Brian Truitt

USA TODAY

%27The Unwritten%27 heads toward a series end with %27Apocalypse%27

The new issue takes Tom Taylor back to creation and through literary animal worlds

%27The Unwritten%27 has long explored the fine line between fiction and reality

The end of the world means a new beginning for Tom Taylor, the key character of Vertigo Comics' The Unwritten.

After 59 issues of adventurously exploring the delicate balance between reality and fiction, Tom goes all the way back to creation on the first page of The Unwritten Vol. 2: Apocalypse No. 1, written by Mike Carey and illustrated by Peter Gross. The new issue also sets up the final 12 parts of the series where Tom visits a variety of beasts and creatures through literature as he makes his way back to what's left of London.

"It's a recapitulation of evolution, but it's not the evolution of a species. It's the evolution of a story or the evolution of an individual," Carey says

"It's Tom kind of rebuilding himself from nothing as he walks through these worlds, and the animal-fables metaphor gives us a cool way of visualizing that."

Since they started the series in 2009 and introduced Tom, the inspiration behind the Harry Potter-esque kid wizard Tommy Taylor (or is the other way around?) and a series of children's novels, Carey and Gross would often talk about what the world would be like if we lost our connection to stories.

So, that's the exact landscape they wanted to create in Apocalypse, which follows the huge climax of the recent crossover between The Unwritten and Bill Willingham's Fables series.

"In a metafictional way, in the life of the book we've done a graphic novel, one spinoff series and now this," Carey says of the final 12-issue maxiseries of sorts. "There's something satisfying about that, too, the fact that we're charting this path through the tropes of the medium.

"We just need a movie and a TV show before we're done, and it'll be perfect!" Gross adds.

The artist brings in elements of children's stories, different illustration styles and experimental storytelling as Tom bounces from tale to tale, running into everyone from the literary mongoose Rikki Tikki Tavi to the White Rabbit from Alice in Wonderland.

"It all worked because it's Tom remaking himself, Tom remaking his world," Gross says.

There are shout-outs to previous story arcs, too, according to Carey. Rikki Tikki Tavi starred in a story from The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling, who tied into issue 5, and Tom's stop in Willowbank Wood echoes the 12th issue of The Unwritten.

"There was also a sense that we were moving though time, from Aesop to Hans Christian Andersen toward the 19th-century fantasy of Lewis Carroll, and then the modern era," Carey says. "There was a direction to the journey."

Doing his research, Gross found an online analysis of animals in fiction and the patterns they fall into. "There are animal characters that don't speak at all, there are animal characters who do speak, and there are characters who are animals that are basically substitutes for humans," he says. There's evolution in animal characters, too, that we tried to touch on a little bit."

No one has evolved as much in the series as Tom, however. The main character of The Unwritten began as a self-centered low-grade celebrity with a chip on his shoulder about his famous author father — and the fictional boy magician who haunted him wherever he went — and wasn't anywhere near the headspace one needs when facing the end of the world.

Tom's getting an epic makeover in Apocalypse and "certainly on any spiritual level would not have been capable of that in the first issue" of the series, Gross says. "He wouldn't have had the beginning of a sense of who he is or what he wants to be to undergo that path."

The character's learned a lot when he ventured to the underworld to save his friend Lizzie and much more in his interactions with the fairy-tale characters of Fables, according to Carey.

As The Unwritten nears its big finale, the writer says, Tom "has more of a sense of who and what he is now, and his perspective on the difference between reality and fiction has completely changed — mostly because of what he was told by Frau Totenkindler and what he found to be true when he was on his travels.

"Bascially, Tom is walking into the end of the world and that's kind of a done deal. There's not a lot he can do about that, but there are different trajectories you can come out of that on. He has to decide what he wants to do and what he wants to make of himself in this new reality."

Adds Gross: "He's gone from questions of his own individuality to having a task before him. He's got a broken world that he thinks he can do something about. It's not about him, it's not about who he is. They're not personal questions anymore — it's big questions for everyone."

Stories are the lifeblood of the Unwritten universe, and quite literally the world where Tom, his friends Lizzie and Richie and the rest of the characters exist.

Carey figures it's not too unlike our own.

"We flatter ourselves that we live in reality, but reality is a consensual illusion that has to be refreshed constantly by means of narratives," he says. "Not just fictions but all the stories that we tell ourselves, which would include religions and philosophies and the daily news and so on.

"Stories are the connective tissue of civilization," Carey adds. "They bridge gaps between generations and individuals and they knit us together. They give us a cohesion."

Gross himself is fascinated by the idea that people tell the same stories over and over again and have never lost that endless appetite for it.

"Partly it's because that's how we define the world and we have to keep telling ourselves that story in order to believe the fiction we've created around us in a way," the illustrator says. "We're constantly propping up our ability to define reality. Maybe. That's a question I have when were doing this."

The end is upon them, though, and Carey describes it as "bittersweet."

Now that they've entered that endgame, Gross says, "the storytelling becomes about the stories you decide not to tell that you thought about telling as you're wrapping things up. You're dropping away the threads and focusing in on that last one.

"It's a very different process because it's not about all this forward-thinking 'We can do this, we can do that.' There is a little sadness in it for me."

Fans can expect "an unmaking and a remaking" in the final act of The Unwritten, Carey says.

"We're going to answer all your questions about reality and life in the next 11 issues," Gross quips. "If you want to be around for the founding of the new religion, you really should read these last issues."