The Unwritten 17

The Unwritten is a Vertigo title that looks at how the world of fiction interacts with the real world. As the narrative unfolds, we are presented with the possibility that characters from stories can become real and manifest in the physical world, though of course that physical world is itself only a comic strip representation.

This kind of metafiction is not completely unheard of in the world of comics. Planetary, by Warren Ellis and John Cassaday, featured a scientific programme to extract a person from a fictional world. Much of the more hermetic work of Alan Moore and Grant Morrison is arguably about the ways in which imaginary worlds can impact on the real one. In that respect the basic premise of The Unwritten is not that ground-breaking, though it is obviously pushing the metafictional envelope a bit compared to the comics mainstream.

Still, for all its relatively unusual premise, The Unwritten often serves up a relatively straightforward narrative – the main characters are being chased by bad guys, the hero is framed for a crime he didn’t commit, plots of a mysterious cabal inch towards their conclusion, and so on. What to me makes this title worth sticking with is its occasional serving up of stand-alone issues that leap beyond the usual. One of these was an issue centred on Rudyard Kipling that bore only the most tangential relation to the main plot. Another, presented more or less in the style of a child’s storybook, gave us something like a cross between Winnie The Pooh and The Prisoner. And then there is this issue.

What  Mike Carey & Peter Gross (script, plot, layouts) and Ryan Kelly (finishes) have done this time is give us an episode in the form of a choose-your-own-adventure story. This again is not a first for comics. 2000AD experimented with this in its own pages and in a spin-off publication (one particularly memorable story being You Are Ronald Reagan), at a time when there was a vogue for such things generally. Here, though, the device is used not as a gimmick. The adventure fills in the back-story of one character, a young woman who in the main story’s present is lying catatonic in a hospital.

After you have gone through the episode a couple of times, you see that, barring one misstep, you always get the same ending. However, your perception of how things have got to that point changes radically depending on which paths you took. Is the character a psychiatrically disturbed woman manipulated by a sinister old man with a nasty agenda, or is she a once troubled child who has been brought into a world of wonder? Seeing both sets of choices suggests that both sets of contradictory explanations may be “true”.

The artwork displays considerable versatility – it has to jump from the relative realism of the present day setting to the more storybook aspects of the woman’s past and then the outright sub-Harry Potter fantasy world she has dropped into. Yuku Shimuzu’s cover also suits the issue’s contents well. An appealing set of images representing the issue’s contents and previous episodes in the character’s life are arranged like a board of snakes and ladders over which an apparently carefree child version of the woman skips. This ultimately suggests the playfulness of the game inside.

What is still frustrating with this title is that the occasional episodes of genius like this are still very much the exception. Most of the time, for all its metafictional premises, the story plods along in a not particularly imaginative fashion. If it could up its game on a permanent basis, The Unwritten would rise to become one of the definitively great comics coming out at the moment, as opposed to something that is merely quite good.