Or rather, as seen in this gorgeous Peter Gross/Mark Buckingham-drawn teaser image, the cast of Fables literally drag Tommy Taylor into their world.

UnwrittenFables

  Vertigo have released this promo for May’s issue #50 of Mike Carey’s excellent series, kicking off an arc which will see the book head into the world of Bill WIllingham’s Fables, as the cast explore the idea of comics as literature. Colours are by Chris Chuckry.

It’s a great idea — the written word isn’t solely owned by novels, and it’ll be interesting to see how Carey tackles things. As a novelist and comic book writer, he should have an entertaining take on the differences between them, and how they interact with each other. This also seems like it may be a good jumping on point – and will only take place in The Unwritten, and not in the Fables series itself.

This does cause many headaches, however. Does this mean that Fables is a comic book in the Unwritten universe? Or does this mean that Fables is a separate dimension to Unwritten? By writing this story, do they now enter the same shared universe, in which literature has come to life and entered the real world alongside the fictional world? And by reading this arc, are we now drawn into that shared universe too?

10 COMMENTS

  1. Boo! The Fables/Jack of Fables was utter shite, and this smacks of desperation. Thanks in advance for screwing up your best title, Vertigo (not referring to Fables, obvs).

  2. >> Does this mean that Fables is a comic book in the Unwritten universe? >>

    Why not? It’s a comic book in this one.

    And it’s not like having MOBY-DICK characters show up made people wonder whether MOBY-DICK was a novel in the UNWRITTEN universe. Of course it was.

  3. I’m looking forward to this. “The Unwritten” has been consistently at the top of my pile since sometime in its first year, and while I stopped reading Fables after they took back the homelands, this should still be a lot of fun.

  4. Also, the “On To Genesis” arc in The Unwritten was an interesting look at the early days of the comics industry as something new and untamed, a revolution of possibility that had to be brought under the cabal’s control.

  5. “I’m looking forward to this. “The Unwritten” has been consistently at the top of my pile since sometime in its first year, and while I stopped reading Fables after they took back the homelands, this should still be a lot of fun.”

    Yes, well, the difference in quality between the two series is exactly why I’m not looking forward to this crossover.

  6. Fables and Unwritten don’t exist in the same universe — they exist in the same *multiverse,* #comicbookphysicsmadeeasy

Comments are closed.