The Unwritten #19

Written by Mike Carey
Art by Peter Gross with Vincent Locke

With the last arc finished, and the interlude issue out of the way, Tom and his friends seem to be in the position of having to refocus and move the comic in a new direction.  They are 'walking the map', whatever that means, as Tom continues to follow the path that his father, Wilson, had left for him.

This brings Tom to Massachusetts, specifically to Herman Mellville's home, for reasons that have yet to make themselves clear.  Tom bones up on his Moby Dick, while Lizzie makes a surprising move, and Savoy figures out why he hasn't been feeling well.

Meanwhile, Pullmann, the Cabal's assassin and black ops operative, has a strange and portentous conversation with a Gepetto-like character.  I'm not sure where this section is supposed to lead, but it seems that, with Callander dead, there needs to be a new public face of the Cabal.

I like this series a lot, but I sometimes can't help feeling that Carey is just taking us around in circles some of the time, as much of this issue seems familiar.  I got a kick out of seeing Vincent Locke doing the inks on a few pages - he's an artist I've always admired but whom we haven't really heard from in ages.