Happy New Year!

It’s a brand new year that dawns now in the studio, suspiciously resembling the old year except I seem to have a lot more empty champagne bottles that I did a week a ago.  Suspicious indeed. There was also an incident with a blizzard, but who really wants to hear about that?

The year starts off with a bang as the next issue of The Unwritten comes to a store near you on the thirteenth (number #9, because we’re all eagerly counting, right?).

If you can’t wait that long for a fix, the first volume of the trade comes to stores on the sixth! Who can resist? If you have yet to jump on board, you can still download the first issue for free. I would recommend the trade anyway, which aside from being shiny and having that delicious “new comic book trade smell,” also has extras. Sketches, bits of script prose, layouts AND a forward by Bill Willingham. I hear he writes comics.

Our very talented cover artist Yuko Shimizu gets a feather in her cap, The Unwritten #3 was awarded one of the best covers of 2009 over at Comic Book Resources.

The Unwritten gets high marks at Best Shots over on Newsarama.

Crave is all excited about the upcoming trade after naming us Best New Series of 2009.

ComicBookResources put us on a list of the 100 Best Comics of 2009, ranking a a whopping high #8.

The Unwritten was also named Best New Ongoing Series by Eye on Comics, for which we get an awesome anatomical award called a “glass eye.” Of all the body parts to choose from, an eye would probably make the most attractive trophy.

The Ventura Star gives us a delightful review and has good words to the people who complain we are still striking dangerously close the Harry Potter mythos: “Some may carp that ‘Tommy Taylor’ is too closely based on Harry Potter. But those critics should be made aware that Potter himself is uncomfortably similar to an earlier character, Tim Hunter of the ‘The Books of Magic.’ That was a comic-book series about a boy wizard published years ago by Vertigo/DC, mostly drawn by a fellow named Peter Gross who is now engaged drawing a series called ‘The Unwritten.’” Extra cool points and a pot of tea for these guys.