Mike Carey: The Interview
Continuing this year's guest interview series, Octocon 2009 Guest of Honour, Mike Carey, has allowed us a peak into his life, his writing process, and his career. We talk Vertigo, Felix Castor, and writing with his family...
Octocon: Before you began writing full time, you were a teacher. Is there a moment that you remember the whole comics thing clicking into place and it replaced teaching as "the thing that you do"?
Mike Carey: No, I don't think there was a transforming moment. It was a slow accumulation of thoughts and ideas, really, leading to a decision which - by the time I made it - seemed inevitable. If I'm honest, it was something I always wanted to do, but I didn't formulate it to myself in terms of "being a writer". I just found myself drifting gently into a situation where my comics work was making my teaching work harder and harder to do well, and I had to make a choice.
Except that, being me, I made the choice provisionally. I took a sabbatical first - and it was only a part-time sabbatical at that. For a year I taught on Mondays and Tuesdays, and continued to run Media courses at the college where I was working, and then I wrote for the rest of the week. In some ways, it was the hardest year of my life - except maybe for teacher training. At the end of the year, I knew I wanted to stick with this new career.
O: Really glad you did! It sounds like a really tough decision. Was it always a goal to work for the major American publishers like Marvel and DC, or were they something that just came along as a nice surprise?
MC: I always wanted to write for Vertigo - DC's mature readers imprint. I loved most of the books they were putting out, and it seemed like a natural home for me. I went through a stage of sending copies of everything I got published to the Vertigo editors, along with letters of the "Gee, I sure would like to work for you" variety. It turned out to be a good approach. Alisa Kwitney sent me some very encouraging letters after Inferno came out, and finally offered me Sandman Presents Lucifer on the back of the Doctor Faustus book I did with Mike Perkins at Caliber.
O: Do you still see Vertigo as the perfect fit for you? You have expanded to more all ages work, especially with Confessions of a Blabbermouth for Minx...
MC: It's true I love to mix and match - to do lots of different kinds of story for different audiences. I think it keeps you fresh as a writer to do that - keeps you from getting stuck in a rut and pastiching yourself. But I'll always have a great love for Vertigo, and I always get a big kick out of working there. What they've accomplished in their relatively brief existence as an imprint has been nothing short of a complete paradigm shift. They changed the nature of the game, and made a lot of things possible that weren't possible before.
O: Did your comics work make it easier to write the Felix Castor novels?
MC: Yeah, very definitely. Writing comics sensitises you to structure and makes you budget story beats. I wrote in a fairly unfocused way before that: I needed to go to school, and comics were my school. They're a lot more than that, of course: it wasn't a case of progressing or evolving from comics to books. It's just that the nature of the medium - writing a monthly book that must appear regularly and must consist of stories tailored to a certain length - makes certain aspects of the craft of writing very clear and tangible.
O: With your new Vertigo series, The Unwritten, you look at the link between reality and fiction. Do you look back on your own work and see very obvious ties to where you were personally when you wrote a particular piece?
MC: I think my pet obsessions come through in a lot of the things I write. I'm someone with very strong family ties - but my family also holds the world record for pointless and destructive feuds. So families feature heavily in my books, both as positive and as negative forces. You can see Lucifer as being the story of a dysfunctional family that unravels across the whole timespan of the universe's existence, with God as the father and Lucifer as the rebellious son. Then at the opposite end of the scale you've got Re-Gifters, where Dixie's family supports her and loves her uncritically and is the stable heart of her life.
But that's not exactly what you're asking, is it? Links to specific things that were going on in my life at a particular time... They're harder to spot, because I tend to disguise anything that's too personal. But yeah, I can go back and look at some stories and say "I know where that came from." The people trafficking plot in The Devil You Know reflected a case that was going through the courts in London around that time, the details of which sort of preyed on my mind. Inevitably, anything that's on your mind flows through your pen and comes out from your characters' mouths.
Children in peril. Children empowered and saving themselves from peril. Children losing and finding parents, friends, refuges. I keep coming back to those themes, because as soon as you've got kids of your own, thoughts like that start to dominate your life.
O: Do your family get to read your work?
MC: Lin reads everything: she's my test reader, sounding board and serial collaborator. The kids... not so much. It was a long time before I could show them a single thing I'd written. There were a few Lucifer issues that were borderline suitable for them, but of course there was the Six-Card Spread storyline as a dragon in the gateway: I couldn't give them a story with that degree of explicit violence in it. My Faith in Frankie was the first book I could show them, and I got a huge amount of pleasure from putting it in their hands and saying "This is what I do when I'm sitting at that machine all day..."
O: Do you feel closer to your daughter having written Confessions with her?
MC: It was certainly a very powerful bonding experience. We had to invent a way of working together that didn't make me the senior partner and her the junior - because she wasn't prepared to work on those terms. And why should she? So we had this bumpy stage where we were dancing circles around each other, trying to find a process that would do the job.
In the end we each chose a bunch of scenes and wrote them, then swapped over, argued about it, and punched up each other's dialogue - editing ourselves towards a consistent tone and feel. It was labour-intensive, but it worked. And we came out the other end with our relationship intact, as well as with a deeper appreciation of each other's storytelling instincts. It was very well worth doing - and the proof of that is that we're now working on a novel, which will be a collaboration between Lin, Lou and me. In other words, we've climbed Everest, and now we're doing it again without oxygen!
O: That's going to be a fantastic read from the sound of it! What's your process like for maintaining a consistent voice with that many personalities involved?
MC: That's the hardest part, obviously. So far what we've done is to write sample scenes for our narrator, Rem, and then dissect and argue about them so that we could triangulate on a voice for her. We feel we've done that. The other main characters are a work in progress.
O: What was the last great comic book you read?
MC: Larry Marder's Beanworld reprints, which Dark Horse is bringing out. Wonderful mythopoeic storytelling, full of joy and surprise.
O: The last great book you read?
MC: I'm going to list The Selected Works of T.S.Spivet by Reif Larsen, even though I haven't finished it yet. Despite the title, it's a novel - about growing up in the American West, cartography, and families. The prose style is very beautiful and very accomplished.
O: The last great album you bought?
MC: Ummm... probably Rook, by Shearwater. It's an incredible piece of work, made into something truly haunting by the ethereal power of Jonathan Meiberg's voice.
O: And the last great TV show and movie you watched?
MC: TV show would be The Wire. Movie would be Moon, which I saw yesterday.
O: What do we have to look forward to from you in the near future?
MC: Oh, you know, stuff. The fifth Castor novel, out in September. A Human Torch miniseries, also starting in September. A big X-Men event in 2010. Heart failure in 2011. (Avert)
O: What are you looking forward to most about Octocon 2009? :)
MC: It's always wonderful to discover a new con, and most of that is just meeting people. Meeting lots of people.
O: Mike Carey, thank so much! See you in October.
