Tommy Taylor's magical origin is no longer 'Unwritten'

Brian Truitt | USA TODAY

Mike Carey and Peter Gross have crafted a whale of a tale for the origin story of their fiction-within-a-fiction boy wizard.

Out Wednesday, the graphic novel The Unwritten: Tommy Taylor and the Ship That Sank Twice actually tells two different stories. Fans of the creators' Vertigo Comics series The Unwritten finally get to see an adaptation of author Wilson Taylor's first book featuring Tommy Taylor, the literary kid magician forever tied to Wilson's own real-life son Tom. That narrative plays out interspersed by Wilson's story of how Tom was literally born out of the writer's grand plan.

For more than 50 issues, The Unwritten has followed adult Tom from being haunted by the constant pop-culture presence of the insanely popular Tommy to searching for the truth about his father and his own self in stories that straddle the real and the fictional.

But one of the goals with the graphic novel was to flip the status quo of The Unwritten, which has focused on Tom while only occasionally showing his literary counterpart's adventures with pals Sue and Peter.

In pairing Tommy's original quest with Wilson's story about the creation of the books and Tom's birth, "we suddenly had something intriguing and worthy of the Unwritten twist we like to take on literature and stories," says Gross, the series artist who's joined by illustrators Kurt Huggins and Zelda Devon for the graphic novel.

"We loved the symmetry of telling the same story from the other side of the coin we had established in the series."

The main story shows how, after the death of his parents, orphaned Tommy ended up at Tulkinghorn Academy courtesy of a very helpful whale and he learns about the presence of his "Spark." It's the most fans have ever seen of Tommy's world thus far, Carey says. "We've only ever had glimpses."

The Unwritten writer has only given readers enough to establish the literary tradition Tommy belongs to and a sense that he's one in a long lineage of magical youngsters alongside Mildred Hubble of Jill Murphy's The Worst Witch series, Christopher Chant of Diana Wynne Jones's Chrestomanci books, Tim Hunter of Vertigo's Books of Magic comics and some kid named Harry Potter.

The graphic novel digs into several key aspects of Tommy's origin, including how he met Sue and Peter, how he came to find his wand Glitterspar, how the cat Mingus became his "familiar," where his wheel tattoo came from and his first defining faceoff with the evil Count Ambrosio.

"We'd never have been able to cover all that stuff in the interstices of the monthly book," Carey says.

Yet in showing how Tommy came to be, the writer also wanted to depict the intertwining of the real and fictional boys.

"We see the process by which Wilson came to write the Tommy books, how he hit on his genre and his hero, and at the same time we see the stages of Sue's pregnancy and Tom's coming into the world," Carey says.

"Each story plays off the other — and all the important reveals are about how they relate to each other."

Since its debut in 2009, The Unwritten has deftly, smartly and often wittily touched on themes of fame and celebrity, fiction vs. reality and friendship. It's the important parent-child relationships, though, that play heaviest in the graphic novel for Carey — not only the obvious Wilson/Tom dynamic but also the Dumbledore-esque Tulkinghorn being a surrogate father for Tommy.

"There are so many ways that relationship can go wrong. And time and again in the book, we're seeing kids used instrumentally to further some goal or scheme of their parents," Carey explains. "Even Tulkinghorn, who's basically a decent man, is guilty of this, because keeping Tom in ignorance of his heritage is a tactical decision.

"I'd say the story is about kids finding their own space, their own autonomy, despite the heavy-handed manipulations of the adults around them. It's a very hopeful story in that sense. Of course it only resolves for Tommy, but Tommy's path foreshadows Tom's to some extent."

The impetus for The Ship That Sank Twice was partly from fans telling Gross and Carey at conventions that they'd love to read one of the fictional Tommy Taylor books. "That got us thinking and realizing there was some great stuff we could do with that," Gross says.

Carey agrees, though he actually sees it as a zero issue in a way. And because the graphic novel will find its way into bookstore audiences, online and otherwise, and act as a gateway to the comic, the writer figures that they'll have a different take on Tom than hardcore Unwritten fans who've been there since the first issue.

"Maybe they'll judge him more mercifully," Carey says, "seeing what his childhood was like before they see him as a man."

The current Unwritten crossover with Bill Willingham's Fables series wraps up in October with issue 54, in which Tom's actions have "some huge consequences" for the worlds of fiction and reality, Gross says. So much so that the landscape he comes back to is so affected that The Unwritten is being relaunched with a new No. 1 issue in January.

"The cynics will say that it's a gimmick to get new readers — and they're partly right in this case — but it's more because it really is a new part of this story that is different than what's come before," Gross says. "We love playing with the conventions of comics. And one of those conventions is the relaunch!"

Adds Carey: "Has anyone ever done that before, relaunching into what's effectively Act III of the story? Because that's where we are. From the moment we come back into Unwritten proper after the Fables arc, the clock is ticking down toward zero. There's going to be an apocalyptic feel."

Carey has long figured The Unwritten would last about 75 issues total, and Gross thought 100 "because he kept seeing all these other ramifications to explore" like with the graphic novel and the "point-five" issues, according to Carey.

They definitely have a climax in mind and actively working toward it, he says. "Without wanting to be too specific about length, let's say that everything that happens from here on out takes us closer to our end point — and much as we love digressions and side stories, there won't be any from now on. We're that close."

Whether the story of Wilson Taylor — father to both Tom and Tommy — is ultimately a tragedy won't be known until the final pages.

"As we go deeper into our story, his humanity gets more complex, and you can start to see some of the reasons he did what he's done — and some of the cost he's paid for it," Carey says. "I guess that does sound like a tragedy, doesn't it?

"I think the interesting thing to see as we enter into the final act of The Unwritten is whether this is Tom's story or Wilson's story being told."