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.

Part One
Part Two

BROKEN FRONTIER: Speaking of Sandman, you have another book coming out from that realm right?

MIKE CAREY: Yes.  It’s called God Save the Queen and John Bolton is doing the artwork.  It will look a lot like the work he did on The Furies, with that mixture of photo-manipulation and painting.

It uses all of the faerie characters.  So Oberon, Titania, Puck, Nuala, Cluracan, they’re all in there along with some new characters.  The book is about a coup, a revolution in the realm of Faerie, where the old queen Mab, who was queen before Titania, comes back from exile and takes over again and then we play out the consequences of that.

But it’s also a coming of age story.  It’s mostly set in London and the main character is a teenage girl who gets into bad company and starts a drug habit.  And it’s about her relationship with her mother and her absentee father and how she sort of falls into the situation that’s going on in the realm of Faerie.

BF: Now you said you were a big fan of the Sandman books, is there any obligation on your part whenever you come up with an idea using his characters to call Neil Gaiman and get his OK?

MC: Oh yeah, Neil is always consulted at a very early stage.  He gets to see the pitch and give his input into it.  Neil is incredibly generous with his time and with what he has allowed me to do over the years, but yes we always will check with him, particularly if any of The Endless are going to be involved.  Dream had a cameo in The Furies and will also have a cameo in this book and Neil is understandably very concerned when the Endless are used by other writers that they keep in line with his conceptions of the characters.

BF: Why use the faerie characters?

MC: Shelly asked me if I would like to pitch for another Sandman Presents book to capitalize on the success of The Furies and to put John and me back together again.  And I started thinking, who hasn’t been used very much and who would I like to write.  And I thought, you know there’s a great vein there.  Cluracan and Nuala are two characters that I’ve always had a great affection for.

Having said that, what you have in this book is mostly the story of the girl, Linda Matthias, who falls in with a bunch of what you could only call “generation X” or slacker faeries who have fallen into exile and live now in the real world.  Most of the Sandman cast only get cameos.  The one Sandman character who is most important to the story is Titania: the others will show up in scenes here and there.

For those that have read The Sandman, you’re aware that it’s there as this rich backdrop and there are beats that are touched on, but you can read it as a totally free standing thing.

BF: Working with John Bolton, is that just another lucky turn that you got?  How did that end up working?

MC: Hmmmm.  How can I reply to that?  I love John’s work and when Shelly put us together on The Furies my fervent hope was that he would paint it because his painted work is so gorgeous.  Then when I heard that he was going to be doing it in this new experimental style, I didn’t know how to feel about that.  Disappointed, at first – like I was going to be missing out on something amazing.  But then when I saw some of the pages from the Hades scene in The Furies, and I was really blown away.  It took the story to a whole new level. 

So, coming back for the second pass has been a lot of fun, because this time I knew what I was getting and, as we were just discussing, I could write towards that style and think about which effects and scenes would work well with that style.

BF: Now, I only ask this because I own Neil Gaiman’s A Short Film About John Bolton, but did you have to sit him down in a room and wait for faeries to show up before he would start painting?

MC: [Laughs] It wasn’t quite like.  Basically, John took the script away and lived with it for a year and when pages would show up we were all amazed but we never knew when the pages would be coming or even which scene would be coming next!

BF: Well, I’m sure it was worth the wait as he is a brilliant artist and painter.

MC: Actually, when I went to visit him in his studio he had a painting up on his wall that he did for the cover of a David Gemmell novel.  The painting is a man’s face and a tiger’s face side by side in profile and it was absolutely stunning.  I asked him if he would ever consider selling it and he replied “Nope.”  Man, I really wanted that painting!

BF: A lot of his stuff would look stunning hanging on the wall.

MC: Yeah.

BF: Anything on that book that you think we’ve missed?

MC: Well, in a way, as we talked about Crossing Midnight being the antithesis of those two very different styles, God Save the Queen is built on another mix.  Because you have the realm of faerie, and we’ve tried to give some sense of the miraculous beauty of this other realm that exists only a stone’s throw from our own world.  But most of the book is about very squalid and seedy and degrading experiences.

You’ve got these fairies that are hooked on a drug that is made from mixing heroin with human blood.  Fairies are not susceptible to drugs unless they knock out their own magic and their own immunities with cold iron.  And since there’s iron in hemoglobin in human blood they mix it in there so the drug can take hold of them.  So you have these really sordid things going on and this innocent girl who is drawn more and more into these situations.  And the book is really about that dilemma: about discovering this other world that has an unearthly beauty, and at the same time being drawn into a world that is almost the opposite of that beauty, which is degraded and disgusting.

I think that contrast gives the book a lot of power and poignancy.

BF: Any particular reason to use London as the setting of the book?

MC: It’s where I live [laughs].  To some extent Linda is based on a real person, although I’ve fictionalized her enough that hopefully no one will realize that.

BF: Should I ask who it is?

MC: No.[Laughs]  I could get into a lot of trouble!

BF: Since you’ve mentioned that Wetworks was a mix of a few different genres and Crossing Midnight and God Save the Queen both are built a bit on these contrasting genres, would you say that that is a theme of your writing?  Do you actively go out and look for genres that normally aren’t related at all and see how they would fit together?

MC: I guess it was a phase I was going through.  A lot of the pitches that I was handing in at that time were based on that idea of throwing things together like that and shaking them up.  But the contrast in God Save the Queen isn’t a contrast of genres – it’s just clashing aesthetics.

To be concluded tomorrow...