the unwritten allusions

To annotate the literary references in the ongoing Vertigo comic "The Unwritten" by Mike Carey and Peter Gross, starting with issue #1.

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I'd love to work on this, yes! My username is Miss-K-Tonic.

Oh, it actually looks like you need to submit an email.  Can you send me that?  put the (@) in parentheses so it doesn’t get refused by tumblr.

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You are starting a noble pursuit. This is an incredible comic, and I can't get enough of it! It is truly awe-inspiring to be reading while it's still happening unfolding unraveling, when the end is...unwritten.

Thank you!  I had to stop briefly due to time constraints but hope to resume in the summer.

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Our Mutual Friend was Charles Dicken's last novel and considered to be one of his most complex critiques of British class structures.  Lizzie Hexam is one of the characters and apparently like, the nicest person, ever.  (Dickens's Lizzie, unlike Tom's, is illiterate.)

Tom has not read the book.  (Confession: I have not, either.)

In The Unwritten, Lizzie would be the "mutual friend" between Wilson Taylor and Tom Taylor.

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I am so confused because as far as I can tell, University College and King's College are not the same school.   In fact, the two schools are rivals!

In The Unwritten Issue #2, Tom Taylor decides to go to University College to try and hunt down Lizzie Hexam.  The school tells him that Lizzie does not go to University College.  But in Issue 1, Lizzie clearly says to Tom at TommyCon that she goes to King's College.  Even if King's College is simply part of her alibi and she isn't a real student there, Tom is still looking in the wrong place.

This is the second inconsistency I was able to find in the first two issues (the other being the ethnicity of Tom's alleged biological parents, the Eastern European Drasics.)  I am not sure if these are slip ups, or deliberate to try and show how tentative 'reality' is in the book.

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Sherlock Holmes is Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's iconic, fictional detective hero.  He was featured in four novels and 56 stories and has been in countless film and television adaptations.  Holmes is inspired for forensic physician Dr. Joseph Bell.  Doyle worked as Dr. Bell's clerk (so he was Bell's own "Dr. Watson.")

Sherlock Holmes's famous quote is:

"When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth".

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221B Baker Street is the apartment of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's famous fictional detective, Sherlock Holmes.  

Tom is right, Doyle made up 221B.  Baker Street was not extended until years later.  There was actually a big squabble between the Abbey National Building Society (located at 219-229 Baker Street from 1930s onward) and the Sherlock Holmes Museum (set up in 1990, located at 237-241 Baker Street, but with a plaque reading 221B) over which building was the real 221B.  

In the comic, Rupert Swope drops Tom Taylor off in front of 186 Baker Street, a few blocks away.  I was able to find the exact spot on the street where Tom is dropped off, right in front of the HSBC bank and the Box Office for City Tours.

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Winnie the Pooh's home has a sign above the door labeled "Sanders."  That is why Tom scoffs at the alias and jokes about The Hundred Acre Wood (Pooh's home.)

Kensington is a district of London, England and the setting of many stories, including Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens. (Peter Pan is similar to Tommy Taylor in that both are based after 'real' people.)  Kensington is first mentioned in the Domesday Book dating back to 1086.

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In his work The Republic, the ancient Greek philospher Plato used the Allegory of the Cave to illustrate the nature of education.

Plato tells a story about his teacher Socrates and his brother Glaucon.  In the story, Socrates describes people who have lived in a cave their entire lives, staring only at a wall.  Behind the wall, there is a fire.  The prisoners stare at shadows as their slavers pass by.  

Socrates tells Glaucon that the prisoners in the cave can only understand reality from the shadows passing by.  A true philosopher is like a prisoner who is free from staring at shadows, someone who comes to understand that the shadows were not reality and instead sees what was casting the shadows.  Once freed, how could you ever go back?

If Wilson views fictions as shadows on a cave, who is casting them?

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Jesus Christ is often referred to as Jesus of Nazareth.    (Nazareth being a town in Israel.)  Nazareth was Jesus's childhood home. 

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Many of the greatest American authors originated from, wrote in, or wrote about New York.  Taylor references them here:

Stephen Crane, best known for the Civil War novel The Red Badge of Courage (1865)

F. Scott Fitzgerald, whose books, including The Great Gatsby, romanticized New York City.

Damon Runyon was more of a newspaperman than an author, but his relationship and characterization of New York actually created a new archetype of New Yorker: Runyonesque.  His short stories inspired the musical Guys and Dolls.

Dorothy Parker (ostensibly the Parker Wilson Taylor is referring to) wrote for the New Yorker and was a founding member of the Algonquin Round Table society of artists and critics.

Bel Kaufman wrote the book Up the Down Staircase which captured the spirit of New York City college life.

Arthur Miller, the famous Broadway playwright who wrote The Crucible andDeath of a Salesman

John Dos Passos is one of the Lost Generation writers, most famous for his U.S.A. Trilogy: The 42nd Parallel, Nineteen Nineteen, and The Big Money.  He is famous for critiquing the gaps between rich and poor.

Saul Bellow, a famous Jewish American writer who won the Nobel Prize for Humboldt's Gift.  

Thomas Wolfe, a New York City author whose books Look Homeward, Angel and Of Time and the River inspired many other authors, including Jack Kerouac and Ray Bradbury.

Wilson Taylor refers to these authors as "the architects...the master engineers."  Engineers of what?  Social engineering?  

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Wilson Taylor also put a pin in New Amsterdam (he's rather Eurocentric in his literary references, don't you think?)  New Amsterdam is now known as New York.  

In 1664, the English took over New Amsterdam and renamed the area to be New York (After the Duke of York and Albany.)  A decade later, the Dutch won it back and tried to name it New Orange.

New Orange.  Yeah.  

In 1674, a year after New Orange, the Dutch traded the land to England for what is now modern day Suriname.  The New York name was then reinstated.

(I assume no one consulted the original Lenape inhabitants of these lands.)

In Issue 1, initially Tommy's next stop after TommyCon London is New York City.  This plan quickly gets derailed.

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Wilson Taylor puts a pin on his map of Nuremberg.  To Wilson Taylor, Nuremberg is one of the places in history that was most masterful in affecting stories.

Nuremberg is a city in Germany that was significant in the Nazi Era.  Wilson Taylor's use of the word "Volk" is intentional and refers to the concept of "community" that Hitler used to shape his power base and frame Jews as the other.

It was the site of several Nazi conventions including their largest events, the Nuremberg rallies.  Triumph of the Will, a famous propaganda film by Leni Riefenstahl, was filmed in Nuremberg.  Many laws and decisions made to persecute the Jews were made at Nuremberg.

During World War II, Nuremberg was a military production site and housed a death camp that was used for slave labor.  After the war, Nuremberg was the location of the trials prosecuting German officials involved in the Holocaust and other war crimes.  There, an international tribute oversaw the Nuremberg Trials.  The city was selected for the trial in part because of its symbolic role:  the seat of Nazi fervor and power would now be the site of the party's final defeat.

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The Waldseemüller map, or Universalis Cosmographia, is a map from 1507 created by German cartographer Martin Waldseemüller.  It is the first map to ever name the continents of the Americas "America."  It was also the first to depict the Americas as not connected to Asia, and separated by the Pacific Ocean.

At first Martin Waldseemuller decided to name the 'new world' "America" baased on a letter by Amerigo Vespucci  (possibly forged) claiming to be the one who discovered and named America.

 Six years after the map was published Waldseemuller had second doubts about naming the land after Vuspucci.  In reprints of his famous atlas, he decided to relabel the continents "Terra Incognita."  By that point, it was too late.  The name America had stuck.   As Wilson Taylor notes, "a story becomes encoded in an image, and the image changes the face of the world."

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Maybe someone can help me out here because I really don't know what "twagged" means.  Urban Dictionary says that "twag" means "moron" but that would mean Pullman is saying he should have "made a moron out of the little fucker."

Pullman, by the way, is a shout out from Carey and Gross to British author Philip Pullman.  Pullman is most famous for his series His Dark Materials.  The books (the most famous one is The Golden Compass) are controversial for pushing atheist ideas (and challenging one of the world's most famous narratives, Christianity.) 

Your henchman character is named “Pullman”; I assume that’s a Philip Pullman nod?

I guess it is a nod to Philip Pullman. I absolutely love the Dark Materials books and so it is sort of a little homage that he’ll never notice.

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Who is this mystery woman working with Swope?  Is Swope playing dumb withTom?

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The ethnicity of the Drasics seems to change from issue to issue.  In the Magic Trumpet online blog article in Issue #1, they are Bosnian.

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"We can’t say a story is just a story.  Those people all died for stories. They died for either a narrative they believed in, or a narrative that somebody else believed in and imposed on them.”  - Mike Carey

The Trojan War is one of the most famous wars ever fought as documented in literature, but historians are not even really sure the war actually happened. The Greeks went to war with Troy because Paris of Troy stole Helen--storied for being the most beautiful woman in the world--from her husband Menelaus of Sparta.

Women have been burned as witches for centuries, all around the world, based on allegations of witchcraft that are also strongly rooted in misogyny. Witch burnings persist today, particularly in sub Sahara and South Africa.

Ethel and Julius Rosenberg were American communists who were caught spying for the Soviets and executed in 1953. This trial was controversial because many people believed they were innocent and others felt their sentence was too harsh. Many high profile people protested their execution, including Albert Einstein. Historians believe they were in fact guilty based on information from Nikita Khruschev's memoirs and testimony from other spies for the Soviets. They are frequently referenced in popular culture.

During this time, several innocent people, mostly Jewish Americans, were also implicated simply because they had the last name Rosenberg.

Sacco and Vanzetti were two Italian American alleged anarchists convicted of bank robbery murders and executed in 1927. It is unclear if they were actually guilty or not. Following their indictment for murder, many anarchists retaliated by setting off bombings around the world. Several miscarriages of justice occurred during their trial. Many of their supporters felt they had been convicted for having anarchists beliefs even though they were likely innocent of the crime. Albert Einstein also campaigned for their release. Following their execution, violent demonstrations spread across the world, including in Geneva, London, Paris, Amsterdam, and Tokyo. More than 10,000 people attended their funeral viewing in Boston, Massachusetts. They are famous for not having the right to a fair trial and continue to be referenced in stories today.