As I mention here, I met Mike Carey in person at SDCC. It was especially awesome because of the esteem I felt for his work. He was kind, generous, and his work moved me deeply. Over the years I've not been able to cover his individual projects nearly as much as I did, but I never lost my appreciate for him personally, or his work. Mike Carey has forged a career in the field of creative writing. I admire his skills, and talents, and I find it most interesting to see his works in their similarities and their many differences. His writing tone in the darkest works that he writes never allows the reader to give up hope, which I think is a lost skill and art.
ALEX: I think that I've read all of your comic book work, and read most of, if not all of your prose. I have found that the comics you've written to be highly entertaining and of great quality, but that the prose you've written to be by far more detailed and effective for me as a reader. Does a creative talent expose his preference of what form s/he will work in, by how easily the work in question resonates with most readers? Do you think the writers in comics who haven't done prose works have a secret desire to do so? Is a quality comic book writer not necessarily a good prose writer? Or is a writer a writer in any format or genre?
MIKE CAREY: Every creative medium has its own skill set, in my experience, and proficiency in one doesn’t guarantee that you’ll be any good in another. I found the transition from comics to prose very easy and natural, but when I first tried my hand at screenwriting I hit it and bounced. All the instincts I’d built up from writing comics steered me in very wrong directions and I had to unlearn a lot of stuff – often on the recoil from acerbic edit notes. And I never did get the hang of writing radio plays or game scripting.
It’s going to vary a lot from one creator to another, though. I know a lot of novelists who have no interest at all in screenwriting, and a few comics writers who don’t feel the pull of prose fiction. It’s not like there’s any intrinsic merit in being a jack of all trades. I like working in different media partly because I feel it keeps me from getting stuck in a rut and endlessly recycling the same stories or the same tropes. But I totally get why some writers prefer to plough one creative furrow – and obviously you can do that without ever repeating yourself.
The important thing in any medium is to be familiar with the toolkit and to be able to use it with confidence and a degree of skill. If the toolkit doesn’t work for you, for whatever reason, there’s no point in pushing yourself against the grain. You should do what gives you joy. If you do it right, some of that joy will be communicated to the reader.
ALEX: I am interested in how genre guides a talent in creating work, and also how labels of mature reader warnings do the same. Your best comics, in my opinion deal with a certain kind of darkness, and with a magnificent quality of creating mythology. Do you feel that had you lived prior to the era of Vertigo from DC, and written then, or had the 1980s not happened in comics, would you have been able to create such works, with the limitations of the expectations of the readers of the day? When comics became mature it obviously allowed for works that would not have occurred otherwise, but my question is different. That is, would someone like you, or Alan Moore or Grant Morrison be able to write works that were brilliant, without having the new freedom accorded by mature audience labels?
MIKE CAREY: I think what Thomas Kuhn said about science is true of media storytelling too. A template for story exists and holds for a certain period of time. Creators follow the template for the most part without even thinking about it much. It’s just how stories work. Then a wayward genius comes along and does something totally different – so clever and so striking that it sweeps away the old template. Now creators are drawn to do something like what the wayward genius did, or something inspired by it. The old way of telling stories is out, and the new way is in.
I think there were two revolutions that preceded me getting into comics. One was back in the late 70s, when Chris Claremont brought what you might call a soap opera approach into his revival of the X-Men. I don’t mean that as any kind of criticism. I absolutely loved those books. What I mean by a soap opera approach is a kind of open-ended storytelling where plot strands play and interweave out across long periods of time without ever finding any real or lasting resolution.
Then about a decade later you got – with the arrival of Gaiman and Morrison – what you could call a novelistic approach. A broad sweep of story that sets itself up and then plays out in the space of fifty, sixty, seventy issues, using stand-alone tales and multi-part arcs in the service of a wider narrative that eventually reaches a definite, pre-planned conclusion.
Like a lot of British creators I came into US comics on the coat-tails of that second revolution. I consciously copied Gaiman’s approach when it came to structure because the possibilities it opened up were impossible to resist. But would I have written like that if I’d come in at a different time? I’m almost certain the answer is no. I may have adapted the template and added some of my own tweaks to it, but I was massively influenced by those guys. If you read Lucifer, you can pretty much identify the point where I stop actively pastiching Neil and start doing my own thing.
I suppose I’m saying that the freedoms that mattered most to me weren’t so much about being able to write for mature readers as about being able to tell big multi-part stories that had an end-point.
ALEX: Will the future of comic books ever be free from the limits of costumes and vigilantes? The reason I ask isn't because I see you as a great proponent of superheroes, but as a bright, thoughtful creator of works that has also created comics. I hear often people saying how comic book based movies are better than ever, and these people point to box office returns to cement their opinion that the works are welcomed by the movie viewing public. I think comic book movies succeed despite the costumes and settings, not due to them and that we are seeing the telling of mythic tales and nothing more. As a writer of comics as well as everything else you have done, do you see a future in comics of most stories falling out of the range of costumes and violence? Why or why not?
MIKE CAREY: I think any creative medium at any time is a sort of densely woven fabric rather than a monolithic block. The American mainstream has been dominated by superheroes for the past 60 years or so, but that’s because of the huge distorting effect created by two spectacularly successful fictional universes maintained through that whole period by two increasingly megalithic publishing houses. For a long time creators – not all of them by any means, but a lot – have gravitated to DC and Marvel, and acceptance there has been seen as a measure of career success.
But they were never the only game in town. It only seemed like they were. Smaller publishers have come and gone, or come and stayed, and very few of them have depended on superhero stories to anything like the same extent. The indie scene is vibrant and diverse, spanning just about every genre you can name. And outside of the USA, although DC and Marvel stories are avidly consumed, domestic comics markets are mostly dominated by other genres entirely. In France you’ll find stores that are devoted to American books, but the regular comic shops lean much more on humour books for kids, drama, tranche de vie, sci-fi and fantasy. When L’Atalante published La Brigade Chimerique, their own (fascinating) take on The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, they had to do a ton of marketing to persuade readers that France could do its own superhero books.
To state a bias, I love good superhero stories. And I feel as though – for all the runaway success of the MCU movies – comics is the natural place to tell those stories. I don’t subscribe Alan Moore’s recently stated view that when you’re all growed up you have to put away childish things. Genres persist as long as there’s an audience for them, and there’s something peculiarly futile about disparaging a given audience’s tastes because you don’t share them.
All of which is my way of saying that I don’t think superhero stories are going away any time soon. But they will change. Everything does. Stories evolve along with the people who tell and consume them.
ALEX: With regard to the redemptive violence theme, 5 years from now, will the issues of global warming and the recent past of pandemics, constant wars and terrorist events make the content of comic books seem tame? Has the world we've been entertained by in comics become closer and closer to reality, and what does that say about the Western culture's acceptance of such things? Do we really enjoy these terrible things?
MIKE CAREY: “Enjoy” is a simple word that describes a very complicated thing. What kind of itches are we scratching when we watch a horror movie, listen to a smutty joke, read a post-apocalyptic novel, play a war-themed console game? There’s a theme in media studies called the uses and gratifications approach, which starts with the question “what satisfactions does this audience derive from this story?” Obviously there are going to be many different answers to that question. And I think there’s value in digging a little deeper and rolling your psychoanalytical sleeves up. “If we derive satisfaction from this story, what does that say about us?”
You mentioned the redemptive act of violence, which is a phrase I first heard in a talk given by Ursula K. Le Guin at the Ottawa Literary Festival in 2008 or so. She talked about it as something that informed a huge number of texts in many different genres, and she said it denoted a kind of story she had no interest in telling. On another occasion she said that the defining theme of her own stories was marriage, which I think is a great insight. She writes about people finding ways to meet across their differences and come to a better understanding of each other and themselves.
If you were to ask me flat-out whether there’s an over-emphasis on violence in the stories we tell ourselves, I’d have to say yes there is. We live in violent times and we internalise the violence. We invent protagonists, heroes, who deploy violence in sanctioned and sanctified ways, and that’s a troubling thing. Gershon Legman thought it was a substitute for sex, which outside of pornography is generally under-represented in our stories. But of course a lot of modern pornography fetishises violence too, so that’s an over-simplification.
I think you have a responsibility as a storyteller to try to tell sane and salutary stories. To tell foma, to use Kurt Vonnegut’s wonderfully useful invented word: “the harmless untruths that make [us] brave and kind and healthy and happy.” But every writer defines those limits for themselves.
ALEX: Meeting you at SDCC 2003, which is rapidly coming upon 20 years ago (Holy Moley!) is a treasured moment in my life. At the time I'd been blown away by your kind response to my questions, and by your treating me, an amateur journalist with great respect and kindness. How common do you think that is with creatives in comics that they have an active communication and ongoing relationship with their fans or journalists of the field? I've been told that comics are such a small industry that it is easier to contact and interact with the talent, as opposed to say, movies or best selling novelists. I'd also suggest, perhaps social media and the internet helps in this regard. That all is very moving to me, but it brings up something I wonder about. With the smaller more vocal fan base of comics being able to complain loudly, do fans of the works have a disproportionate impact upon the stories told, the scale of stories, or how important a comic series becomes? (I'd suggest a similar area is Star Wars fans and the way each movie is trashed by supposed fans.)
MIKE CAREY: Well thank you for the compliment. I’m not sure if I deserve it. I try not to be a jerk when I interact with readers because it seems to me that’s the minimum requirement on a creator in a public setting where you’ve come along in your public persona. It’s different, obviously, when you’re in your own space or just doing your own thing.
I’ve been lucky, generally, in my interactions with the fan community. I started out in comics at Vertigo, which had a very friendly and articulate fanbase. For years we had our own area just for the Lucifer book, and apart from a few disgruntled moralists very early on there was a great vibe. There was a standing joke that since I was an ex-teacher I was the guy in charge of an unruly class. I used to set homework assignments, and the best response would win a prize. Usually they would get to nominate a word that I would undertake to use in the next issue.
The X-Men fanbase was a lot more raucous and about a hundred times bigger. It was intimidating at first, but overall I had an easy ride until I decided to have Rogue and Magneto start a relationship. This was established canon, by the way. It had happened many years before in an old Savage Land story, so all I was doing was revisiting that theme, but there were a lot of Rogue/Gambit shippers who were vehemently opposed to it. Some ugly things got said, sadly. Personally I never felt under any pressure to change the stories to meet those expectations, and it was pretty rare for the attacks to get personal. But then I’m a white guy and I was carrying my white guy umbrella. Things have gotten a lot worse since, obviously, and they’re exponentially worse for some people than they are for others.
I don’t know what the answer is. I think a large part of it has to be publishers making sure they’ve always got the creators’ backs and pushing back on their behalf. If you don’t protect the people who work for you when they’re facing abuse then you shouldn’t be in business in the first place. In that regard, the sidelining of Rose Tico in the final Star Wars movie made me incandescent with rage. It was pandering to the abusers.
Alex: I LOVE ROSE, the treatment of her, and the actress of the character was miserable. Thank you Mike!
Find Mike Carey's BIO at: WIKI
Find the database for his Comics at: COMICS.ORG
Find the books he has written at: LIBTHING
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