The Unwritten: Volume 10 (2014)

War Stories (2014)

Author: Mike Carey | Illustrator: Peter Gross | Page Count: 144

"Every dream is true, and every truth is broken. I tell the story, and I will not cease from telling it."

A relaunch of the series that underhandedly claimed to be a 'perfect jumping-on point' for new readers. But it's categorically not - it's a direct continuation of what came before (see Vol 09). To reinforce the chicanery the series got a slight name change (The Unwritten: Apocalypse) and had its numbering reset to 01. The collected editions continue the proper numbering, though, thankfully.

It's business as usual, which is to say that the journey towards repairing the damage done to the physical world after the fight with Leviathan continues down paths of strangeness and around corners of consequence. The Christ-like parallel in the 'fourteenth' Tommy Taylor™ novel (Vol 03) springs to mind, with fictional Tommy's real-world reflection, Tom Taylor, reborn and renewed.

Anyone who's ever spent time developing an original novel — or even attempted to do so — will maybe understand that written characters occasionally take on a life of their own. The author will want them to respond in a certain why to a given situation in order to further his/her personal agenda, but the written character(s) will instead dictate their own actions and destiny. That's kind of how it was for Wilson Taylor; he wrote a destiny for his son that his son rejected, and consequently Wilson lost control of his creation.

It pleased me once again to see that the geography of fiction and its relationship to physical world geography was still relevant. There are fictional and alternate histories, too, à la Harry Turtledove, intruding into the real world present. The 'rules' of reality have gone tits-up.

There's an interesting reversal involving the sweary rabbit, and an odd but semi-enjoyable perversion of a Biblical event. In short, the people are in crisis and the world is in flux.

An Unwritten character that I feared had been forgotten about makes a slight but important return and, pleasingly, has his 'dropping from the plot' situation turned into a strength. (There's at least one other important individual that hasn't returned - fingers crossed it happens soon.)

The cover art used for Vol 10 is from the first re-numbered issue and is by series regular Yuko Shimizu. It was maybe picked to represent the collection as a whole because it features Tom, whereas none of the other included issues do (see below). Personally, I like the others more.

The book collects together The Unwritten: Apocalypse, issues 01-05.

Individual covers. Click for FULL size: