Broken Frontier

From Wetworks with While Portacio at Wildstorm, X-Men and Ultimate Fantastic Four at Marvel, and One-Sided Bargains at Image to his three new Vertigo Crossing Midnight, God Save The Queen and The Faker, and beyond, writer Mike Carey is leaving his indelible mark on comicdom. He stopped by to chat about his upcoming releases and what they mean to him.

BROKEN FRONTIER: Before we start with our discussion of your new books Mike, I wanted to take the time to give some well deserved congratulations on your Marvel work with X-Men and Ultimate Fantastic Four.

MIKE CAREY: Thank you.

BF: And how has that experience been for you thus far?

MC: It’s really exciting.  It’s been an incredible year really.  I’ve really enjoyed playing with these characters and in these continuities.  I’m having a blast.

BF: Has anything been different than you expected it to be?

MC: I guess you can’t ever know what it’s like to write the X-Men until you do it.  It’s this incredibly intense thing because there’s so many books in that line and so much going on at any one time you have got to be aware of what the other creators are doing and what’s coming up.  So the planning process can be complicated, and some of that came as a surprise, but it hasn’t been an one.  It’s an enjoyable challenge and I’m having a good time stepping up to the plate there.

Sorry about that lousy metaphor. But yeah, it’s fascinating and different from anything I’ve done before.  And all in good ways.

BF: Was there any character that you didn’t expect to be as fun to write or any character who you thought you knew and then found more difficult?

MC: No, because I chose all the characters I wanted to write.  I specifically picked characters I thought I could give a voice to. 

Some of them have been different than expected though, for example Rogue.  I thought I knew Rogue really well, but as I started to write her I started to see her differently—to see her motivations and anticipate her reactions to different situations.  And in some ways that was surprising.

But all of the characters have been fun to write.  I chose them because I felt that I could fall in love with them.

BF: What about the artists you’ve got?  Have you felt yourself growing together with them as you’ve gone along?

MC: Yes.  Again it’s been incredibly rewarding working with Chris and Pasqual.  Both of them are very gifted artists.  What I find is that to begin with I tend to write scripts in a very generic way and then as I get a feel for how the artist is going to respond to certain things I start writing more to their strengths and styles and we end up with a more symbiotic relationship going on.

But I have always had ridiculously good luck with the artists I’ve been paired up with and I couldn’t ask for anyone better than Chris Bachalo and Pasqual Ferry.  They’re both geniuses in very, very different styles.  Pasqual is using a very open, very clear style for Ultimate FF, and Chris has a very rich, layered style.  They’re perfectly adapted to the books they’re drawing.

BF: And next you’ve got Humberto Ramos for an arc on X-Men.  You just get lucky again?

MC: [Laughs] I guess so.  It’s like I keep pulling the lever on the side of the slot machine and it keeps coming up cherries.  It’s wonderful.

BF: While we are discussing your luck with artists, let’s move on to your more recent stuff. One of my favorite artists of all time is Whilce Portacio and now you are working with him on what was originally his series, Wetworks.

Now that you are three issues deep on that book I can ask, how has that experience been for you?

MC: Fascinating.  Again, it was different from anything I had done before.

I really loved the original Wetworks book because it was this crazy mix of genres.  There was no other book out there that was mixing sci-fi, superheroics, horror, and big screen action in that way.  It’s a crazy anarchic book and I loved it for that.  So it’s been a whole lot of fun resurrecting the book—working with Whilce to create a whole new Wetworks team, and also planning with him how we could revisit members of the old team and how we would bring them in.

We decided right from the start not to do anything that people would expect or anticipate on the book.  So we have an opening arc that plays very big on the horror themes.  We’ve introduced this really bad-ass vampire villain, Vascar.  And in the second arc we move onto a kind of prison break scenario which has been wonderful to do.  Imagine Shawshank Redemption, but set in a world where almost the entire population is werewolves, vampires, and other supernatural entities of one sort or another.  We had a blast doing that.  And then going into the second half of the first year we’re building towards this massive cataclysmic scenario that involves the old Wetworks team, the new Wetworks team, and a whole bunch of people we’ve never met before.  It’s really been wild. 

And obviously it’s been a really symbiotic thing.  Whilce came on board with a lot of ideas.  He’s created most of these characters so he knows them really well and has a very clear idea of what he would like to do with them. 

BF: I was just about to mention that.  I’ve spoken to quite a few of the Wildstorm creators—Brian Azzarello and Christos Gage to name two—and they all mentioned that they were given a good amount of freedom on their books.  However, you are in a slightly different situation because your collaborator on the book is the initial creator of the book, team and characters.  Did you feel any obligation towards Whilce to keep him “happy” and to keep things going the way he wanted?

MC: The situation never really presented itself in those terms.  I had originally come up with a scenario for a story that hinged around the two characters move on to your more recent stuff—the vampire Simon Vascar and the werewolf detective Ashe.  And it was Jim Lee who said that the story would work really well within Wetworks continuity.  So it was Jim who put Whilce and me together and from that point onwards it was more like I would say, “Yeah, we could do this…” and then Whilce would agree “Yeah, that would be great!”  And it became this rapid volley of ideas back and forth.  It was never a case of “You can’t do this” or “I’d prefer if you didn’t do that.”  Things evolved in a very organic way.

BF: You said you are a fan of the original series.  Did you own all the issues and did you go back and reread them before you started writing the book to reacquaint yourself with the characters and maybe get some ideas from what had been done before?

MC: I own most of the issues.  There were a couple of books, a crossover with Vampirella and a few other arcane bits and pieces that I didn’t have.  But the Wildstorm people sent me copies of all the stuff I didn’t have and I went through the entire thing from start to finish before we got into the detailed planning.

We talked a lot about who we’d like to showcase upfront.  We agreed that we would have to have Dane there.  We agreed on Mother One, and I begged him to include Red on the team because she’s such a cool character.  And then we talked about how we would bring the rest of the team in.  A lot of the time we were using the original series as a springboard for things we wanted to do in this one, but trying not to make anything too dependent on old continuity.

BF: In line with that: are you trying to keep Wetworks totally open to new readers?  Is there old continuity that you are taking as it still happened and build on that or is it more that you are accepting some of it did happen and just move onto something new?

MC: The second one really.  Basically, we meet the old team and we introduce them as though they’re new characters.  Long time readers will obviously say “That’s Jester” and so on.  We’ve tried to keep it open for new readers though.  I think that I may have taken too much for granted with the first issue and that I could have laid down more clues and explicit explanations for new readers.  I think the second issue was a much easier read than the first in that respect. 

But yeah, as we go on we’re trying not to take anything for granted and introduce these characters as though no one has ever heard of them before.

BF: Does that mean you are going to go in and sort of redo the origin at all?  Perhaps try to clean it up or are you going to accept the old origin?

MC: We only get the origin as rumor and legend.  Every so often a character will say, “Where did these guys come from?” and we get someone else giving their take on it, but we never see it.  We never show the origin.

That’s something we could do further down the line, but so far we’ve just set the origin so far in the past that no one knows the truth of it.

BF: Do you think that plays up more of the horror aspects?  Especially considering the book contains a lot of werewolves and vampires and most of their origins are rumors and legends, is this an attempt to give the team the same sort of feel?

MC: I guess so.  It does fit into that kind of aesthetic that they don’t have origins.  That in a way they are superheroes, but in another way they’re also figures out of folklore and legends.  It’s cool not to know too much about them and not to give too much away.

Which is one of the things we did when we brought Mother One back into the book.  We see her being worked over by a team of technicians and surgeons and they don’t know what she is.  They’re completely nonplussed by her.  They’ve never encountered this type of cyborg before.  They’re trying to reboot her and repair her organic parts but they’re really just flailing in the dark.  And I think that also helps tune her in more with the horror aesthetic.  There are echoes of the awakening of the monster in the Frankenstein movies, not least because the first thing she does when she’s re-animated is to attack the team that brought her back.

BF: Which then has been your favorite genre to play with in the story?   Have you found yourself gravitating more towards the horror or action or any of the other many story elements?

MC: It’s more like building a layer cake.  We started with the horror and then in the second arc we play up the science fiction elements.  Then there are more of the thriller and action elements coming in as we build to this big finale with some more of the widescreen super heroic stuff.  It’s a very rich, dense tapestry.

BF: While we talk about the elements of the story, in particular with werewolves and vampires, a lot of the ideas behind those as we said were all legends, rumors, and myths.  Was there an attempt on your part to create a new set of rules for these archetypes specific to this book or any effort to clean up the legends to make them work?

MC: Yeah, we did discuss some of that very explicitly.  In the second issue in fact there is a point where Red makes a comment to Dane about how she stabbed a werewolf through the heart and he didn’t die, because it was a steel blade and not a silver blade.  But it doesn’t work like that.  In our world, werewolves are vulnerable to edged weapons no matter what they’re made of: so Ashe must be a different sort of werewolf.   We’re actually going to get an explanation of the differences between Vascar and the other vampires and between Ashe and the other werewolves and where they come from and just what the hell is going on.  Ultimately, and this is where the science fiction comes into play, they’re not from Earth.  They’re actually from another world which is kind of twinned with ours in the totality of dimensions and realms.

BF: You mentioned Red as a character that you really liked, would you say she is your favorite in the book?  Is there any other character you found a voice for quickly and really enjoyed writing?

MC: I like writing Red a lot because she is this great femme fatale.  I loved in the first series her relationship with the vampire queen and I thought those characters played off each other really well.  There was always this erotic tension there as well.  She was a very attractive character on every level—proud and austere and dangerous, sensuous, fanatically loyal.  Kind of like a vampire that lives by a version of the samurai code, in some ways.

I like writing Dane as well.  I like the fact that he sometimes doesn’t even have to use his power because he’s such a dense and imposing presence.  He can walk into a situation and people will listen to him because of who and what he is and because of what he’s been through and the sheer force of his personality.  Yeah, he’s been a lot of fun to write.

And I like Ashe because a werewolf cop is a nice sort of riff to play on.  I like the moment at the end of issue #1 where he shows his badge and we realize that there’s something going on here we weren’t being told.

BF: One thing that I feel obligated to ask about this book is the planning stages of it.  For better or worse, Whilce Portacio has a bit of a reputation for getting caught up with projects and not being able to deliver on time.  Especially now with him working on Batman Confidential, did that factor at all into the planning of the book?

MC: Well, we did take our own sweet time for just that reason.  A lot of the scripts were actually written a long time ago, but we had the luxury of being able to choose our own launch date.  So we waited until we had a good amount in the can before putting the book out. 

We spent a great deal of time before Whilce started drawing the pages with him just working on the sketches and character designs and me feeding him ideas and talking about what he was doing.  So he didn’t even start roughing out the pages until we had a good feel and knew what we were doing and where we were going on the book.  In that way it was a slow gestation period and that was actually a great strength.  I think we’re now in a groove where things are moving faster and things have gotten into a good routine.

BF: And finally, will you be around for all of Wetworks?  Is there a set timetable for you to be writing the book?

MC: I’m certainly around for most of the first year.  Those scripts are already written.  After that we’ll have to see.  There might well be a period when I’m not around and where maybe Whilce is writing as well as drawing.

Continued tomorrow.