The Unwritten #12

This is a stand-alone issue, and it's probably my favorite issue yet of the series.  It's probably not fair of me to do this, but I can't help comparing this series to Sandman.  And this issue felt to me like issue 8 of Sandman.  That was the standalone story that introduced Death, and it was the moment where the series really started to find itself.  That's what this issue felt like to me, like this series is really going to take off now.  I hope I'm right.

Anyway, this was a great story.  It's a parody of A. A. Milne's Winnie-the-Pooh stories, though the cover makes it look more like we're about to read an Alice in Wonderland parody, and I think that's probably done on purpose.  What's going on here is that we're in a place that's very much like the Hundred Acre Wood, and we're reading narration that's a lot like Milne's, but there's something off about the cute little rabbit character the narration is talking about.  He can hear the narrator, and he insists that his name is not Mr. Bun as the narrator would have it, but rather Pauly Bruckner.

As the story unfolds, we learn that he does not belong in this storybook world at all.  He has somehow been trapped there by Wilson Taylor, the author of the Tommy Taylor books (the Harry Potter clone that serves as the premise for this series).  Pauly had apparently tried to steal a map from Wilson Taylor, and Taylor somehow sent him into the fictional world of this Winnie-the-Pooh type story, where he is constantly annoyed by cute little brainless talking animals, and he is constantly trying to find some way to either escape or kill himself, but has a lot of trouble doing either.

The Milne parody is very good, and you can tell that the writer, Mike Carey, clearly loves the source material.  And the interactions between this foul-mouthed criminal from the real world and the Pooh character knockoffs are really funny.  The story also has a wonderfully dark ending that I won't ruin.

I think, much like issue 8 of Sandman, this issue is probably going to serve as a great jumping-on point for new readers, so I highly recommend picking this one up.