The Unwritten vol. 3: Dead Man’s Knock

Three volumes in and this series keeps getting better.  While vol. 3 provides more answers and clarification to Tom Taylor’s quest to find the truth about his father and himself that’s not even my favorite part about it.  What is, is how writer Mike Carey shows that this battle is going to be a struggle on both sides.  Though the cabal that seeks to control all stories may have history, a disturbingly all-encompassing information network, and the relentless killer known as Pullman on their side, the ingenuity that Tom and his father display in disrupting their plans is downright ingenious.  It’s a series that demands a lot from its reader to make sense of everything, but the satisfaction it offers is worth it.

Case in point being the “Choose Your Own Adventure” story detailing the secret origin of Lizzie Hexam collected here.  I’d heard that Carey had asked for the issue to be double-sized to properly tell the tale, but since that obviously fell through he came up with an ingenious solution:  present the issue in a horizontal “widescreen” format and put two story pages on each page instead of one.  The format problem is solved, and the gimmick actually made me more involved in its telling.  However, while Carey does a good job of capturing the feel and progression of the source material, it’s only a proper “Choose Your Own Adventure” for the first half.  Once Tom and Savoy show up, you’re just following the story pages out of sequence.  It’s still a good story, and credit must be given to regular series artist Peter Gross (with his “Lucifer” partner Ryan Kelly on finishes) for maintaining the book’s high artistic standards in such an unorthodox project.