Image Comics has announced Unfinished Tales, a new graphic novel by Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips, due out this fall. A thriller set in the world of publishing, the book follows Finnegan Blake, a successful fantasy author who’s been struggling to finish the series that made him famous for over a decade. That’s when “an old friend shows up with the perfect solution to his writer’s block. But as their secret pact turns dark and these writers’ egos clash, Finn will see how far he’s willing to go to get this final book onto the bestseller list. Most writers would kill for Finn’s life… will he?”
The book marks the latest collaboration between the Criminal creators, who most recently teamed up on last year’s Giant Size Criminal special. Brubaker states, “This is one of my favorite books we’ve ever done. I’ve always been fascinated by why people write, or in this case, why they don’t, and so I took the idea of writer’s block and ran into the darkness with it. Unfinished Tales is a deep dive into the world of writers and publishing, the pressure to succeed, and what that may cost you. It’s also a very fucked up thriller about egos and ambition, because it’s about writers.”
The press release also describes the book as a cross between Stephen King‘s Misery and Patricia Highsmith‘s The Talented Mr Ripley, “perfect for fans of both J.R.R. Tolkien [The Lord of the Rings] and Megan Abbott [Dare Me].” Incidentally, Unfinished Tales was the name of a posthumous 1980 collection of, well, unfinished Tolkien stories like “The Tale of the Children of Húrin” (later completed by his son Christopher as The Children of Húrin), “The History of Galadriel and Celeborn,” and The Hobbit rewrite “The Quest of Erebor.”
Unfinished Tales will be released in hardcover in comics shops on November 11, and bookstores on December 8. It will retail at 144 pages for $25.99. In the meantime, Brubaker and Phillips’s next book, the Criminal spin-off Five Gears in Reverse, will be released on May 27, and the Prime Video series of Criminal, co-run by Brubaker, will premiere sometime later this year. You can also read a seven-page preview below until then.
Fortunately, you cannot (with a few exceptions) copyright a title.