“But in the end– without story– without the ability to step sideways from fact into hypothesis– human life is untenable.”
In this episode, Mike and Alex discuss how everything finally comes together in The Unwritten Volumes 7 and 8 (issues 36-49). Random details and story beats that have been sprinkled throughout the entire run thus far all begin to converge here, whether that’s in Brisbane, Australia or in the land of the dead (or in a story about the land of the dead; it’s unclear). What happens to the world if we don’t have stories? Where do we turn to to guidance and what is there to believe in if not the stories we tell ourselves every day? It takes going to Hell/Hades/wherever to find out, but we’re up for the journey. Just don’t look back on your way up the steps.
Things get a little weird next week, as we’ll be covering The Unwritten Volume 9 and the OGN The Unwritten: Tommy Taylor & The Ship That Sank Twice. We don’t spoil anything beyond what we’ve covered through each episode, but as a heads up, Volume 9 is a quasi-crossover with another Vertigo title, Fables! You don’t have to have read Fables to follow along in the story (Alex has; Mike hasn’t), but if you want to check it out, it’s really not that much: 157 issues (and counting), one of them being the length of a full trade paperback, a handful of one-shots, a half dozen or so spinoff series running anywhere from 6 to 50 issues, prose novels and short stories, video games adaptations- okay, maybe it is a bit of commitment. But if you’re enjoying The Unwritten, Fables is a great companion piece. A second cousin in the genre of meta-fiction stories about stories.
Go read Volume 9 and the OGN (and maybe all of Fables, who knows) for next week and we’ll be back right here to dive deep into all of it!