EXCLUSIVE Q&A with Mike Carey and Peter Gross
Q: Tommy Taylor is one of the most beloved fictional characters of all time
and a pop culture phenomenon. Almost everyone has read the bestselling Tommy Taylor books, played the videogames and seen the movies. But who is Tom Taylor—and why does he hate Tommy Taylor?
M: Tom is the real-life son of novelist Wilson Taylor, and the inspiration
for the fictional boy wizard, Tommy. So he’s had to cope with this burden
of being world famous – but world famous as a fictional character created by
someone else. It’s a bitter pill for him to swallow. He’s tried hard to be
his own man, but he’s failed in everything he’s ever attempted, so in his
mid-twenties he finds himself earning a living signing his father’s books
and doing photo ops on the festival circuit. And then he has even that
compromised identity kicked out from under him when someone at a convention
stands up and says that all the documentation relating to his life so far is
fake.
P: Tom needs to find out who he is--but that huge shadow of Tommy Taylor has
been over him his whole life making it impossible to forge his own path.
When he learns that he might not even be Wilson Taylor's real son all
possibilities are in play. He could be a viral marketing ploy adopted to
give the Tommy Taylor franchise a real face and abandoned when the last
book was published, he could be what he claims he is; the unfortunate namesake for a literary phenom penned by a selfish runaway father, or he could have had something sinister to do with the disappearance of Wilson Taylor, or finally as some believe, he could be the boy wizard Tommy Taylor manifest on earth due to the collective belief of a billion fervent readers.
Q: The fictional world of Tommy Taylor is chock full of adventure,
conspiracy, fame, magic, secrets and cliffhangers. The real story behind
these stories is just as compelling. Whatever happened to Wilson Taylor, the
author of the Tommy Taylor novels?
P: That's one of the big things we're going to have to learn before we can
find out if Tom is real or not. And there's a secret cabal out there even
more interested in Wilson's whereabouts than Tom is.
M: Tom’s quest to find his father is one of the main plot threads in the
book. He runs across some clues early on that suggest Wilson could still be
alive, but that raises a whole lot more questions about why he disappeared,
where he’s hiding, and how he’s connected to the things that are happening
in Tom’s life now.
But we see a lot of Wilson in the early issues, as we flashback to some of
the key moments in Tom’s childhood. We get a lot of glimpses into how their
relationship worked and what sort of a father Wilson was. We also get to
see some of the weird things, and the weird people, he was involved with
back then, which may have a bearing on Tom’s present problems.
Q: Some of the more… devoted fans of the Tommy Taylor series have suggested
on various blogs that Tom Taylor is the boy-wizard of the books made flesh
and blood. Are these people crazy fanatics or are they on to something?
P: They're crazy--but that doesn't explain how Tommy Taylor's winged cat shows up in Switzerland in issue #4!
M: We play a lot of games in The Unwritten with this whole question of what’s
real and what isn’t – or more specifically, how real the things and people
in stories are. There’s a sense in which when you’re reading you just
accept the reality of the story because that’s one of the necessary
conditions for enjoying it. But maybe that acceptance goes deeper than we
think, and maybe it has consequences.
From Tom’s point of view, this is all just gibberish. He remembers a real
childhood in a real world with real people, so how could he be a character
from a book. But the Tom-is-Tommy fanatics don’t even skip a beat on that
one: they just say “so you’re Tommy on a deep cover mission. A magical deep
cover mission!” And as Tom finds out, it’s the hardest thing in the world
to prove one hundred per cent that something is false.
Q: THE UNWRITTEN is a new ongoing comic book series to be published by
Vertigo that explores the fine line between fact and fiction. It’s a story
for people who love to read books and lose themselves in fiction. Why do you
think stories matter? Can stories themselves be dangerous?
P: Like Mike writes in issue #1: "Stories are the only thing worth dying for!" When we started this book I would have said that stories are most definitely dangerous. But I'd change that now. I'd say that stories are only dangerous if we believe they might be true. And that's the place where manipulative forces can grab hold of them and reshape the world.
M: Yeah, I’d agree with that. On one level, this is a book about the misuse
of power – and the power that’s being misused is the power of the human
imagination. What Chinatown did for the Californian water and power
scandal, The Unwritten does for stories!
Q: THE UNWRITTEN is full of literary references. Can you tease us with
some of the literary references we'll encounter throughout the first year of
the series?
M: Well, a lot of the first arc takes place in the Villa Diodati, which is
famously where Mary Shelley got the idea for Frankenstein, during a
conversation with her husband Percy, Lord Byron and John Polidori. The
Frankenstein monster had a very troubled relationship with his creator, so
you could see his situation as being similar to Tom’s in some respects. We
play on that parallel a lot, and the monster himself ultimately gets to
comment on it.
Later stories will refer to a lot of great fictions, some famous, some
pretty obscure. The medieval Song of Roland plays a big part in the second
arc. Tom will sail on a whaling ship at one point, although we’d rather not
say when or how, and he’ll also get to visit the Hundred Acre Wood – or
somewhere very similar.
A lot of the other characters in the book also have connections to famous
stories. Our female lead is named Lizzie Hexam, which is the name of the
heroine in Dickens’ Our Mutual Friend. And Tommy Taylor’s nemesis is Count
Ambrosio – the same name as the depraved and sadistic cleric in Matthew
Lewis’s Victorian Gothic potboiler The Monk.
It’s a tapestry, really: there are stories woven through The Unwritten on
many different levels, some really structurally important, some just sneaky
little grace notes.
Q: THE UNWRITTEN is a pretty meta reading experience. You’ve created a
comic book that contains excerpts from novels, depicts scenes from films and
brings readers inside chat rooms. There’s a lot of text and it makes for an
unusual experience. How do the two of you balance the text with the art?
P: By the seat of our pants at the start. In issue #1 we had to find a
comic art way of portraying a novel, a movie taken from the novel, TV news
shows, internet search pages, news sites, IM chats and more. Todd Klein
came up with a lot of solutions for that, and I'm always trying to find
interesting ways of making it all work. That's a big part of the fun for
me.
M: Yeah, I have to say, I wouldn’t even dream of attempting a story like
this without Peter as the other half of the creative collaboration. He’s
brilliant at what I can only call hyper-dimensional storytelling. He can
just find all the oblique and unexpected and surprising angles from which to
approach a comic book page: he can create a text that has huge stylistic
leaps and startling juxtapositions, but still feels totally coherent. From
the start he’s been keen to create that sense of popular consciousness as
something that expresses itself through and is then also shaped by mass
media.
Q: We’re just a week and a half away from the publication of the first
issue of THE UNWRITTEN. What kind of emotional state are you in? You aren’t
going to pull a Wilson Taylor and disappear, are you?
P: I'm tempted but unlike Wilson, I don't have a billion dollars to make
that possible. But I haven't heard from Mike all weekend and I'm starting to
worry...
M: I was in Ottawa for the literary festival! It’s true I almost didn’t
come back, but that says more about Ottawa and the people there than about
my state of mind.
I guess I’m nervous. I’m always nervous when I’ve got a new book out. It’s
a strange time, because all the decisions have been made, the book is
printed, it’s too late to change your mind about anything, but you can’t
stop going over it in your mind and second-guessing yourself on some things.
You know it’s stupid, but you do it anyway.
Q: Can you give us a hint at what’s to come in issue #2 and in the coming
months?
P: A staircase not to Heaven, a horror writing workshop with bloody consequences, a literary map, the true story of Rudyard Kipling, and a stint in prison for one of our main characters--and that flying cat, of course...
M: Not to mention death and resurrection, pre-emptive plagiarism, trumpets
both golden and otherwise, medieval lies and modern journalism. And a
monster. And some Nazis.
THE UNWRITTEN #1
Written by Mike Carey ; Art by Peter Gross ; Cover by Yuko Shimizu
Everyone's read the Tommy Taylor books, the popular series of novels turned pop culture phenomenon about a boy wizard's adventures. And everyone knows about Tom Taylor, the boy the novels were based on, whose life was so overshadowed by his Dad's fictional epic that Tom's become a lame Z-level celebrity at best and a human viral marketing tool at worst.
But what if the resemblance goes even deeper? What if Tom is the boy-wizard of the books made flesh? And if that sounds crazy, why is it bringing him into the crosshairs of an ancient faction that has never been named in any book or text?
To discover the truth about himself, Tom must search through all the places in history where fiction and reality have intersected. And in the process, he'll learn more about that unwritten cabal and the plot they're at the center of –– a plot that spans all of literature from the first clay tablets to the gothic castles where Frankenstein was conceived to the self-adjusting stories of the internet.
A conspiracy mystery a la The Da Vinci Code, THE UNWRITTEN is the eagerly anticipated reunion of Mike Carey (X-Men, HELLBLAZER) and Peter Gross (FABLES, Chosen) – the team behind the multiple Eisner-nominated LUCIFER. Acclaimed artist Yuko Shimizu (SANDMAN: DREAM HUNTERS) joins the duo on covers, and the series kicks off with a 4-issue opening storyarc with the extra-sized 40-page debut promo-priced at only $1.00!
· Vertigo
· 40pg.
· Color
· $1.00 US
· Mature Readers
On Sale May 13, 2009
