Tom Taylor is trying to find his way back to his friends, moving through a number of children’s stories. Even when he’s reunited with his storyteller father, Wilson Taylor, who by writing a popular fantasy series where the main character shared Tom’s name, pretty much gave him the abilities to move through all manner of works of fiction, and his friends, the world is in chaos, as the Leviathan, the source of all the stories in the world, is gravely wounded. The boundaries between stories are thin and unreliable and it’s difficult to tell what is real and what is fiction anymore.
Tom and his little band of supporters need to find a way to heal the Leviathan, but it seems as if all the wicked forces in the world are working to stop them, controlled by Pullman, the eternal adversary. To complicate matters further, there’s the mysterious puppet-mistress, Madame Rausch, who seems to have her own agenda, separate from both Pullman and the Wilsons. In the end, it all comes down to one final quest and if Tom succeeds, he can save both our own reality and restore the balance to the worlds of fiction. If he’s thwarted, thing could go very bad indeed.
War Stories and Apocalypse collects issues 1-12 of the miniseries The Unwritten:Apocalypse, which is both the final installments of the entire run of the comic, yet somehow also seems made to stand on its own. Throughout the graphic novel series, author Mike Carey and artist Peter Gross has collaborated closely, exploring the importance of storytelling and the nature of stories.
Full review here.