Mike Carey’s The Unwritten is already up to issue five, which brings about some drastic tonal shifts. For starters, it’s presented as an autobiographical work by Rudyard Kipling that grafts fresh metaphors onto his various works, especially Just So Stories. Kipling recounts his motivations in moving from poetry and travel literature to children’s fables, as well as his run-ins with other authors such as Samuel Clemens and Oscar Wilde.

It’s sort of like fetish porn for lit geeks.

The first four issues of The Unwritten — and their focus on a Harry Potter type character — seem like more of an aside now. The tale Mike Carey is really telling is one of an invisible war fought using prose. Stories are weapons that shape the cultural landscape of the entire planet. Various shadowy figures engineer incidents in order to control what is (or is not) written.

I love this series because the concept seems perfectly tailored for a monthly series. There are so many literary works that can be re-examined as being purposeful agents of change. It makes me a bit giddy. I’m eagerly awaiting the Nabokov one-shot.