The Unwritten

wilsoknut.comIt’s been a while since I’ve written, but I have extra time on my hands with the COVID-19 stay-at-home orders and what not. If you have extra time on your hands and you want to get lost in a story, you can’t go wrong with The Unwritten. There are 11 volumes of this epic, and it will pull you in and transport you to oh so many places. The Unwritten has everything you can think of—adventure, fantasy, post-modern social commentary, metafiction, comedy, on and on.

Tommy Taylor & the Bogus Identity

This is the story of Tommy Taylor. His father is perhaps the most successful author on the planet. His father’s books, however, are about a boy wizard named after and based on his son, Tommy. We recognize the boy wizard troupe as a nod to Harry Potter. So, Tommy Taylor is world famous, but only as a character in his father’s books. The real Tommy Taylor would like a life and identity of his own.

The story kicks off with this identity crisis, and jumps back and forth between the real Tommy Taylor and the Tommy Taylor of his father’s books. His father’s fans are rabid about a long awaited final book. Tommy resents the books and his father. It doesn’t take long for reality and story to start intertwining, which isn’t that original of a concept, but that’s not all there is to it. It’s much deeper than that.

And The Twists Keep On Coming

A sketchy cultish cabal shows up, and Tommy goes on the run trying to figure out why they’re after him. A girl who is eerily similar to his fictional counterpart’s friend befriends Tommy himself and gives him advice, and the conspiracy continues to grow. What exactly did his father do? What was he up to? Speaking of his father, where is he?

Every volume of The Unwritten will keep you on your toes. The plot never gets predictable, partly because this isn’t just a story. It’s a meditation on the power of stories in our lives. The meta, postmodern beauty of it all will have you thinking and rethinking what it all means. It’s a smart, mysterious book.

On top of that, you have characters and subplots twisting and turning. The book pulls in classic stories and fables going back through all of literature—Frankenstein, Moby Dick, Grimm’s Fairy Tales. Everything is given a twist. Where do all these stories come from? How do they exist in our collective psyche, and what does it have to do with Tommy Taylor?

Tommy Taylor and the War of Words

The Unwritten is not just all words. The art is beautiful and compelling, and gives us different looks for different narrative elements. There’s written book pages, dialogues, TV broadcasts, and websites. There’s fairy tales and super heroes. It will immerse you in the story and many worlds of the stories.

Once I started The Unwritten, I didn’t want to put it down. It really captures the magic of stories. Each volume adds to the mystery, and you’re never sure where it will go. I read it over a year ago, and the journey is still fresh in mind. Get lost in the story while you’re riding out this quarantine thing. You can start here.

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The Black Dossier by Alan Moore

Black Dossier Cover - wilsonknut.comIf James Joyce’s Ulysses is the demonstration and summation of modernist literature, Alan Moore’s The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: The Black Dossier is the paradigm for post-postmodernism in graphic novels.  Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad has received critical acclaim for its structure and interconnecting stories.  She includes a section consisting of PowerPoint slides. Another includes text messages. Those techniques pale in comparison to what Moore accomplishes in The Black Dossier.

Volumes 1 and 2 of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen series are critically acclaimed mash-ups of Victorian literature, pulp fiction, steampunk, and Moore’s own twists.  The Black Dossier was to serve as a standalone sourcebook between volume two of the series and a proper volume 3. It grew into much more.  Moore has stated in various interviews that he and Kevin O’Neill realized early that the series was growing into an attempt to map the entire fictional world and how it relates to fact.  They created a study and commentary on the popular imagination.  But in the structure and complexity of The Black Dossier, I also see the growth and culmination of literary movements throughout history into something new.

Experimental Joyride

Similar to Joyce’s Ulysses, The Black Dossier is very experimental in its structure and construction.  Critics of the book have noted that the narrative plot is very weak.  Mina Harker and Allan Quartermain have recovered The Black Dossier, which contains the secret history of The League.  Emma Night (Peel), Bulldog Drummond, and a young James Bond chase them all over London and Scotland trying to stop them.  In true Moore style, you would have to do a tremendous amount of research to figure out all of the references and allusions. Moore throws in his twists on characters and events for good measure.  For example, James Bond (Jimmy in the book) is a sadistic womanizer and the events take place in 1958 after the Big Brother government from George Orwell’s Ninteen Eighty Four has fallen.

The narrative is merely a shell for The Black Dossier itself, which Mina and Allan stop to read at various points in the narrative.  The Dossier takes over the story metafictionally (if that’s a word). There are faux historical texts, comic strips in various styles, a “lost” Shakespeare folio. But wait! There’s more— prose in the style of H.P Lovecraft and Jack Kerouac, post cards, Big Brother posters in the style of English WWII posters, maps, and more.  Throughout these artifacts are mysterious handwritten notes that point back to the narrative at hand and the previous volumes in the series.  The complexity of it all is overwhelming.

Decoder Ring

To add to the complexity, the graphic novel contains a 3D section set in “the Blazing World” with glasses.  The cover to the Kerouac section mimics the paperback style of the early Kerouac books when they were published. It even includes the creases they would have had from being read.  Like Ulysses, you need an annotated version to understand it all.  Some folks have been kind enough to put one together- Black Dossier annotated.

Black Dossier - Alan Moore - wilsonknut.comBlack Dossier - Alan Moore - wilsonknut.comSo what separates Moore’s book from A Visit from the Goon Squad, or Ulysses for that matter?  As a medium, the graphic novel has the potential to capture the contemporary human experience far better than the traditional novel.  We are inundated with visuals and images by television, advertising, and internet.  So much could be done with the medium.

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Strengths & Weaknesses

I think it goes back to the perceived weakness of The Black Dossier– narrative.  Egan’s book, though experimental in structure and technique, is about characters and narrative.  They are “real” characters with “real” stories.  The themes capture truths about the human experience that run deep.  If Moore could capture that along with the genius he has for pop culture, structure, and technique; we would see a phenomenal new literature.

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Our Cancer Year by Harvey Pekar and Joyce Brabner


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I know some will think I’m committing heresy when I say I did not like this nonfiction graphic novel.  I imagine some of my dislike is due to the fact that I’m also reading So Much For That by Lionel Shriver, which also details a character’s battle with cancer and how it affects her care-giver.  So Much For That (fiction)is just a phenomenal book on all levels. I know the supposed beauty of Harvey Pekar’s writing is the simplicity, but when I read it in conjunction with Shriver’s book, it just made Our Cancer Year seem flat, amateurish, and poorly written.

Pekar and Brabner’s account of Harvey’s battle with lymphoma is poignant enough, but it takes some time to get to Harvey even going to the doctor.  The first quarter of the book is all about Joyce’s friends and dealings with the international peace movement, which seems completely disjointed and… well, self-centered.  Characters just appear and the reader is supposed to care about them because Joyce tells us in a few panels that they have had tough lives and are good people.  We get brief updates on these characters through the book, but again it’s like someone telling you about a friend of a friend who you don’t know… while the main character (and her husband) is writhing on the floor from chemo treatments.  And essentially, it all comes across as part of Joyce’s political agenda, which really should have been a completely unrelated book.  SPOILER ALERT: These people, who we really don’t know, come to visit at the end and it helps “heal” Harvey’s depression.  I imagine learning that he beat the cancer has something to do with it.

The dialogue and inner-dialogue throughout seems very, very simplistic and unrealistic.  There are parts where I felt like I was watching that scene in all CSI episodes where they over-explain everything they’re doing so everyone with a fifth grade education can understand it.  It just doesn’t work well in literature, which is disappointing because Pekar is a literature lover.

I wanted to like the book because I have heard so many times that it is a classic, but I just couldn’t get past what seemed like poor writing to me.  I have not read any of the American Splendor series, so I have no way of telling how much of this book is Pekar’s writing and how much is Brabner’s, whose character I didn’t care for.  I saw the movie adaptation when it came out years ago, but honestly the only thing I remember is that Robert Crumb was Pekar’s friend.  Maybe watching it again would give me a better appreciation for the graphic novel.