Let's start this off with something that not a lot of people think of as traditionally "girly": comics. A bit of history: my cousin gave me a stack of comics for my birthday when I was little and I've been hooked on X-men ever since. I got back into the scene in 2001 with Marvel's Ultimate line, branched out into non-capes stuff, and every Wednesday my husband patiently waits for me to come back from spending money at my very friendly local comic book store and I try to hide the bag full of single issues like it's porn or something. (We have an agreement. He doesn't say anything about my comics, I don't say anything about his board games and we both share the roleplaying books. Things are peaceful and nerdy in our apartment.)
Anyway, the angels at my LCBS saved me a copy of the first issue of Mike Carey's The Unwritten (link goes to Wikipedia and has spoilers) a few years ago, and I've been anxiously awaiting every new issue every month since. The short summary is, it's about a guy whose dad wrote a series of Harry Potter-esque books with a main character with his name, he grew up bitter about it much like the real-life Christopher Robin. And then the line between real life and fiction gets blurred, and it's all very meta and makes a lot of literary references and I'm a happy nerd every month.
It's fantastic, and the entire series is worth a read, but there are three issues that really stand out to me as absolutely amazing. This one covers the first of the three, issue #12, "Eliza Mae Hertford's Willowbank Tales." In essence, this is what happens when you force a thug from a Guy Ritchie movie into a Beatrix Potter book. And then it gets scary. Spoilers abound.
The art, done by Kurt Huggins and Zelda Devins, is gorgeous. Beautiful backgrounds, animals in clothes, extremely pissed off rabbits--yeah, just beautiful. The rabbit, by the way, is Mr. Bun--Pauly Bruckner--the character who would be more at home in Snatch than in The Tale of Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle. (This is not a slight against Beatrix Potter. I loved her stories as a kid, and holy hell I still love those illustrations. I need to remember to ask my mom tomorrow if she still has my collection of them so I can save them for any theoretical kids I have or adopt or something.) As a reader, you realize pretty quickly that this character does not belong in a saccharine kids' story because of the constant stream of "FUCK" that comes out of his adorable bunny mouth. He tries to get out of the setting (one of many tries, we are assured), fails, and is hog-tied until he stops screaming obscenities by the well-meaning animal creations native to the story's setting. (One memorable exchange between the actual story animals: "Thinking makes your brain hurt." "Have you ever tried it?" "I have no brain, Dogling." "Oh.")
Pauly, as it turns out, was dumped off into this story after crossing Wilson Taylor, the main character's father. See, in The Unwritten, beloved stories have power enough that they create pocket realities of their own. There's a brilliant plot later on about how a story became tortured by becoming propaganda, but that's neither here nor there. The point is, stories have power enough to be real in a form, and it's not sitting well with Pauly at all. He had a companion who was thrown in with him and found it easier to forget who he was and become part of the story. Which, you can see how that would happen--between the pleasant and well-meaning animals who assure Pauly that no, he's always been Mr. Bun and the narrator (who Pauly is very aware of and argues with at several points) trying to make his actions sound more palateable and genre-appropriate in parts... If enough people start telling you something for long enough, you're probably going to start believing it, is all I'm saying.
Pauly, though, is an obstinant cuss who builds weapons out of whatever he can get, murders a mouse to test it out (and only fluff comes out), and interrogates his former companion-turned-complacent squirrel to find out where the Author Avatar (WARNING: TV Tropes link) who was present in the original stories can be found. Since the squirrel was a fan of the series when he was a little kid, he knows all of this stuff pretty well--and can possibly be forgiven for succumbing to becoming part of the story so quickly. He goes off to find her, expecting just an insipid little kid, since that's what the girl was written as in the original stories.
But the funny thing about being an author avatar is that the author is God in the universe they created. And this author avatar knows it. Pauly might be able to shoot her with a crossbow, but Liza--the author avatar of Eliza Mae Hertford--isn't a kid. And she isn't the sad wish of a forty-some year old woman to have an idealized childhood. She's the author with the wisdom of an adult and the power of a creator, but with the cynicism and negative experiences of a lifetime of growing up locked away--and that's where she throws Pauly, since he's so desperate to escape the sugar of a children's story. He goes into a dark room, with all the worst parts of growing up, and is locked in.
It's beautiful. It's hilarious, and chilling, and haunting, and makes me want to dig out Beatrix Potter and the Scary Stories books and above all, it makes me glad that this series is coming out. I love the exploration in this issue of the relationship between an audience and the books, and an author and their creation.
One of the more popular tropes in fanfiction, especially among a certain age group (in my experience), is the story where the author, or a character based on the author, or any modern person gets somehow transported into the story of their choosing. Nine times out of ten it's wish fulfillment, fun and games, and maybe some romance. Really, though... if you were somehow transported into a story you read when you were younger, would it really be such a dream come true? Or would it be something more like this? You can't just lock away the parts of you that developed between the time you read, say, Redwall for the first time as a middle-schooler and adulthood. You change. The stories don't.
Unwritten #12 can be found in Unwritten vol. 2: Inside Man from Vertigo comics.
No comments:
Post a Comment