Mike Carey’s UNWRITTEN – Gary Stu, tiresome Harry Potter allusions, rapeyness this way comes, oh MY!

I’ve had my issues with Mike Carey in the past. Mainly, the way he handles female characters. But he has, at times, been decent: he authored The Furies, a Sandman spinoff that gives maligned and disempowered Hippolyta Hall a chance to stand up and kick ass. Lucifer while severely flawed has its share of pretty good female characters, like Elaine Belloc and Jill Presto, and Lilith was mostly superb until Carey decided to shit all over her.

Imagine my surprise, then, to find that in The Unwritten there’s only really one major female character. Her purpose? Why, to be the protagonist Tom Taylor’s love interest, because what else are women for. Thirty issues or so in, Tom’s nameless, faceless seven ex-girlfriends are fridged to drive him to revenge.

It’s obvious that Carey drew a lot from Harry Potter and the pop-culture phenomenon that surrounds it. Tom Taylor’s father Wilson Taylor is an acclaimed author who wrote a series of books about a boy wizard who goes to a wizard school, making friends with a bookish girl and a ginger sidekick. The parallels are so close that Tommy Taylor casts faux-Latin spells while pointing a wand. Count Ambrosio, vampire, is Voldemort; there’s a Dumbledore figure in there somewhere too, albeit the in-story Wilson Taylor never outed him as a celibate gay man post-series. There is also an absence of a yellow fever stereotype, and I daresay the literary references–Mary Shelley, Charles Dickens–are somewhat more… literary than Rowling. The writing is shittier than in Lucifer, but all in all it could make for fun, if not very substantial reading. It is about stories and the nature of stories, how reality is collectively consensual (and how stories, by manipulating beliefs, manipulate reality) and having worked on Sandman stuff must have influenced Carey a great deal in this. Not groundbreaking premise by any means. But it could be fun, if Tom Taylor weren’t a boring, self-centered, smug Gary Stu who becomes an ass-kicking master of magic-via-stories with alarming alacrity, the type that would put Patrick Rothfuss’ Kvothe to shame (but with, thankfully, less sex and less universal adoration). And even that might have been excusable, if you’re willing to put up with all of the above.

Except.

Now, all right, I’m not entirely fair about Lizzie Hexam–yes, the one from Charles Dickens’ Our Mutual Friends (and, hah, Dickens was always shit about women, wasn’t he). She gets her share of character development, there’s an entire issue done as choose-your-adventure devoted to her backplot, but it remains that she spends all her time dedicating her energy to Tom Taylor. It’s that trap so many writers fall into, making a woman’s life revolve absolutely and utterly around supporting a man. And naturally they fall in love, they fuck, you know the drill. Other female characters fare hardly any better: a woman Wilson had a fling with in his youth ended up getting cancer and stuck raising the son he got on her after a traumatic birth. Then, in a later issue, the sinister cabal that’s hunting Tom kills off his seven ex-girlfriends (unnamed, faceless, off-screen) “to drive him to despair.” Which doesn’t work as they’d hoped. He gets all pumped up and attacks their headquarters instead. This, dear reader, is textbook fridging. I suppose one ought to be grateful that Lizzie is still alive. For how long? Until the next time Tom needs a dose of motivation, perhaps.

Then we come to the side-stories.

One of them concerns seemingly invincible assassin Pullman, who in olden times contacted Gilgamesh to go on a hunt for Leviathan, a story-creature. In the process they encounter a lone woman (yes, nameless) who gives them water. Gilgamesh, being a decent enough man, leaves her alone–but Pullman tells him he’s “forgotten his flint” and returns to the woman.

Yes, he did exactly what you think. “Some animal scratched me, that’s all.” (Take note, Peter Watts.) Too subtle? Here’s a confirmation.

Perhaps Mike Carey enrolled on a Grim Darkness 101 course in the interim between finishing Lucifer and starting The Unwritten. Joy. Because that’s what we need more of, isn’t it? More rapeyness? It’s just so fashionable, these days. Oh, I know, this is all to establish what an irredeemably evil monster Pullman is, as though that were ever in doubt. Isn’t it nice that rape is always the shortcut? Isn’t it refreshing?

Another side-story ups the ante. This time we have an attempted rape, first, which really is nothing special by this point–

From which the protagonist, a sterling soldier man, the one diamond among the rocks of his fellows, naturally rescues the woman.

That’s him seeing, through a conveniently unlocked door, a father raping his daughter. Witnessing the sexual abuse of a child, one assumes, turns any man’s skin and irises an unnatural shade of red.

The mother is naturally a monster who “condones” all this and needs to have it explained to her by Our Hero, who lectures her on what’s what. Is her viewpoint–that if she does speak up there’ll be no relief or rescue for her either; that she likely doesn’t have any way to get out of this marriage–taken into account? No. Does she try to help her daughter? Why no, women are either victims or monsters, and never ever help each other.

Ah, the punchline. You can almost imagine Mike Carey breathlessly typing out the script for this issue. Attempted rape, child abuse, then pregnancy and miscarriage of her father’s baby, then the girl Anna-Beth exacting revenge on the whole town using story magic. It’s so… powerful!

Only really it isn’t. Anna-Beth isn’t portrayed as anything but a traumatized child having withdrawn into herself, perpetually (and justifiably, sure) angry. It’s not nuanced or complex. The issue isn’t even about her, it’s about Our Hero being shocked and alarmed at the terror and evil of this town and his fellow soldiers. What purpose does any of this serve? We already know Pullman is evil. All the murder and torture he’s done in the main plot proper might have clued you in. This anonymous town brims with hypocrisy and awfulness. Yes, and?

It is a story signifying nothing, adding nothing to the setting or backplot. It’s just: Our Hero comes to this town, finds everyone is horrible, there is rapeyness by the bucketload, and then the little girl uses magic to kill everyone then walks off into the sunset as Our Hero’s adopted daughter. Our Hero being essentially just a variant on Christopher Rudd from Lucifer but less awful.

Obviously, I won’t be reading The Unwritten any further.