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Why I Love Mike Carey!

Welcome to the Why I Love Comics column where I have a very special one for my long time readers. For those that don't know, I am a huge fan of Mike Carey and The Unwritten has hands down become one of my favorite books any company is publishing. Plus his X-Men books are hands down some of the best, especially when he's using some of the less used X-characters. Also in this interview you can see my turning into the comic book equivalent of Inside the Actors Studio's host James Lipton. Anyways without further ado, here's the interview!

Eric Ratcliffe: My first real question to you Mike, you've been on a main X-Men book for a while now, been playing in the X-office for a while now through a few major changes. What keeps you staying around marvel's merry mutants?

Mike Carey: It carries on being fun!

I like superhero stories a lot, and the X-Men was one of the comics I read as a kid that really had a big impact on me. There's something very cool about writing additional chapters in their story: it feels like a great privilege in some ways to be allowed to do that.

Writing a book in a wider line brings its own challenges - logistically, I mean, in that none of the creative decisions you take can ever be simple or self-contained. You always have to be aware of who else is using the same characters as you and where the wider arc is going. I had a great idea in my first year on X-Men for a story involving Cassandra Nova, but Joss Whedon beat me to the draw. And just by bringing Cable into X-Men, I destabilised Fabian Nicieza's Cable and Deadpool book. Stuff like that can be stressful at times, but the pleasure you can get from working on such an insanely wide canvas outweighs the logistical headaches.

ER: Before Creed's timely death in Jeph Loeb's Wolverine story many fans point to your take on the character to fleshing him out more, do you miss having Sabretooth around? Is he one of those characters you'd love to play with one day?

MC: And that's another example of the same thing! Yeah, I would have loved to have Creed around for longer: I thought the interplay between him and the other members of Rogue's team was working really well. People criticised me up front for including him in the team, thinking that I was going to "reform" him in the way that many other X-Men villains (Rogue, Juggernaut, Mystique for a long time) have been reformed. But that was never the plan. he remained a psychopath - always dangerous, totally impervious to reason, impossible to domesticate.

Also we got to play beats like having Cable fire Sabretooth like a living torpedo into Pandemic's lab, and having him get around the Plague Dogs' regenerative power by eating them. He was all kinds of fun.

But it was a timing thing. Rogue's team was like a time bomb, and the logic of Messiah Complex called for it to explode. If Loeb hadn't done the Wolverine/Sabretooth face-off, Sabretooth would have defected back to the Marauders and he would have left the building that way instead.

ER: Talking about Cable being on the team a little, it did set up something very interesting in the team book where Wade (Deadpool) seemed to fully take over the book. Was there ever a point where you wanted to have Wade appear as well?

MC: No, really not. I love Deadpool, but he's such an extreme character. I think he changes the texture and mood of the books where he appears, and what I was trying to do with that team would just have been skewed too much by adding him in. Fabian's achievement in creating that team-up - making it credible and even poignant - is something I hugely admire.

I never thought about that aspect of team books before I started writing X-Men. You really need to be careful with the big, vivid, larger-than-life characters. You shouldn't use them unless you're prepared to give them room to breathe, and I wasn't convinced that I could do that for Deadpool. And it would have made Fabe come after me with a tire-iron, given that I'd already swiped his other lead character!

ER: Have you been a long term reader of the other X-books yourself?

MC: Long-term, but intermittent. I read the original run in UK reprints, then came on board for the Claremont run on Uncanny quite early on (around #110 or #111, I think). Then I read it religiously right through the introduction of the New Mutants and X-Factor, after which I was more or less dipping in - reading big arcs and crossovers, keeping a watching brief. I can remember reading an article in a fanzine about Maggott and Marrow, who were both introduced around the same time, and thinking "hmm, I'm missing a lot of stuff here."

Basically I had a good overview of the X-Men's history, but there were gaps which I took steps to fill when I took over on Adjectiveless.

ER: Another spotlight for me was the beginning of Sam, aka Cannonball, kind of stepping up to the big leagues; was he always on your list of characters you wanted to do something with?

MC: Yeah, Sam was one of my first draft choices. I liked the fact that we'd seen him grow up and grow into his role. He was one of the characters I felt I had the best handle on, along with Rogue and Iceman - and I picked those three to be the stable core of a very unstable team.

ER: So who originally pulled you into writing the book? Was it a gig that was offered to you or did you pitch for it?

MC: It was offered to me - and at that time, I'd done so little superhero stuff, I thought it had to be a wind-up. A friend playing a joke or something. So the conversation went something like this. "Hi, I'm Michael Marts, the editor on X-Men." "No you're not. How naive do you think I am?" "Uhh... I really am Michael Marts. is this a bad time?"

It was really an invitation to pitch, of course, as these things usually are. Mike wanted me to come up with a statement of intent. What would I want to do if I took over the book, and who would I want to use? I put together some copious notes - running off at the mouth being my specialist subject - and sent them in, and a week later I got the green light. Things happen fast at Marvel.

ER: I remember at the time you were coming on to the book Ed had just started on Uncanny and there seemed to be a smaller amount of X-books. Are you actively participating in the summits for the entire brand?

MC: Yeah, I have been. That's how the X-Men office works. The big arcs are worked out by all the writers and all the editors together. That reached its apogee with Messiah Complex, which we were planning for at least a year. That's why so many of the story arcs in all the books dovetailed into Messiah Complex so neatly: we all felt like we had joint ownership of that story.

ER: Speaking of Messiah Complex, you seem to really work well with other writers, that being the first big example of it as well as teaming up with Daniel Way for the Original Sin crossover. How much collaboration goes into projects like those?

MC: A lot - which of course makes it very labour-intensive compared to a normal issue. If the final story comes together well, it's really worth it, but there's no denying that it can be tough. Fortunately the X-Men writers are a uniformly great bunch, and very easy to work with. Both on Messiah Complex and on Original Sin, the process was smooth and without pitfalls. And on Original Sin, we actually had to arrange a smooth hand-over in the middle of the opening issue. We could have crashed and burned on that one!

ER: Working with Bachalo on art must have been a blast for you, getting those pages back as he completed them? He seems like a very energetic artist.

MC: Oh yeah, you bet. That was really exhilarating - and really helpful, too. Chris's experience in the X-Men universe and confidence with the characters were a great resource. I'd work with him again like a shot, either on an X-book or on something completely different.

ER: Something that stood out with me right before the book changed it's name was the evolving relationship between Iceman and Mystique, which you then followed up on in the 5 issue anthology series. Was this more about exploring mystique's character and adding a new level to her? Or giving Bobbie a new love interest to play with?

MC: I thought it would be an interesting development for both of them - for Bobby in putting him in this hopelessly compromised position, and for Mystique in giving her a new Achilles heel. I wasn't altogether happy with the Manifest destiny story: the journey worked, but I think I could have built to a better end point rather than just "you'll see me one last time". The truth is that I blew the pacing there, and didn't leave myself enough room at the end to play out the emotional beats that were needed. But the way they interacted in Adjectiveless itself... well, I thought that worked. You saw Bobby's reluctance, his intense unwillingness to believe that Mystique was on the level, her playing him perfectly - and then realising that actually it was a little too perfect. She got tangled up in the role she was playing.

ER: So do you think you'll ever follow up on Mystique and Iceman again? or was that the last nail in the coffin to that subplot between the two characters?

MC: No, I think there still needs to be a pay-off. I even know what it has to be, in broad terms. I'd like to bring it in, but it might have to be a year down the line...

ER: While the book became Legacy and one of my favorite characters came into being featured I found myself really curious on your take on him. I'm talking of course about Cain Marko, the Juggernaut. In recent years we've viewed the man doing his best to do the right thing. Do you think he's back to being completely bad or is he on some middle ground?

MC: I think he's completely himself again, which makes him very largely bad. It's like the only way he can channel the full power of Cyttorak is by putting himself - his internal workings, his mind and soul - into a certain configuration. And he was pulling against that, but now he's not. He's stopped trying to find any common ground between himself and Xavier.

This was me picking up on hints in the World War Hulk tie-in, but also following my own instincts. I don't think you can tame the Juggernaut: I think in a sense it did violence to the character to try to pull that off. You can't be a little bit unstoppable, or only implacable on weekdays. He's a character of absolutes, and if he's tormented by the choices he's made, he's mostly able to channel that suffering into rage, where it's directly useful.

ER: I find it speaks a lot for your writing style that using Charles Xavier and barely having the man throw a punch the entire time and still keeping the story fresh and enticing - was it difficult to pull off? Or does it help that Charles has always tried to resist to resorting to violence?

MC: It helped that I'd written Lucifer for seventy-odd issues! I'm not saying Charles is like Lucifer in terms of personality, but they've got certain features in common - the main one being immense power that's rarely seen in action. So the way you respond to that is you avoid putting them in certain kinds of situation, or else you put other characters in the mix who can handle the physical side of things. When the Assassins Guild comes after Xavier, they meet Gambit - and when Daken finally pops his claws on the Professor, it's Wolverine who steps in between them - stuff like that. Which means that when you DO write a scene like the one I wrote in #225, where Xavier takes down the Acolytes single-handed, it has all the more force.

ER: The series' focus is once again on Rogue now... what keeps drawing you back to her as a character?

MC: It's always hard to say what attracts you to a character in the first place. By this time, it's that I've got a stake in Rogue's story and a sense of where she's going. I know I don't own her - or even a small piece of her - but you reach a point where you want to stay involved.

Before that, I think it was both her power set and her personality - I found them attractive and I found them exciting from a narrative point of view - I thought I could do interesting things with them.

ER: Have you been enjoying working under the new status quo that Matt Fraction set up?

MC: It's a very dynamic status quo - lots of quo, very little stasis. :) Yeah, the books as a whole are in a great place right now. I like the big picture stuff I'm getting to play off.

ER: In the solicits it looks like you'll be playing around with Colossus and Nightcrawler, will they be in the book full time starting with that story?

MC: No, just for Necrosha. I'm still working to the "solo book" brief, so everybody besides Rogue is officially rotating supporting cast. You'll tend to see, though, as in the Prof X days, that the characters I like best will rotate into view a whole lot...

ER: Your other marvel project is currently teaming with Alex Ross in bringing the original Human Torch Jim Hammond back into the marvel u, how did you get involved with the project and what pulled you in to being on board with it?

MC: Alex had wanted to do something with the Torch and Toro for a long time, and had a lot of ideas for how to bring them back into current continuity. I came on board with some ideas of my own about the Mad Thinker and the nature of the Torch's artificial life. We talked, and - appropriately enough - the core concepts for the series sparked pretty quickly.

I've got a lot of respect and affection for those golden age characters. There's something huge and iconic about them, just by virtue of the fact that they were superheroes before that term even existed.

ER: So lets talk about the big book that has got a lot of spotlight with it only being 5 issues in, The Unwritten. I remember reading the first issue and my thoughts went to it being galaxy quest for Harry Potter fans. But of course by issue 2 that had all changed. What was the original pitch to vertigo like? Still the same idea?

MC: The pitch went through a lot of different versions, but the core idea has remained intact through all of that time. It was two idea originally, one coming from Peter and the other from me, and then we joined them together using a third idea - the son cursed by his father's legacy - as the glue. The inspiration for that was Christopher Milne, the Christopher Robin of the Winnie the Pooh books, but we changed a lot of the furniture around to make the story seem more directly relevant to the present day.

ER: By the opening of issue 3 the books tone changed, at least for me. Is it safe to say the book is really a love letter to fiction writing in general?

MC: Yeah, very much so. It's a reverie on how important stories are in our lives - how they become the basis on which we live, and by which we understand ourselves. "Words support like bone", as Peter Gabriel said in the song Mercy Street. Admittedly we then introduce an irritant or complicating factor in that process: what if the stories we tell ourselves have been tainted at source by a third party with a hidden agenda? But you're right, it's about the wonders of fictional worlds, and the colours they add to the real world.

ER: Was that actual prose taken from Mary Shelly's Frankenstein?

MC: Most of it was. I cheated at the end. "I ought to be thy Adam" is one of my favourite passages from the novel.

ER: Tom at first wasn't too much of a likable character but as we've slowly gone on in his story it seems he's very much a victim of living in his fathers shadow. How will he be changing as a character? Especially now that he seems to be in jail?

MC: You have to let him grow on you a little. I think when we first meet Tom he's a very passive character, just rolling with the punches and feeling sorry for himself. But adversity brings out the best in him. When he realises that his life isn't a mess by accident - that people have had these plans for him, and there's a reason behind everything that's happened to him - he starts to take more control and to use the smarts he's always had.

ER: So magic is very much alive in this universe? Would it be safe to assume that some of that magic is connected to the power of words in stories?

MC: There's another word besides magic for what we're seeing. But yeah, it's all tied into this question of the power of stories and the way stories work on us.

ER: The young woman that seems to keep playing a big role in tom's life, will we be finding out about her origins soon enough? Or are you having fun keeping her as one of the bigger mysteries in the series?

MC: There's more than one mystery about Lizzie's origins and background. All will be revealed, but not until the second year of the book, in a story we're thinking of as HOW MANY ROADS? Like issue 5, that's probably going to be one of the book's defining moments.

ER: Something I'm really curious about is this a full fledged ongoing or do you guys have an end point in mind for the series down the line?

MC: We have an end point - but as with Lucifer, we'd really like that end point to be about five or six years away. This is a big, big story, and it needs a lot of room to breathe. With Lucifer we had a cast of hundreds and a lot of plot threads that wove in and out of the book and all resolved finally in the Morningstar arc. We'd like to do something similar with The Unwritten - build that momentum and that richness, so when the pay-off comes, it will come with a sound like thunder.

ER: Will we ever see anymore historical figures play a part in the series like issue 5? To me it felt a little like the Venture Brothers who manage to do it in a way that makes sense and never feels heavy handed.

MC: We're telling a story that - in the end - spreads across most of human history. Well, all of human history since the discovery of writing, and a little bit before that. Within these interstitial stories, the one-offs, we'll be jumping around a lot from one era to another. The main arcs will almost without exception take place in the present day and deal with the ramifications of Tom's odyssey and his battle against the shadowy forces that are conspiring to destroy him.

ER: Issues 3 and 4 had some of my favorite material in them. I really appreciated as a horror fan some of the arguments the characters had. Is any of it your personal thoughts on the genre currently? Or was it just based on actual arguments you've heard about how current horror is?

MC: It was a personal view of some trends within modern horror - and of course, when you encapsulate them like that, it sounds like a critique. Thumbnail sketches of any genre, or any text for that matter, have a way of sounding reductionist and dismissive. We weren't trying to do that, although we were taking a sly dig at how cinematic horror sometimes ditches complexity and nuance in favour of in-your-face visual effect. Frankenstein the book is a very different animal from any of the Frankenstein movies, and I don't exclude the Kenneth Branagh re-hash. Shelley is just doing more and saying more with that central situation of one sentient being making another sentient being: she has a philosophical axe to grind.

But, you know, I say that, and then I look at some recent Japanese and Korean horror, where the horror of the intensely realised moment is taken to spectacular heights. A movie like Tale of Two Sisters has just enough plot to cover its nakedness, and just enough of a resolution to make you feel like the events fit together in some sense. But you watch it for the pants-wetting terror of a half-dozen scenes, and they do what they do so well that you never feel cheated. So I'm kind of a hypocrite there.

ER: So Mike, what can readers expect coming up in all your books? Tease away sir!

MC: In Legacy... Emplate will be followed by another even scarier villain (and there aren't many X-verse big bads you could say that about). Also, in 2010, both the final part of the Messiah Child trilogy and the return of the Children of the Vault.

In The Unwritten... our prison break story, which is not like any other prison break story. Then Nazis (and Josef Goebbels in particular). Then bunny rabbits. Then whales. Lots of whales, in all sizes from vast to cosmic. And the return of... but that would be telling.

In the Torch... Torches. At least three, arguably four.

A lot of thanks to Mike for taking the time to talk with me. You can find The Unwritten monthly from Vertigo, The Torch and X-Men Legacy are monthly from Marvel. The Unwritten is one of the best books on the stands, hands down and I definitely recommend it to anyone who loves fiction.

Eric Ratcliffe is a young writer/pop culture journalist/interviewer currently working on pitching a project named the Hunter chronicles. When not reading his weekly stack Eric can be found watching DVDs, playing on his 360 (gamertag: Zack Hunter) or just surfing online trying to find a scoop or two. Brand new to the Comic Related family, Eric is a fun new voice. Eric shops at TJ's Collectibles. Visit them on the web at www.tjcollect.com!