The third part of my "all love and praise be upon Mike Carey and Peter Gross' The Unwritten" wraps (so far; it's still an ongoing title) with issue #24, "Stairway to Heaven." This issue really benefits from having read issue 12 first, by the way. It's another diversion from the main story of Tom Taylor and his companions, after the arc about him winding up in Moby Dick wraps, though elements of the conclusion to that arc are used in #24.
Artistically, it's beautiful and grotesque. Most of the characters are refugees from children's stories, and are adorable talking animals. Piglet from Winnie the Pooh makes a brief appearance. And then there's the one character who shows up and is consistently drawn in a pretty unnerving way when contrasted against the others. It's like... did anybody else watch Ren and Stimpy back in the mid-nineties? Remember how every now and then, the animators would do an extreme focus on something gross about a character and just really drive the point home with the amount of detail that yes, it was disgusting? It's like that, and it emphasizes how out of place this character is.
Before I get to this character, I'd like to start at the beginning. It really sets the mood for what you can expect in this issue. The narrator, a hippo-like character named the Quark Maiden, is telling the story of how her band of storybook escapees came to trek up an M.C. Escher-like staircase that doesn't seem to have an end. She relates how a rat who claimed to have seen the top of the stairs ranted and raved about a world that sounds kind of like ours, with voiceless animals, and then finally died. Having no ground to bury him in and no wood to burn him on, the band of animals pitched him over the side of the stairs. "As he fell, we said the oldest prayer we knew. Happy. Happy ever after."
I can't overstate how much I love this first page. The thought of characters from books I read when I was four or five--the duck from The Story About Ping, the teddy bear from Corduroy--on a journey where they could die, and where they're clinging to nothing but hope and prayer to get through? It's hard to think about, if you loved those characters and think about them as those characters instead of made-up ones for the comic. Spoilers for the rest of the issue follow.
In any case, at some point in their extremely long journey, the group camps in front of a door, and out from the door bursts... Pauly Bruckner. Yep. Still a rabbit, still cursing up a storm, about as unbalanced as you'd expect after the last issue he appeared in.
He spends a lot of time ranting and raving, since... well, he's been locked away with pure negativity and cynicism for the past who-knows-how-long. It didn't do much for his personality, incidentally; within a short period of time of discovering that these storybook animals are on a semi-religious quest for the Golden Door out of the stairs, he frames a fox for the murder of their leader, tortures the fox until he confesses, and then assumes command by means of a false prophecy. Blatantly false. So blatant that someone starts to point out how it directly contradicts what he had just been saying and was then threatened into silence false.
But Pauly's false prophecy and zeal gives the storybook animals hope and a renewed purpose. Where before, they plodded along and ate whatever food they could get out of a turtle's magic hat, they now become more violent and start raiding other stories. They tear up the stairs behind them to use as weapons and to discourage others from leaving, and at one point leave some of their slower and older companions behind in order to pick up their pace after a "vision" Pauly has. Quark Maiden becomes his lover and they have three little rabbit-hippo babies--as it turns out, that's who she's telling the story to in the future. (Incidentally, babies weren't mentioned before Pauly joined them. I'm not sure if I'm reaching by inferring that Pauly introduced sex to the storybook animals, but given that they're innocent things before he meets them and he's... him, I'm not sure I'm far off. Which isn't to say sex is bad, but I never read about anyone in the Hundred Acre Wood getting busy in their spare time. Please don't take that as an invitation to link me to fanworks that say otherwise.)
After what is implied to be years, or some other really long stretch of time, things fall apart. They turn a corner only to find that the stairs have been torn apart in front of them, and they can't reach far enough to keep going. The raccoon who initially pointed out the inaccuracies in Pauly's story when he assumed command turns against him, bringing it back up and accusing Pauly of the murder of their old leader. But right before Pauly kills the raccoon in panic, the animals are attacked by pixies flying on birds. Pauly takes advantage of the confusion to disappear into the magic hat that he'd confiscated earlier in the story, and will probably show up again at some point--we all know people like him, the ones who aren't any good and won't leave you alone no matter how much you wish they would. In this case, he makes for a good story, so I look forward to his return.
Many of the animals die in the attack, but a good number of them survive. Quark Maiden takes up leadership, clinging to her belief in Pauly's "vision" and her belief in the top of the stairs. The animals organize ladders, and they continue to climb. "Onward we climb, year after year. Borne up by our faith, and by his blessing. Into the light."
So Pauly created a religion around himself. He inspired a peaceful and hopeful group of animals from kid lit to be okay with ruthless and violent actions in the hope of a heavenly reward. His drive gave them purpose when they were all but stalled out, but led to the deaths, abandonment, and betrayal of many of them along the way. Did he do something ultimately good, or bad? His followers are still working together after he leaves them. But they've been tainted by their association with him.
In the previous arc, it's revealed that story archetypes have the ability to travel between stories; the whale from Moby Dick comes into contact with Pinocchio, Sinbad, and a bunch of other characters whose stories feature whales or whale-like monsters. Given Pauly's escape at the end of this story, I'm wondering if he's becoming a trickster archetype, like a malevolent Br'er Rabbit. Only time will tell if I'm on the right track, I suppose.
The Unwritten #24 is, as of May 20, 2011, still out in single issues in comic book stores. It will be collected in Vol. 4, Leviathan, on October 25, 2011 according to the Amazon page.
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