Mike Carey with The Girly Comic Book at Thought Bubble 2008
So, yesterday afternoon we met up with Mike Carey, when he was up in Leicester at De Montfort University for the Teen Read Expo. Mike did some workshops in the morning with local teenagers on writing comics, with the help of several arts students, which apparently went down very well. We were also hoping to meet Mike’s daughter Louise, who co-wrote Confessions of a Blabbermouth with him for the Minx imprint, but she was busy revising for her A levels.
We kidnapped Mike and went to a local pub for lunch, over which we discussed our plans for Factor Fiction and the great news that Mike’s Vertigo comic The Unwritten has been nominated for three Eisner Awards.
Once we’d ambled back to the event we bumped into Leicester Libraries’ Book Doctor Alison Dunne and had a wide-ranging chat covering cooking, The Wire, ebooks vs print, and the best places to relax and read (Alison recommends lying on a trampoline!).
Mike then did a public talk about The Unwritten, which was unfortunately a little light on audience. Possibly due to it being four o’clock in the afternoon, but those of us in attendance found it very interesting.
Topics covered included:
- Genesis of The Unwritten: After working on Lucifer with artist Peter Gross, Mike and Peter were keen to work on another project together. They pitched many ideas to DC and a couple got extremely close to happening, but in the end they went their separate ways to concentrate on other projects until the stars (and schedules!) finally came back into alignment, and the story Mike wanted to pitch, and the story Peter wanted to pitch, turned out to be the same story from two different angles. That story was The Unwritten. The main inspiration for The Unwritten came from reading the autobiography of Christopher Robin Milne, the child upon which Christopher Robin in the Winnie the Pooh books was based. In his autobiography, Milne argued that his father had taken his childhood from him and used it for his own ends. The concept of a child having to grow-up with their own fictional spectre intrigued Mike and led to the creation of Tom/Tommy Taylor. They then decided to use the trope of a boy wizard, as it would be very familiar to current readers.
- Fiction vs Reality: Another theme explored in The Unwritten is that there is no such thing as reality, because we all perceive events in a different manner, so reality it just an agreed upon fiction. Mike also mentioned a current idea in psychology, that theorises that our self-identity is made up of the narrative of our life, how it plays out in our heads. He wanted to look at how the stories we tell ourselves have an impact on our idea of reality, and how different types of fiction intersect.
- Writing long running comic book series: One of the audience asked Mike about whether ongoing stories such as Lucifer, tend to be part planned and part serendipity, as surely they need to be meticulously planned. Mike said he always find things grab his attention during the writing process, which he decides to include, so no story is ever fully planned. For example, he said Gaudium, the fallen cherub character in Lucifer, was merely meant to be a plot device. They simply needed someone to inform Elaine Belloc that she was the Archangel Michael’s daughter. However, Peter Gross drew Gaudium in such an interesting and memorable way that Mike found himself intrigued by the character and ended up writing three issues based around the cherub and his family.
Cover to The Unwritten, Issue #1
- Famous tales in The Unwritten. Mike talked about some of the iconic stories and myths they want to include in the narrative of The Unwritten. For example, Mike wanted to use the Song of Roland, which tells the the tale of the Battle of Roncevaux. So when Tom is accused of murder, it was convenient to get him sent to Maison d’Arret de Roncevaux, the prison which is built on the site of the battle. An upcoming storyline will include Moby Dick and other fictional whales. I did ask whether there would be a space whale in homage to the recent episode of Doctor Who: The Beast Below, but apparently not.
- “How the whale became”: this is issue #5 of The Unwritten, which has been nominated for the Eisner Award for Best Single Issue and looks at the parallel lives of Rudyard Kipling and Samual Clemens, otherwise known as Mark Twain. This issue came about due to Mike reading reading about Kipling and finding out that it was true that Kipling had met Mark Twain when they both received Honourary Degrees from Oxford University. This dovetailed into exploring how the lives of these famous authors would be effected if one had been recruited, and one not, by the cabal that seems to be guiding fiction and reality in the world of The Unwritten. This issue, and future standalone issues show that there is a much larger narrative happening in The Unwritten than just the one revolving around Tom Taylor.
- Writing X-Men: Mike also talked about being a writer on X-Men, and how he felt that you had to respect the history of the comic, and the fact that a lot of fans have a huge emotional investment in the characters. He feels more like a custodian than a creator, because he is aware that the characters will carry on with other teams after his stint on the book. He was asked if he found the frequent crossover events in the Marvel titles frustrating to his X-Men vision. He replied that the crossover events can mean that your story for the characters gets put on hold, but it was also lots of fun, to be locked in a room for three days with other writers on the franchise, to come up with the event storyline. All the writers usually leave those sessions feeling like they get to write the best bit of the story.
Mike is always a busy creator, as he also pens the brilliant Felix Castor novels as well as his many comics projects, and he might also be soon working on a novel with his wife and daughter. Though his sons have yet to join the family obsession with writing and would rather draw comics instead!
There were many other interesting discussions and digressions during our afternoon with Mike, and it was lovely to get the chance to spend some time with him outside of the frenzy of conventions.