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 and additional art by Yuko Shimizu.

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.

Ugh, I’ve been meaning to continue reading this series for so long, I had to restart it from the beginning because I could barely remember the first one. But fortunately, re-reading this is not exactly a chore since it’s an amazing comic.

I really love the entire idea of Tommy probably – but who knows – being fictional and kinda ending up in this world. The literary mafia who pull the strings and make and break writers and their ideas. The idea of the literary maps. Just the general focus of the power of literature and the exploration of that is pretty damn awesome.

And it helps, of course, that it has an exciting plot and I have no idea how things will continue, which is always nice. And exciting! (I’ve been pushing off reading number 2 until after writing this review so I still don’t know what’s gonna happen. Now I can finally find out.)

The horror writer convention – which is a nice persiflage of the various horror subgenres – was funny and spot-on. I would have loved to get more of that.

Tommy is a great character, even if not very likeable most of the time. At least you always know where he’s coming from. As opposed to Lizzy. I would really like to know what’s going on there.

In any case, I’m all in. The plot, the characters, the artwork – all is wonderful and this time I’ll read further in the series for sure.

Summarizing: Yes.