Tommy Taylor and the Bogus Identity is the first book (first five issues) in The Unwritten series of comics, written by Mike Carey and art by Peter Gross.

Plot:
Wilson Taylor wrote a famous series of books about child wizard Tommy Taylor – modelled after his own son. Before he could complete the series with the fourteenth book, though, Wilson vanished without a trace. Now Tom is living off his father’s estate, going from convention to convention and is generally pretty frustrated with his life and his father. At one of the usual conventions, a woman confronts him and raises the question whether Tom isn’t actually Tommy Taylor, having crossed over from the fictional world. This spawns a series of investigations and nutjobs and completely disrupts Tom’s life until he starts questioning his own identity.

The Unwritten is absolutely excellent: The story is interesting, the art is gorgeous and I’m eagerly awaiting book number 2.

I love it when books blur the boundaries between “fictional” and “real”. And this comic does a great job with it. The combination of the books written by Wilson Taylor and the real world; the incorporation of the geography of stories – it just works really well.

The plot itself works really well – though I think that I have figured out a few things, there are other things that remain unclear. And I like the characters, especially Tom.

The artwork is just great. I liked the general look of the series, but especially the covers by Yuko Shimizu are absolutely stunning. In the paperback, we also get some of her sketches and they are wonderful as well.

The only thing I could have done without was the introduction by Bill Willingham, which was mostly about how great and groundbreaking Bill Willingham is.

Summarising: Metafiction at its best.