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41st out of 87 books
—
44 voters
The Unwritten, Vol. 4: Leviathan (The Unwritten #4)
by
Mike Carey (Goodreads Author) ,
Peter Gross , Vince Locke , Al Davison , Yuko Shimizu
This fourth volume in the acclaimed series sends Tommy Taylor into the world of Moby-Dick!
After the shocking return of Tommy’s father, best-selling fantasy author Wilson Taylor, the mysterious Cabal audition a new assassin and Tom seeks out “the source.” The source of what? He’s not really sure, but it looks like a whale, and apparently it can be found in the Nantucket far
...morePaperback, 144 pages
Published
October 25th 2011
by Vertigo (DC Comics)
(first published January 2011)
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I'm not sure why I didn't like this installment as much as earlier ones. Perhaps one reason is I found its beginning chapters much more interesting (and funny) than the rest.
I enjoyed the Moby-Dick references (a book I've read and think is great) but I'm not as familiar with the stories of Baron Munchhausen (I'm not generally interested in tall tales) and I had to look up who the Irishman might be -- I'm thinking he's the one in this ballad.)
I especially liked the climax of this volume, when t...more
I enjoyed the Moby-Dick references (a book I've read and think is great) but I'm not as familiar with the stories of Baron Munchhausen (I'm not generally interested in tall tales) and I had to look up who the Irishman might be -- I'm thinking he's the one in this ballad.)
I especially liked the climax of this volume, when t...more
Unwritten Volume 4 is Tom Taylor's first adventure since accepting his role in his father's war on the Cabal. Where Volume 3 told readers about Lizzie Hexam's past, Volume 4 spends time revealing Tom Taylor's childhood and where he and Lizzie's stories touched (though he can only barely remember her). Volume 4 also provides us with some insight into the type of person Wilson Taylor was. He was very much like the proverbial mad scientist who forsakes his conscience in the pursuit of discovery. W...more
Another excellent volume! Granted, I am just the type of reader Carey is writing for, a graduate student in English (i.e. one conversant with and actively reading in established classic literature) who still buys and reads comic books in great numbers (a reader who has a great love for the romance [as a genre] as opposed to the novel [as a genre]).
In volume four we learn the source of Wilson (and Tom) Taylor's power, and, at least it seems, by extension the power of this cabal that seeks to con...more
In volume four we learn the source of Wilson (and Tom) Taylor's power, and, at least it seems, by extension the power of this cabal that seeks to con...more
The Leviathan story line felt a little flat to me. It has moments that I've experienced earlier in the series where I think "Wow, this is fantastic writing." Occasionally, Carey has a turn of phrase or dialogue that makes you set the book down in your lap for a minute so you can roll it around in your head for a while and try to mentally digest it.
Unfortunately, those moments were fewer and farther between than they had been in prior issues. For most of this collection I found myself just not dr...more
Unfortunately, those moments were fewer and farther between than they had been in prior issues. For most of this collection I found myself just not dr...more
Tommy and Lizzie and Savoy find themselves on a tour bus labeled White Whale Tours in Pittsfield. Tommy is insistent that they need to be there. Part of the tour includes the house where Herman Melville wrote his magnus opus. Savoy isn’t doing so good—his skin is crawling like he’s got ants, and the light hurts his eyes; he thinks it’s an allergic reaction to the sun, because he’s British.
According to the map, the Arrowhead Farm is “the source”, whatever that means. But Tommy won’t move on until...more
According to the map, the Arrowhead Farm is “the source”, whatever that means. But Tommy won’t move on until...more
This fourth installment of The Unwritten series was probably the most difficult to read. Tom Taylor gets separated from Lizzie and Savoy and travels through multiple stories, faces the great white whale and must figure out how to get back home. I feel like there was a lot I missed in this story so I'm going to have to go over it again before the fifth volume comes out but I did still enjoy it. I love the premise of these comics and how they illustrate how much the stories we read influence our l...more
This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it,
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This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it,
click here.
This series started out as a really interesting mystery/fantasy surrounding a man who wrote a insanely popular book series around a boy wizard (a la Harry Potter) who highly resembles the man's son. The father has since gone missing, is thought to be dead, and suddenly his son Tom is able to do magic in real life, has thugs chasing him, and has no clue whats going on.
Then you get to this installment which all of a sudden gets all philosophical and preachy about belief in books, the role of the r...more
Then you get to this installment which all of a sudden gets all philosophical and preachy about belief in books, the role of the r...more
Tom takes a journey into the pages of Moby Dick, which thankfully is less boring than actual Moby Dick. With help from Frankenstein's monster, he starts to figure out more about the source of his power. What he eventually discovers takes him on a strange trip (and I do mean it's trippy) into other whale-related texts, and echoes some of what happens in fellow Vertigo title Fables, and also an older Vertigo book: Neil Gaiman's Sandman, which I think it's fair to say is the grandfather of the curr...more
The fourth installment of Mike Carey's The Unwritten is every bit as compelling as its predecessors. This time the gang is on the hunt for "The Source" and that takes Tommy into the Leviathan and to the very heart of the power of story itself. It's interesting to me how well Carey here defines the essence of fiction... better actually than some books I've read on fiction theory. Carey's wrestling with some huge concepts in the pages of The Unwritten, and they are certainly worth our attention. Y...more
like a few other comics, for years the buzz never let up about "The Unwritten". i picked up the first issue, but wasn't into it. i picked up this trade hoping to get hooked. and it is inspired and inspiring. gorgeous illustration. its main attraction for me being a story of a storyverse. at its best it reminds me of borges. but, just like with the single issues, i remain out of the loop of the larger plot, so it drags a lot too. guess i just have to decide if i want to read all the trades in seq...more
Just when this series was really getting good in the previous volume, we're back to "what the heck is going on here?" territory, especially in the last issue in this collection, a return to the foul-mouthed talking animals that made an appearance earlier on. It's interesting, but I want things to move along more clearly. What is really up with that rotten rabbit? I like the journey up the stairs, but what is that all about? And, who was that Scottish guy in the whale's belly? The others were all...more
No big comments that I didn't already put on my volume one notes, but Carey did manage to ALMOST make me want to read Moby-Dick, so that's a plus for him. Of course, then I read some of the transposed text and remembered why I don't enjoy reading the classics, so I'll stick with the comic book adaptations for now. I wonder if volume five is out yet.
Oh, and Pauly is definitely my favorite character now. I certainly don't like him, but he's fascinating to watch/read. In fact, I've generally enjoye...more
Oh, and Pauly is definitely my favorite character now. I certainly don't like him, but he's fascinating to watch/read. In fact, I've generally enjoye...more
I've been a fan of Carey's writing since his run on Lucifer and I'm really enjoying Unwritten. It's much more ambitious than I imagined it would be, tackling the idea of fiction as a living, breathing space that crosses boundaries and interacts, influences and repsonds to the "real" world. The original Harry Potter like premise is a fantastic jumping off point for this exploration of story and I appreciate how some characters are very pure and driven and others are unwitting participatns in the...more
I read volume 4: Leviathan without having read volumes 1-3 since this was nominated for a Hugo, but enjoyed it enough to want to go back to the beginning. The baseline story is that of a child whose father is a popular YA fantasy novelist, who has a character that many people believe IS his son, and he starts moving in and out of fiction himself. It reminded me of the Jasper Fforde "Thursday Next" books, such as The Eyre Affair.
The full-page art is breathtaking, and I'm going to enjoy going back...more
The full-page art is breathtaking, and I'm going to enjoy going back...more
Another excellent entry in one of the best comics currently out there. The basic plot of this series- 'Guy finding out about his secret past as the star of a series of young adult fantasy novels'- would be enough to sustain an interesting comic, but Mike Carey uses it to explore the entirety of literature and storytelling throughout history, from Twitter to 'Moby Dick'. The art is grounded in vibrant realism, even as it expresses everything from various literary universes, evil wizards, and the...more
Honestly, I'm having a lot of trouble getting into this collection. First, no blizzard and plenty of distractions to keep interrupting. Second, I've never really liked Moby Dick, the primary focus of this arc. And third, I'm finding the story and format very disjointed in the way it flips between characters and locations every page...
I finished, finally. The story continued to be disjointed and confusing. Tom found the idea he was searching for, which seems obvious to me, but the path to get th...more
I finished, finally. The story continued to be disjointed and confusing. Tom found the idea he was searching for, which seems obvious to me, but the path to get th...more
I really do enjoy this series--despite the art. Most of the time, if I dislike the art, it takes a BIG push for me to get into the story. And I'm sorry, Peter Gross, but your style is simply not for me.
However, what this comic lacks in art, the story is such an amazingly fun and creative face-melter that you can't help but fall in love with the premise--especially if you are a lover of books and stories in general.
These are fantastic reads, but of course, you NEED to start at the beginning, wher...more
However, what this comic lacks in art, the story is such an amazingly fun and creative face-melter that you can't help but fall in love with the premise--especially if you are a lover of books and stories in general.
These are fantastic reads, but of course, you NEED to start at the beginning, wher...more
Kind of disappointed with this one. This volume is kind of broken into chapters some of which are only a page or two, most are only three or four. While these chapters made the book a fast read, it also made the story feel somewhat disjointed. Also, I feel like the story is being revealed too slowly, I need more action. I’m waiting for our main character, Tom, to do something. I feel like he is just reacting, being pushed and pulled by outside forces, I get the reluctant hero aspect, but this is...more
This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it,
click here.
http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/1958567.html[return][return]This is the second of this year's Hugo nominees for graphic novel which I have read - a pleasing narrative of young Tommy Taylor, who gets separately from his girlfriend and his vampire side-kick to get sucked into crewing the Pequod and ending up in a confined space with Pinocchio and Gepetto, the Prophet Jonah, Sinbad the Sailor and Baron Munchausen (and a random Celt). The literary allusions are dense, the artwork generally good and th...more
The Unwritten just gets better with each installment. As far as plot goes, it is a gripping mystery/thriller about a young man who discovers a secret society attempting to control the world by manipulating the flow of information. But the scope of this series is much more epic (forgive the use of a description that has been beaten to death in recent years, but I really can't think of a better way to describe this series). Jumping back and forth between "reality" and a world of thoughts and symbo...more
The first books proved a compelling examination of the power of stories, viz. Harry Potter. But the series is growing to seem like some kind of overt Oedipal war a la Harold Bloom, not on the part of protagonist Tom Taylor, but on Carey's, against that dead father whose absence is still a kind of overwhelming presence and whose storytelling powers are inescapable because omnipresent and essential to the formation of the son Carey's destiny: Neil Gaiman. But Carey can't beat Gaiman at his own, er...more
The third volume in this terrific series, a fantasy/horror meta-story about the power of stories. Tommy Taylor finds himself trapped on board The Pequod, a-hunting the great white whale, or at least trying to find out what it is the whale represents and what it has to do with the power his father wielded and the very bad people trying to kill him and his friends. I love tis stuff, and it's such a relief that it's found an audience large enough to keep it going (unlike say, Crossing Midnight.) I'...more
Okay, I still think this series is going very, very good, but I found this volume a bit heavy on the exposition. I don't feel the story gained a lot of ground but merely recapped. This is not a bad thing because the plot of the first three volumes went at breakneck speed and could easily be seen as confusing. Plus we've went from the ordinary world to a world that contains magic and secretive societies. Best to stop, take a breath, look around. Best to actually set down the rules of the new worl...more
Even though I don't know what is going on half the time (I really must re read the first 3 books), I really enjoyed this one. Tommy's trip through all the whales of literature juxtaposed Baron Munchausen with Sinbad with Pinocchio, and everyone had a "whale" of a time (sorry couldn't resist).
Meanwhile, in the "real" world, Tommy's friends are not having nearly as good a time of it, with Savoy coming down with a bad case of literary vampirism and Lizzie getting to have sex with Tom only to lose...more
Meanwhile, in the "real" world, Tommy's friends are not having nearly as good a time of it, with Savoy coming down with a bad case of literary vampirism and Lizzie getting to have sex with Tom only to lose...more
Nov 20, 2011
Ashley
rated it
5 of 5 stars
Shelves:
fantasy,
books-about-writers,
graphic-novels,
post-modern,
speculative,
favorites,
nerd-lit
This series hurts my brain, but in a good way. I'm too hungover to say anything else. Wine is good, and wine is bad. That is my philosophical thought for the day.
Actually, I can tell you that when I went to B&N to buy this book, my boss said to me, "So I see you're still reading trash . . ." (because I told him a couple of weeks ago that basically all I've been reading since finishing my masters exams was YA and fantasy and mindless fluff), but when he said that I about bit his head off. "N...more
Actually, I can tell you that when I went to B&N to buy this book, my boss said to me, "So I see you're still reading trash . . ." (because I told him a couple of weeks ago that basically all I've been reading since finishing my masters exams was YA and fantasy and mindless fluff), but when he said that I about bit his head off. "N...more
I think this is good! I can never remember what's going on every time I pick up this series. But I seem to get sucked in anyway. I'm not a huge of fan of literature so I'm sure that I am missing lots of Easter eggs and context but I still find this to be a pretty fun series. My favourite part, though, was the backup(?) story "Stairway to Heaven", which told the story of a group of folktale animals climbing an infinitely high stair case while being led by a homicidal rabbit. I have no idea how it...more
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Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. See this thread for more information.
Mike Carey was born in Liverpool in 1959. He worked as a teacher for fifteen years, before starting to write comics. When he started to receive regular commissions from DC Comics, he gave up the day job.
Since then, he has worked for both DC and Marvel Comics, writing storyli...more
More about Mike Carey...
Mike Carey was born in Liverpool in 1959. He worked as a teacher for fifteen years, before starting to write comics. When he started to receive regular commissions from DC Comics, he gave up the day job.
Since then, he has worked for both DC and Marvel Comics, writing storyli...more
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Jun 23, 2012 08:56pm