1602 Volume 8

This volume is the final issue of Neil Gaiman's eight-issue miniseries 1602, subtitled "In Which We Discover the Way of the World." The story follows the first seven issues: in Elizabethan England, where the heavens behave strangely and heretical "witchbreed" appear on all sides, the Queen's intelligence officer Nicholas Fury, her physician Stephen Strange, Virginia Dare stranded in the New World, her guardian "Rojhaz," and a host of mutants and voyagers are all drawn into the same rift in time. In this issue, the group finally converges at the Roanoke colony and finds the singularity in time that can send the visitor from the future back to his own era; yet the man from the future refuses to return, for he wants to use this new continent to build a better world with his own hands. Fury trades a lie for his trust and finally plunges with him into the singularity, and the universe is saved. The Watchers give Uatu a miniature, rescued universe, allowing this timeline to continue as an independent reality. Reed and Javier plan a free nation without racial distinctions, Banner transforms into a towering shadow, and young Peter chooses to stay with Virginia, only to be bitten at the end by a radioactive spider. The book's seventeenth-century-engraving-style covers and digital coloring give it a distinctive historical texture.