In the third volume of Mike Carey and Peter Gross’s Unwritten: Dead Man’s Knock, we find the gang newly returned from Nazi Germany and the world about to open up the latest, long lost Tommy Taylor novel.
For those of you jumping in late, the premise of Unwritten is that Tom Taylor, a man who has spent his life in the shadow of a Harry Potter-esque character created by his father and named Tommy Taylor, has been dragged into a monumental war. The war, as the reader slowly learns, has been initiated by Taylor’s father, Wilson, against an undefined entity that seeks to manipulate the world’s stories.
In this volume, Taylor must confront his father, the latest novel, and the nature of his female companion, Lizzie Hexam. The stories, as usual, are compelling. One job of a comic book should be to make the reader keep flipping pages, and while this is not always true, it is with Dead Man’s Knock. Although Carey has not yet been able to engage a good deal of empathy for Tom, Lizzie, and their third, Richie, the mystery of the plot does drag the audience along for the ride. As the heroes learn the nature of the journey they must take in order to battle the creative forces against them, we also learn bits and pieces about the conspiracy they are trying to fight.
Part of what gives the story such tension is the fact that the reader discovers the machinations of the bad guys and the attempts of the good guys to battle them, we can see that although they mean to combat each other, their efforts, thus far, are parallel stories. For example, the latest Tommy Taylor novel has been written as a way to draw out Taylor’s father, Wilson, not necessarily to attack Taylor directly. And since Taylor does not yet understand the entity he’s fighting, he does not know how to make a direct counter-attack.
Perhaps, then, what makes the series so fascinating is Carey’s ability to use dramatic irony and his exquisite understanding of withholding information. For example, we do not exactly understand the nature of the magical world encroaching on the physical world, but we can grasp enough that we don’t waste time asking questions. Take, for instance, the doorknob that lets Taylor travel on the map. Since the doorknob works in a way similar to a real doorknob—-by allowing the characters to enter different realities—-then we can accept its existence without asking too many questions. We know its physical purpose and we begin to see its purpose in the story, and so we go along with it.
Lizzie Hexam’s back story, also quite interesting, is told in a risky format, a take-off on the Choose-Your-Own-Adventure novels that were once popular. By manipulating the genre, what we learn from Lizzie’s story is that it doesn’t necessarily matter how Lizzie ended up where she did or how Wilson manipulated her, just that she ended up where she needed to end up not just for the sake of story, but for the sake of her character’s fragile well-being, also.
Volume 3 of The Unwritten lives up to the previous volumes, and shows that the series matches and even exceeds the quality of other similar series.
