Graphic Books Best Sellers and the Return of 'The Unwritten' The manga list is in flux this week, with seven newcomers. They include regulars on the list, like the latest volume of "Naruto," about the ninja in training, which lands at No. The other series involve battles ("Yu-Gi-Oh GX," at No. 2), pirates and treasures ("One Piece," at No. 3), werewolves and vampires ("Rosario+Vampire," Season II, at No. 4), a demon bridge ("Black Bird," at No. 5), romance ("Skip Beat!," at No. 6) and mourning ("Dengeki Daisy," at No. The latest volume of "The Unwritten," written by Mike Carey and illustrated by Peter Gross, went on sale this week. The series is about Tom Taylor and his father, an author who conjured up an incredibly popular boy-wizard character named Tommy Taylor, who was modeled on his son. An additional wrinkle: the fictional world seems to be leaking into the real world. And nefarious forces are afoot. When the first volume of the series landed on our paperback list in January 2010, Mr. Carey said a real-life inspiration was Christopher Robin Milne, who was the basis for the boy in the Winnie the Pooh stories written by his father, A.A. Milne. "I read the first volume of [Christopher Milne's] autobiography, "Enchanted Places," and he talked about the burden of growing up as inspiration for the character," Mr. Carey said. That was the seed for the character of Tom in the comic. I have to confess that I had just about given up on the series, which teemed with literary references that were going over my head. But Vol. 4, when Tom finds himself in the world of "Moby-Dick," started to turn me around. The deeper meaning of the hunt for the whale was made clearer in Vol. 5, when one of the characters tells Tom, "so the whale he sent you to find - it wasn't Moby Dick at all, was it? It was Leviathan. Thomas Hobbes's symbol for the mass of ordinary people who make up a society. This idea of the power of the collective unconsciousness gets greater play in the current volume, which also riffs on the origins of the comic book industry and its role as maker of new myths. Even more promising are the closing pages, which indicate that Tom is going to take a more aggressive role in dealing with the forces that have been hunting him.