The Unwritten

Tom: It's-- It's a story. It's just a story, man. It's not worth dying for.
Ambrosio: Just a story? Tell that to the greeks who fought at Troy, Tommy. Tell the women burned as witches. The Rosenbergs. Sacco and Vanzetti. Tell the Martyrs of all the religions and the millions who fell in all the wars since time began! Stories are the only thing worth dying for!

The Unwritten is a Vertigo Comics series by Mike Carey and Peter Gross, whom you might know as the principal creative team behind Lucifer. The series started in July, 2009 and remains ongoing. It tells the story of Tom Taylor, son of an ultra-successful fantasy novelist who disappeared mysteriously at the height of his career. The protagonist of his father's Tommy Taylor series was obviously based on him, causing the Tom no small amount of resentment. He is the constant center of attention for fans who want to meet "the real Tommy Taylor". At the same time, he isn't above cashing in by appearing at book shows and signings.

However, his life is turned upside down when it turns out that records of Tom's life are incomplete, and that he might be adopted, or just a fraud. Public outrage is instantly sparked, but things get even weirder when some of the more obsessive fans start believing he's Tommy Taylor made manifest. Soon afterward, he's attacked by what seems to be the vampiric Big Bad of the Tommy Taylor novels, Count Ambrosio. He's only barely rescued by Lizzie Hexam, the same woman who sprung the secret of his origin to the public, and who has some kind of connection to his missing father. The boundary between reality and fiction starts to blur as Tom sets out to discover the truth, while also being hunted by someone himself.

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Tropes used in The Unwritten include:

• Anti-Villain: Pauly Bruckner in issue #12. He's clearly a ruthless person who's willing to commit any despicable act to get to his goal, but since his goal is getting out of the crap saccharine talking animal world Wilson Taylor has condemned him into and back into the real world, it makes his actions a bit more understandable.
• Alliterative Name: Tommy (and Tom) Taylor, Sue Sparrow, Peter Price.
• Ancient Conspiracy
• Arc Words: "Stories are the only thing worth dying for."
• Character Name and the Noun Phrase: "Tommy Taylor and the Bogus Identity", the first collected volume. A later story arc, Tommy Taylor and the War of Words.
• Clap Your Hands If You Believe: Starting when he goes to prison Tom starts to realize that some places are affected by the stories about them. For example, the town in "Song of Roland" wouldn't be remembered except for the fact that the "Song" was a Medieval meme. As he goes through the stories, he finds that stories have their own worlds, and also have connections to the corresponding locations in this world. Wilson seems to have written the book with the intent of bringing Tom the power of the character. It's revealed in Issue 11 that, when a book is turned against its purpose in the eyes of the world, it becomes a Canker. The example given is "Jud Suss," which was corrupted in its film form and "tortured" the story. This seems to be the cabal's goal with the fake 14th novel - it's full of mishmashed crap to the point that it would "poison the well" of Wilson's power.
• Cliché Storm: In-Universe, the fourteenth (fake) Tommy Taylor novel.
• Chekhov MIA: Wilson Taylor.
• Chekhov's Skill: Tom's only notable ability is his encyclopedic knowledge of the literary significance of various geographical locations. This ends up being continuously useful. It seems his father specifically taught it all to him for this very purpose.
• Choose Your Own Adventure: Issue #17 is a "Pick-A-Story" issue, telling the confused backstory of Lizzie Hexam.
• Cluster F-Bomb: Pauly Bruckner.
• Crap Saccharine World: Some minor characters find themselves turned into wildlife and trapped in Willowbank Wood, a pleasant forest environment, with a group of cheery Talking Animals. One of them manages to adapt, but another, in the form of a rabbit, gets increasingly misanthropic and disturbed. His constant escape attempts... do not go well.
  • It seems perfectly nice if you're one of the locals, but for an ordinary human it's a maddeningly childish life.
• Expy: The Tommy Taylor series is more than a little similar to Harry Potter, down to the trio of main characters, similar villains and adjacent old mentors. They're also similar as phenomena. However, Tom Taylor himself is mostly based on the son of A. A. Milne, who was the basis of Christopher Robin in the Winnie the Pooh stories.
• Hidden Villain
• Historical Domain Character: Rudyard Kipling stars in one issue. Josef Goebbels makes an appearance as well. Also Mark Twain.
• Hurricane of Excuses: Lizzie puts off a girl who wants to involve Tom in some sex magic by claiming that he has syphilis, he's celibate, and he's her fiancé.
• Intrepid Reporter: More of an Intrepid Blogger, really. Savoy is willing to let himself be jailed to get the inside scoop on Tom Taylor.
• Jigsaw Puzzle Plot
• Informed Attribute: Your Mileage May Vary with regards to Wilson Taylor's (allegedly brilliant) work as a whole, but most of the excerpts we've seen have appeared epic and dark, but with a sense of banter and friendship keeping them from being overpowering. The fake book, of course, is hilariously bad. Then, we see the real Book 14. In-comic critics bend over backwards to tell us it has messianic themes but somehow avoids being overbearing and dull, yet whenever we see scenes from it, it appears to be nothing but the new white-clad Tommy going around spouting generically pseudo-Christian cliches while every good character literally bows to ask his blessing, and anyone who dares oppose him is stupid, ugly, and (in Ambrosio's case) wildly less competent and menacing than they used to be.
  • However, this could also be taken to mean that the book is ridiculously over-hyped in-universe.
    • The series is a clichestorm because Taylor made it primarily as a weapon, not art.
• Loony Fan: Lots. It goes with the conspiracy.
• Messianic Archetype: Tommy Taylor in his last book, blatantly so. And for many people, Tom Taylor is this too.
• Meta Fiction: "Stories" is the big theme of the series.
• Multiple Choice Past: Lizzie. Literally.
• My Name Is Not Durwood: Tom really dislikes people calling him "Tommy", since that's the name of the fictional character his father based on him.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: Lizzie's first few attempts to give Tom The Call backfire spectacularly (one getting him thousands of pieces of hatemail and death threats to the point where he's afraid to go outside, and one getting him locked up on murder charges). At least she apologizes to him for this.
• Older Than He Looks: Pullman.
• Our Vampires Are Different: The vampires in the Tommy Taylor-verse look like Orlok and are unkillable to the point that thinking about them after destroying them can return them to unlife.
  • Lampshaded in Leviathan, when Lizzie tests Savoy to make sure he's turning into a Wilson Taylor vampire, "rather than, say, Stoker, Matheson or King."
• Out-Gambitted: Mr. Callendar, and he pays for it.
• Parental Abandonment: Tom's mother died when he was young, his father vanished.
  • Turns out that his mother is actually the woman that he thought his father was cheating on his mother with... at least according to Tom's father. He's not the most trustworthy source of information.
• Public Domain Character: Lizzie Hexam seems to be the character of the same name from Charles Dickens's Our Mutual Friend.
  • Or maybe not: it's suggested that Lizzie was originally a regular person who was made into a Public Domain Character by Wilson Taylor.
  • Also Frankenstein, Sir Roland, Baron von Munchhausen, Sinbad, Jonah, Pinocchio, Mr. Badger, Br'er Bear, and various characters from Moby Dick.
• Say My Name: The first time Lizzie calls Tom "Tom" instead of "Tommy" (see the My Name Is Not Durwood example above) is when she's about to kiss him.
• Shout-Out: To various books.
  • The Cliché Storm fake 14th Tommy Taylor book, a deliberate case of So Bad Its Horrible, was designed to rip off several other novels and so has a number of crushingly blatant shout outs... The most obvious is to His Dark Materials with a ridiculously obvious Expy of Lord Asriel, but there's also a slightly subtler one to Discworld in the shape of a scruffy little talking dog who SAYS "Woof!" who is almost certainly meant to be an Expy of Gaspode the Wonder Dog.
    • Doesn't even begin to cover it. His Dark Materials, the Star Wars prequels ("Magic has a physical source"), the Lord of the Rings, and Elric of Melnibone all get ripped off in a single page.
  • One of the book reviewer's references Peter Pan, saying that if he lies and says the fake/poison Cliché Storm 14th book is good, "a fairy dies."
  • Also, the cover artist slipped Lucifer in among several other characters on the cover of issue #14 to reference the creators' previous work.
  • As a kid, Tommy played with Terraformer and Mal-bot toys.
• Smug Snake: Mr. Callendar.
• Talking Animal: In issue #12. They're practically Civilized Animals, really, and even get called out for not trying to eat each other.
• You Have Failed Me...: Mr. Callendar wants to pull one of these, but instead ends as the victim.
• Your Costume Needs Work: Tom failed to get the role of Tommy Taylor in a movie.
  • To be fair, he was auditioning for the role of a character based on himself ten years younger.