggage. In this case, the baggage happens to be Ramona Flowers’ seven evil exes, who all want to fight Scott Pilgrim if he’s going to date her. Fights are staged like video games, with “X vs Y” captions, physics-defying moves and special powers, and defeated opponents transforming into coins. Caption boxes provide extra information. Flashbacks are illustrated in comic-strip form.

Its biggest flaw, IMO, is that it tries so hard to fit all the battles into one movie that it forgets to slow down and show us that Scott and Ramona actually like each other (most of the time). There’s no real sense of time, and it feels like the whole thing could happen in a week. So when the supporting cast starts asking Scott whether being with Ramona is really worth all the effort, it’s a good question, one that makes the ultimate ending a bit less satisfying than the one in the original graphic novels.

The original comics tell the story over six volumes, which take place over roughly a year. Obviously side characters are developed a lot more. More importantly for the lead story, Ramona is developed a lot more, and you get to see the two of them dealing with an actual relationship, rather than simply “You’re hot, wanna go out?” “Oh, okay.” You get much more of a sense that the fights mean something. The later volumes also focus heavily on people growing up and growing apart, something which there really isn’t time for in the movie.

The movie is great fun. If you liked it, I absolutely recommend picking up the graphic novels. If you liked the idea, but not the execution, or if you can’t stand Michael Cera (I know that’s a consideration for some people, and I had my doubts when I heard that he’d been cast in the role), I recommend picking up the first volume or two to give it a try.

The Glass Mendacity is a spoof of Tennessee Williams, mashing together The Glass Menagerie, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and A Streetcar Named Desire into one messed-up family gathering, played as comedy instead of tragedy. There’s Big Daddy and Big Amanda Dubois; their son Brick (played by a mannequin) and his wife Maggie the Cat; their daughter Blanche and her husband Stanley Kowalski; their youngest daughter Laura; and a gentleman caller, who appears in the final sce–okay, he shows up in scene one and never leaves. It’s funny on its own, but absolutely hilarious if you know the plays being parodied.

The production we saw was at the Ark Theatre. It’s a tiny theater upstairs in the historic building that houses the Hayworth Theatre. In the 1920s, even office buildings had character! The lobby is basically entry-level landing to the rear stairway, but they’ve managed to fit in a small bar and a couple of tables.

Ordinary Days is a slice-of-life musical about four people in New York City: a couple just moving in together, a grad student, and an artist. Their stories intersect, and each reaches an epiphany about his or her life over the course of the story. The music reminded me a bit of Stephen Sondheim and a bit of Stephen Schwartz. The cast was good, and the set design did a great job of suggesting various locations in an enormous city.

This was the first show I’d seen at South Coast Repertory’s Julianne Argyros Stage. Somehow I managed to go a whole decade without seeing anything at SCR at all, and the other shows I’ve seen over the last year were all in what used to be the main stage. In my head, I still had the image of the old second stage, a box-shaped studio, up until the point that we walked in the door to see a proscenium stage and a house with a balcony and box seats. I might actually have missed this one, except we ran into one of my music theater teachers from college on the way to Xanadu last month, and he was rehearsing this show as the musical director and accompanist.

Both shows are still running. The Glass Mendacity runs through January 30, and Ordinary Days runs through January 24.

*Hooray for cheap tickets at Goldstar. ← (Darn right, it’s an affiliate link! If you sign up using it, they’ll give me $1 off my next purchase!)

All this could make it the best show ever or an hour and a half of uncomfortable embarrassment punctuated by moments of hilarity, depending on your taste and frame of mind.

Appropriately enough for a story about fusing different genres together, the show itself is a fusion of two types of popular musicals these days: adaptations of movies, and “juke box” musicals that string together previously unrelated songs by an artist or in a particular style.

Personally, I really liked about 10% of it. I finally started to get into the show during Danny Maguire’s flashback/tap dance sequence and the song, “Whenever You’re Away,” but the rest of it just wasn’t my thing, or wasn’t what I was expecting, or something. The rest of the audience seemed to like it a lot better, though.

We ended up at Yamato, a Japanese restaurant that I’d definitely eat at again! I did wonder about the original purpose of the building, since it clearly hadn’t been a restaurant to start with. One of us spotted a plaque outside identifying it as The Westwood Building, built in 1929. Among other things, it did include a bank, which was one of my guesses.

After dinner we went looking for places we could get dessert and/or coffee after the show. The two Coffee Beans were both going to close by 9:00, but the Starbucks was open until midnight, and Diddy Riese was open until 1:00. We stopped in at Rocky Mountain Chocolate factory to get some sugar-free chocolate for Katie, and then made our way over to the theater.

The Show

Bill Cain’s play is a political thriller in which William Shakespeare is commissioned to write a play about the Gunpowder Plot to assassinate King James I and blow up Parliament. (Remember the fifth of November?) The problem: the king wants him to write the official version of the plot, which has been somewhat…embellished. Shakespeare has to deal with political pressure from the Crown, conflicts among his actors, estrangement from his daughter Judith…and the question of truth: Can he find it? If so, can he afford to write it?

It’s a compelling story — terrorism and torture are topical, and political intrigue is always in fashion — and manages to give you enough information on the background that if you don’t know much about the Gunpowder Plot, or even about Shakespeare, you can still follow what’s going on.

Some familiarity with Shakespeare helps, though. The Globe is rehearsing King Lear at the beginning, and it quickly becomes clear that The True History of the Gunpowder Plot will eventually become Macbeth. References to Shakespeare’s legacy are scattered throughout the play. There’s also a great comedic moment at one point that is only funny if you know about the Porter scene in MacBeth, but it doesn’t interrupt the flow if you don’t know it.

(Some recognizable faces in this production: Harry Groener, the Mayor of Sunnydale from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and Connor Trinneer, Trip from Star Trek: Enterprise. Coincidentally, Groener was also in the last play I saw, Putting it Together at South Coast Repertory.)

After the show we walked down to Diddy Riese, but the line was long enough it looked like it might take an hour just to get ice cream. By which time coffee wouldn’t be an option, unless they had some there. So we ducked over to Starbucks for a half hour or so, then drove home.

No spoilers unless you don’t want to know which characters appear in the book. In which case, stop reading now. It focuses primarily on Rand, Egwene, and their respective entourages, though most of the other major characters make appearances. If I were to guess, the next book (Towers of Midnight) will probably focus mainly on Rand and Mat, and maybe Elayne. Katie reminded me that the title is a Seanchan reference, plus there’s another mission — well, quest, really — being built up involving a tower. (Not to mention the White Tower and Black Tower, of course!)

As in Knife of Dreams (and unlike Crossroads of Twilight), things happen in this book! There’s a growing sense of urgency throughout the novel, and everyone who can is pushing hard to have everything in place for the coming apocalypse. For some characters it’s a personal journey. For others it’s political. And for some, it’s simply geographical.

As far as meshing with the rest of the series goes, the only thing that stood out for me was that points of view would switch in the middle of a chapter more often than I expected. It’s not that Robert Jordan never did it, but I remember it being rare outside of the prologues. Brandon Sanderson is more likely to take what would have been two shorter, thematically linked chapters and combine them into one. Katie also noticed one spot early on that one character from Tarabon didn’t speak with the Taraboner dialect — but only the one instance, and one in which the phrasing would have been awkward. It still reads like a Wheel of Time book.

I wish Robert Jordan had been able to finish his epic himself, but it looks like we’re getting the next best thing.

Most shows would take two hours to do all that, or pick and choose to cram it into one. (They even found time for a car chase.)

One of the things that really impressed me was that, just using one episode’s worth of characters, they showed the beginnings of so many totally different ways of looking at humanity’s glimpse of the future, whether through hope, fear, or simply confusion. From what they said at Comic-Con, one of the ideas is to be able to expand this to theoretically anyone in the world.

The extended preview of upcoming episodes (a flash forward to Flashforward!) seemed to be making a great effort to say that yes, they’ll be answering questions, and no, you won’t have to wait 3 years to find out what the heck is going on (unlike that other show with Sonya Walger, Dominic Monaghan, and Oceanic Airlines).

There were a couple of moments that I thought were forced, though the only one that really stands out was the immediate juxtaposition of the “we’re being punished” and “this is a gift” reactions.

Adaptation

They did a good job of taking the source material, Robert J. Sawyer’s novel Flashforward (I’m getting really confused as to whether the TV series has a space in the title or not, but the book definitely doesn’t), and making something that’s recognizably the same idea, but telling a new story with it. It has the benefit of all the thought he put into it:

• What are all the consequences of everyone blacking out for two minutes?
• If everyone experiences his or her own future at the same instant, what about people who are asleep at that time?
• How do you determine whether people are seeing different possible futures or the same future?
• How do you determine whether the future can be changed? (It’s a common enough storytelling trope, but how would you scientifically prove it?)

And so on. But they can tell a larger story, with more characters…and still surprise people who read the book. I don’t know whether they plan on using a similar explanation for what caused the event, or whether the TV version will come down on the side of “The future is not set” or “You can’t fight fate” (though I expect it will be the former, for storytelling reasons). And there was a moment a few minutes before the end that just came out of nowhere and left me thinking, “Wait, what???”

The book is definitely worth reading, especially if you like science fiction of the “what would happen if…?” variety, and it looks like it probably won’t spoil much.

Like most of Sawyer’s stuff, It’s a good, fast read that makes you think. It’s also been in the news lately, since ABC is developing it as a TV series to pick up the Lost audience as that show wraps up, and they’ve been announcing casting for the pilot.

I’ve posted a review of Flashforward at Speed Force.

It was well worth the wait.

The series is set two millennia after humans, led by Virginia Dare (explaining where the lost Roanoke colonists went), overthrew the demonic race that had kept them as slaves for generations. Virginia had discovered how to harness the sedos power, essentially magic. The last of humanity’s oppressors warned them that the sedos would eventually destroy their world. Of course, no one believed him.

2200 years later, this corner of the world is not unlike Europe in the early Renaissance. Except that the church is based on the sedos, in the person of saints, and its priests walk the paths to harness the sedos powers.

The world is also beginning to rot. Things of nature are dying, human alliances are crumbling, and terrible creatures thought to be myth are walking the earth. There are several factions who claim that they want to save it, but their true goals are suspect, and their methods differ greatly. The various viewpoint characters are thrust into the middle of things without any real sense of what’s going on: a holter, a princess, a novice priest, a knight, a swordsman, a composer and a queen.

One of the things I find so fascinating about this series (as I mentioned when I first read The Blood Knight) is the fact that everyone is acting on partial information. This makes them screw up, sometimes mildly, sometimes horrifically. And there’s a curveball that comes about 1/3 of the way into The Born Queen that turns everything on its head.

I don’t think it’ll give too much away to say that one of the key struggles in this book is for control of the sedos. Even 100 pages from the end, I wasn’t sure which faction would give the world a better chance of surviving.

Music also figures importantly, starting with the second book, where it’s learned that certain combinations of sound can have a profound effect on the human psyche. I found myself wondering whether Keyes had someone set any of the songs to music.

By the end of The Born Queen, most of the major questions about what’s really going on have been answered. Of course, they’re answered in pieces, by different characters with different agendas. The major characters’ arcs reach (mostly) satisfying conclusions, with some finding what they want, some finding what they need, some doing what needs to be done, and some getting what they deserve.

It’s weird to finally be done with the series, which started around the same time as this blog. The first post that I made that wasn’t “Hey, look! I have a blog!” was a review of The Waterborn and The Blackgod, Greg Keyes’ first novel and its sequel. In it, I mentioned looking forward to The Briar King when it came out.

The story links the dawn of the Silver Age of comics, and the formation of the Justice League of America, with the dawn of the Space Age, set against the political background of the Red Scare. It focuses most heavily on Green Lantern-to-be Hal Jordan and on the Martian Manhunter, but touches on Superman, Wonder Woman, Batman and the Flash as well.

What Works

Cooke’s drawing style and the 1950s retro look to the artwork both translate well to the screen. The voice talent does a great job as well: At no point did I find myself thinking, “Hey, that’s Lucy Lawless,” or “Funny how Hal sounds just like Angel.” In many cases, I actually had to look up the names of actors whose voices I probably would have recognized if I’d been less involved in following the story.

The first 10-15 minutes are somewhat disjointed, but it soon settles into a solid narrative, and the battle which takes up the final third of the film is quite impressive. On the surface it’s about the new generation of super-heroes banding together to face the apocalyptic threat of “The Centre,” but it’s all really about two things: hope and trust.

Some of my favorite bits from the book are still there: Barry Allen racing across the country to stop Captain Cold in Las Vegas, pausing for a nanosecond to kiss Iris on the cheek before continuing. J’onn J’onnz absorbing American culture by watching TV, transforming into the characters he sees—including Groucho Marx and Bugs Bunny. Wonder Woman explaining how she freed the captive women in an Indochina village, and let them deal with their captors as they saw fit.

What Doesn’t

There are two main places where the movie breaks down:

First, the spaceflight sequence in the middle. There was just way too much wrong with it in a “Physics don’t work that way!” sense. I can buy the secret pre-Apollo launch; that’s a staple of the genre. But it would help if the rocket moved like, well, a rocket. Though I have to admit it didn’t bother me watching it with a huge audience of comic fans. It was only when I watched it again at home (M80 was kind enough to send me a review copy) that it really pulled me out of the action.

Second, the political themes came off a lot clumsier than I remembered. It has been a few years since I’ve read it, so it could simply be rose-colored glasses, but it’s probably just the result of trying to condense a 450-odd-page story down to 75 minutes.

Overall

It’s definitely worth seeing. And it’s convinced me I need to dig through my long boxes and re-read the original. (I also need to fill in the details on my Flash site’s write-up.) There are a number of subplots which fill out the backstory and the main themes which had to get cut for time. (An audience member on Saturday asked about the Challengers of the Unknown. They’re there—but only Ace Morgan gets much screen time.)

If you haven’t read the comics (or, as they’re careful to describe it, the graphic novel), I highly recommend it. It’s available as a single hardcover or as a pair of paperbacks. There’s more on the adaptation at the official website for the movie.