IGN reviews THE UNWRITTEN #7 calling it “as engrossing and mysterious as it’s ever been.” Check out the full review here.

For those of you looking forward to what’s to come, a new storyline begins with issue #10! Tom finds himself in 1940 Stuttgart—a ghost city inhabited by the master liar of the Third Reich, Josef Goebbels.

Check out this imagery:

We all love a good story, right? The creators of THE UNWRITTEN certainly do. The series references major and minor works of literature alike. We’ve traveled across the globe from the India of the British Raj to the Villa Diodati, the Swiss Villa where John Milton penned Paradise Lost and Mary Shelley conceived Frankenstein. We’ve seen cameos from famous writers (Oscar Wilde, Rudyard Kipling, and Mark Twain) and fictional characters (Frankenstein and a character named Lizzie Hexam, from Charles Dickens’ last completed novel, Our Mutual Friend). It’s like a literary scavenger hunt.

Peter Gross, artist of THE UNWRITTEN has been kind enough to share his Top 5 Favorite Books with us:

Last month Mike Carey listed his top 5 favorite books and here I am a month later as the bookend to that piece! Working with Mike on THE UNWRITTEN has resulted in a lot of conversations and emails about great literary classics so it was fun for me to see what a low brow fantasy geek Mike really was underneath all that education and sophistication.

I think I look positively worldly in comparison…

1. The Oz books by L. Frank Baum.

Ok, I’m cheating right off the bat by mentioning 13 or so books in one fell swoop but I don’t really have a favorite among these (I have a least favorite—the first one, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, because it wasn’t illustrated by the brilliant John R. Neill). I first read these when I was in Catholic school (grades 2 and 3). They were probably the only books in the tiny school library that transported me out of that dreary place. And what I loved most were the drawings. I remembered them long after the stories were forgotten. They were fabulous then and they’re even better now.

About 12 years ago there was a set of hardbacks released recreating the original editions and I felt compelled to buy them even though I had no intention of reading them and only a vague recollection of enjoying them back in the day. For some reason I just needed to have them all in a row on a shelf in my house. Then, a couple years later my daughter, Alice was born and from the age of 2 on they became her religion. We’ve read them out loud, listened to them on book tape and collected old Oz toys at the San Diego con. She’s playing “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” on the piano as I write this.

Like Claude Chadron with his daughter in next month’s THE UNWRITTEN, (how’s that for a plug!) I bonded with my daughter over a series of books. But happily, we have a better relationship than poor Chadron seems to manage.

The more I’ve read them the more convinced I am that Baum was a genius. The books essentially have no plots; they’re more like travelogues through a strange world that he seemed to make up as he was going. It’s a world that can be infuriating to an adult’s logic but is absolutely in sync with a child’s.

2. Winter’s Tale by Mark Helprin.

This book is about Winter and New York and the magic of bridges—but mostly it’s about the love of language. I’ve read it numerous times and loved it every time.

I recently downloaded an unabridged audiobook to listen to on those long nights when I’m inking pages and my mind is free to roam.

Some things are better read than heard…

3: The Anubis Gates by Tim Powers.

Best time travel book ever. Probably because that isn’t what it’s really about. It’s really about inserting a modern character into the world of 19th century literature and letting him fall into the secret history of the poets and authors of that time.

Wait a minute—that sounds vaguely familiar…

4. The Clown by Heinrich Böll.

I read this in college and was blown away by the melancholy of lost love and lost hope in post WWII Germany. And the guy can smell cabbage over the phone!

This is a great book.

5. Laughing Boy by Oliver LaFarge.

Another melancholy tale of doomed love and a way of life coming to an end. (Come to think of it, Winter’s Tale was about doomed love too.) LaFarge wrote this in the late 1920’s as his master’s thesis in anthropology and it won the Pulitzer Prize for novels in 1930. It’s about a Navajo Indian trying to live traditional way of life in a time when a new civilization is engulfing the old.

I loved how unexpected this book was in it’s honesty and uncompromising look at culture clash. It seemed years ahead of it’s time.

Tom’s locked up in Donostia Prison, but death still surrounds him. Placed in solo confinement he confronts the mystery of his own nature and the significance of the epic poem “The Song of Roland.”

Preview THE UNWRITTEN #7

Like what you see? Go to IGN for more.

By Mike Carey, author of THE UNWRITTEN

THE UNWRITTEN is all about the impact of stories on the real world. I’d hate to spoil what we’re doing by talking about the stories we’re going to feature (we’ve already touched on Frankenstein and Kipling’s Just So Stories), but I think everyone has a list of books that have changed their lives.

I should probably qualify that. I’m not talking about the situation that arises when you carry, say, a Bible in your breast pocket and it conveniently deflects a bullet. We’ve all been there, but it’s kind of infrequent. Try to remember the last time it happened to you.

What I’m talking about is the books that redecorate the inside of your head – the watershed books. The ones where, when you put them down, you discover to your vast surprise that you’re living in a different world.

Here are my top five:-

1. The Magic Faraway Tree, by Enid Blyton.

This is the second in a series of three books, but it was the first one I got my hands on. I was maybe six years old – just starting to read by myself – and Miss Kilvington had said I could pick anything out of the book cupboard and take it back to my desk. I chose this battered-looking hardback because it had cool pictures in it: a guy with a face that was round and pitted like the moon, another guy with pots and pans and flat-irons hanging off his suit, and a fairy with wings who seemed to be hanging out with both of them. I took it back, started to read, and got sucked into this crazy world.

The plot: three kids find a tree in a patch of woodland near their home. It’s a magic tree. It stretches up much further than you’d ever guess if you saw it from the ground, and there’s a whole community of people living in its upper branches. Some of them have houses carved right into the trunk of the tree. Moreover, right up at the top of the tree, there’s a gateway into another world – Topsy-Turvy Land, say, or the Land of Do-As-You-Would-Be-Done-By. The lands are constantly moving in a magical, poly-dimensional way: at any moment, the one that’s at the top of the tree could move on and be replaced by another. If you’re there when that happens, too bad: it’ll be a year before the land comes round again to the top of the tree and you can climb down and get home.

It has to be admitted that Enid Blyton’s writing style is penny-plain. She never bothered much with adjectives: she seems to have felt that verbs did a better job of keeping things moving along. She was a product of her time, full of fairly horrendous views about race and gender, and her characters struggled to be one-dimensional. None of that mattered, though. The stories lit up the inside of my head, and gave me the love of fantasy that steered my life towards writing. I never looked back.

Since then, I’ve read the entire series to all of my own three kids, who devoured them every bit as avidly as I did. The magic is still there.

(NB: if three books aren’t enough, The Wishing Chair is almost as good.)

2. An Alien Heat, by Michael Moorcock.

It was the Eternal Champion stories that first turned me onto Moorcock’s writing, but the Dancers at the End of Time trilogy (An Alien Heat and its two sequels) stayed with me longer and affected me more deeply. Whereas the Eternal Champion books were written to a formula (hero seeks magical artefacts to defeat earthly representatives of evil gods), these more sci-fi oriented tales were whimsical and beautiful and unpredictable. They tell the story of a love affair that spans most of time and space. In the far future of Earth, only a few humans remain alive, but they’re immortal and have powers that could fairly be called god-like. Ancient and powerful machines buried in the crust of their world translate their every wish into instant reality.

Against this backdrop, Jherek Carnelian meet s Mrs. Amelia Underwood, a time traveller from the Victorian era. He decides to fall in love with her, at first as part of a game – like all the other games his bored, jaded peers play to fill the tiresome eons. But gradually he comes to feel for her more deeply, and the emotions he was play-acting become real. When Mrs. Underwood is abducted and taken back to her own time, Jherek determines to be reunited with her at any cost. But of course, the great reality-changing machines don’t exist in the Victorian age, and Jherek is powerless there. So begins the last epic love story in the annals of the human race.

These books taught me that there were no limits to the stories you could tell in a sci-fi or fantasy context: that sci-fi and fantasy were modes of storytelling rather than genres, and could subsume other genres without a stretch: if you could have a sci-fi romance, then sci-fi mysteries, thrillers, comedies, tragedies, westerns and war stories and travelogues all became possible. My eyes were opened.

3. Wyrd Sisters, by Terry Pratchett.

Not the first Discworld novel, but the first that my wife, Lin, offered to read to me while I was cooking dinner one evening. That started a tradition we’re still honouring. I never actually read Pratchett. I have him read to me, and I pay in the currency of food. One of the more bizarre side effects of this is that on the very rare occasions when I do open a Pratchett novel and look inside, I hear the words being spoken in Lin’s voice as I scan them. I have an internal Lin.

This was also the book where it all kicked into gear. The first two Rincewind novels, Colour of Magic and The Light Fantastic, are rollicking good fun: Equal Rites, Mort and Sourcery get progressively deeper and richer. Then along comes Wyrd Sisters, with its Macbeth parallels, its nebbish hero, its enduringly wonderful trio of witches, and suddenly what had been just a parody of post-Tolkien high fantasy became incomparably much more. There was no stopping the Pratchett juggernaut now – and thank god for it.

4. Nine Princes in Amber, by Roger Zelazny.

Yeah, I know, Lord of Light is a better book. Maybe Jack of Shadows, too. But Nine Princes in Amber was the one that did it for me.

This was back when I was a snot-nosed kid (someone bought me a handkerchief about a year later). I would have been about fifteen or so, and to be blunt, I had less disposable income than your average sea cucumber. I got 50p a week pocket money, and books cost thirty-seven-and-a-half. So mostly when I wanted something to read I went to the library. One of two libraries, that were about a mile from where I lived in opposite directions – Evered Avenue and Spellow Lane, for the Scousers among you.

And since I favoured sci-fi, I looked for the mustard-yellow spines that signified books on the Victor Gollancz sci-fi list. Sometimes they wouldn’t be sci-fi: annoyingly, Gollancz used the same livery for their mystery thrillers. But usually, bright yellow meant paydirt.

One day, I picked up Nine Princes in Amber. And believe me when I say that was a good day. A city that casts shadows through space and time – and the shadows are all the other cities that have ever existed. A family that are like the Medici, only immortal and superhumanly strong. A pack of Tarot cards that function both as omni-dimensional cellphones and as gateways to other worlds. And that’s just the starting position. By the time you get to Ganelon, Dworkin, Oberon, the maternal unicorn and the Courts of Chaos, you’re in a mental space that can normally only be reached by going over the stated dose on your prescription medications.

Zelazny is one of those writers who starts where a lot of other guys would normally be clocking off. He takes an idea, makes it sing and dance and juggle burning torches, folds it into a paper plane, sails it off into the ether and then reveals the better idea he was hiding up his sleeve all the time. In the Amber books, he does it again and again: you don’t really know the whole story until the final battle, and even then there’s a twist.

And the fact that Nine Princes casually incorporates a wonderful Chandler pastiche is just icing on the cake.

5. Titus Groan, by Mervyn Peake.

You can’t really read Titus Groan without reading Gormenghast – they’re the two halves of the same story. The third book in the trilogy, Titus Alone, is a different animal altogether, and it took me longer to love it.

Peake was an artist as well as a writer, and he writes with an artist’s eye. Some chapters in Titus Groan are set up as tableaux: Peake paints a still image for you in words, and then has some piece of action, often small and symbolic, disturb the stillness. You have to be prepared to immerse yourself in the sense of place. Gormenghast castle is a place where nothing much has changed in the past few millennia, and part of peake’s purpose is to make you feel the weight of that past – the dead hand of tradition and precedent.

Then he hits it with a wrecking ball.

Before I read Titus Groan, I’d never really thought all that much about the music of great prose. Most of my favourite writers weren’t really great stylists, and I was all about a good story, even if it was told in monosyllables. Peake taught me the power of language, more than anybody else I read in my teens. He built a whole world out of words, and gave it an infinite variety of flavours and nuances.

Also – and despite what I said earlier about stillness – the last two hundred and fifty pages of Gormenghast (the stalking of Steerpike) are the longest sustained edge-of-the seat read in the English language.

And now to reveal the cover to issue #9 by Yuko Shimizu!

I can hardly believe it, but we are about to embark on the second arc of THE UNWRITTEN. Here’s a preview of issue #6. Enjoy!

THE UNWRITTEN is about the stories behind stories, so how’s this for appropriate?

Issue 5 is a one-off focusing on Rudyard Kipling, and while most people think The Jungle Book when you mention him, Mike and Peter thought Just-So Stories.

In that anthology of children’s tales, there’s a story called “How the Alphabet was Made.” It’s a whimsical tale about how a girl and her father invented the alphabet to be used as a secret code between them. But check out the poem at the end of the story:

OF all the Tribe of Tegumai
Who cut that figure, none remain,–
On Merrow Down the cuckoos cry
The silence and the sun remain.

For far–oh, very far behind,
So far she cannot call to him,
Comes Tegumai alone to find
The daughter that was all to him.

The first time Mike Carey read it – I believe as a kid – he had no idea what it meant, but he knew it was about a helluva lot more than the alphabet.

It was. Kipling’s daughter died at some point before he wrote the book. Read it again with that in mind.

It’s amazing what you find in these little kid stories.

And that’s only the tip of how fascinating Kipling’s life is. THE UNWRITTEN 5 – “How the Whale Became” – gets into all of that and the mysterious unwritten conspiracy that’s got its eyes on Tom Taylor. It features cameos by Mark Twain, Oscar Wilde and might cause you to take rethink some of the things you saw in the first 4 issues – or things you’ll see in the next storyline – which maybe we should have titled “The Song of Roland.” Everyone on board took extra time on this one. Don’t believe me? You can check out Peter’s extra care on the black and white art in this issue.

In the India of the British Raj, young journalist and would-be novelist Rudyard Kipling gets an offer he can’t refuse. It’s an offer that will catapult him to fame, fortune and inexorable destruction. The secret history of the Unwritten begins in this stand-alone story…

THE UNWRITTEN #5

THE UNWRITTEN continues to wow.

Death, doorknobs, a map . . . and jail? Gothic and modern collide in issue #4.

Lot’s happened this week. Here’s a roundup of those not to be missed.

LARGEHEARTED BOY posts Jeff Lemire’s fantastic music playlist for THE NOBODY. In his introduction Jeff writes, “I’ve always preferred sad songs. They don’t make me sad, they just make me “feel more.” Now, that’s something I can totally relate to. Check it out!

CBR and NEWSARAMA review THE NOBODY.

BLOG@NEWSARAMA and AINT IT COOL NEWS review GREEK STREET #1.

IGN reviews THE UNWRITTEN #3 giving it a rating of 9/10.

MTV/Splashpage talks with Brian Azzarello about the end of 100 BULLETS.

And as a special treat, here are a few of Jeff Lemire’s early cover sketches for THE NOBODY.

Have a great weekend!

In the previous post, Editor Pornsak Pichetshote discussed THE UNWRITTEN. This new series really has something special, and it gives me great pleasure to reveal one of my favorite inked pages from issue #3 below.

Drooling yet?