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
Part Three

BROKEN FRONTIER: The last comic work you’ve got coming out is The Faker.  Would you like to give a quick intro on that one?

MIKE CAREY: Sure.  Well, that one is not a mixture of anything with anything else: it’s really pure horror.  Although there is the element of social satire or social observation.  The main characters are all university students and the horror, which is mostly psychological, deals with the loss of identity. 

You have a wild party, and the main character wasn’t even there for most of it – he sort of shows up at the end when everyone else is going crazy and overindulging and all his friends are hopped up on booze and pills.  And then afterwards, there is no one who remembers him.  He has basically been erased from the world.  Even people who have had close relationships with him have no recollection of him at all.  And the more he tries to prove who he is, the harder it gets.  All the hard evidence has disappeared, all the paperwork – driver’s license, birth certificate, all of it – is gone and he can’t find anything that will absolutely support the fact of his existence.  Then there are people who he goes to for help and he can’t find them either.

That’s really the starting point for the book.  And then his attempt to prove his own existence feeds into him trying to find out just what the hell has happened to him and why.  And the story takes some unexpected turns and ultimately ends up with a more physical kind of horror which I hope people won’t see coming.

BF: Now, this one is set in Minnesota, why such a locale?

MC: My brother lived there for a while.  He was a visiting professor at the University of Minneapolis.  And also, I’d seen and enjoyed Fargo and the setting really caught me.  When I was planning this book out and setting the scenes in my mind, there was snow everywhere.  I really wanted this book to take place somewhere where it was cold and inhospitable and bleak.  I know there’s more to Minnesota than that, but still Minnesota seemed like a good setting.

BF: Does the cold help out with the story of a guy who is basically alone?

MC: It isn’t directly relevant, at least not until the last couple of issues where there are some wilderness scenes.  You can’t live out there for very long in those cold Minnesota winters.  You’re going to die very quickly if you’re not properly prepared.

BF: And what spawned this story idea?

MC: A lot of it was actually a kind of riffing on words.  Shelly Bond and I were playing this game where we were throwing words back and forth to each other to see what we thought of them and “faker” was one of the words she threw at me.  I had this idea that stuck in my mind.  It was an idea that I kept coming back to and eventually it turned into this story.

BF: And once again you seem to have lucked out with the artist as you are working with Jock on this book.  How has that been?

MC: It’s been great.  I love Jock.  I hate to gush, but he’s a fantastic artist and a really nice guy.  Just an amazing human being.  I had worked with him once before when we did an issue of Hellblazer together, very shortly after I took over on that book.  I think it was maybe the best single issue I did.  It was issue #181, “A Game of Cat and Mouse” and it was just a sheer pleasure working with him.  From there I always wanted to work with him again somewhere down the line and this seemed like the perfect opportunity to do that.  And the timing just worked out really well with him finishing up on Losers at that time.

BF: So you felt that his artwork would really fit stylistically with what you were trying to do on the book?

MC: Yeah.  It is a great stylistic match.  Especially with some scenes in the later issues that are very kinetic and very fast paced.  Jock can do that stuff standing on his head.  He’s just great at it.

But then again, in the quieter, more subtle horror elements in the earlier issues we discussed how we wanted to do that and he came up with some brilliant stuff.  He’s just very versatile.

BF: Now, this is another book that you’ve described as “horror.”  Is that a favorite of yours or, as you said before, was it a phase that you were going through?

MC: Well, it is a favorite genre of mine, but it isn’t by any means the only genre I love.  I love superheroes and I’m having a blast with X-Men and Ultimate FF .  I love fantasy and sci-fi… I guess I love stuff that goes off on tangents from reality.  I’m not real good with the 100% realistic stuff.  I’ve got a pretty quirky way of looking at things.

BF: That’s a good way to put it.

MC: [Laughs]

BF: OK, so is there any new stuff from you that we are missing here?

MC: Only the novels – the Felix Castor books.

BF: Well, let’s touch on them a little bit.  What can you say about those?

MC: I’ve just finished writing the third one.  The second one is now in stores in England.  The first one, The Devil You Know , gets its American release in July, I think around the time of San Diego.  So I’ll be there promoting it probably which is very exciting for me.  It’ll be my first Comicon in 4 years.

BF: With the novels was that something that you wanted to try on your own?

MC: Yeah.  I had written a couple of aborted novels way back before I ever started doing comic scripts – late 80’s/early 90’s.  It was always something I wanted to come back to and try my hand at again.  And the opportunity came up because of Hellblazer really.  Orbit, who are my publishers, seemed to be receptive to the idea of a series of books that would hit the same genre areas as Laurel K. Hamilton and Tanya Huff, but set in England.  And I had a certain credibility with them because I was writing Hellblazer , so I pitched them the Felix Castor novels.

BF: And this is a series of books with one main character and one setting?

MC: Yes.  The main character, Felix Castor, is an exorcist.  But he’s more like a gumshoe exorcist.  He’s an exorcist the same way the Raymond Chandler heroes are detectives: he’s doing this for a set fee plus expenses.  He’s not a religious man by any means, he just has the ability to bind and banish ghosts.  And so that’s what he does for a living, and it isn’t that good a living.

He’s sort of a down at heel character, living in this grim and slightly sleazy world.

BF: Did you find it was easier to write a series like that coming from comics?

MC: It’s a very different process.  I found it enjoyable, especially with the change of pace.  In comics you work on these very short deadlines.  You plot well in advance, but it comes down to this in the end: you write the script, send it in, maybe do a rewrite, then it goes to the artist.  If you’re in the middle of the next issue or a few issues down the line and you suddenly think “Oh wait, I should have introduced this character earlier” or “I should have planted this!” it’s too late and you can’t change your mind.  The freedom to change your mind is very limited.

With a novel you live with it for 6 months and if you suddenly get to chapter 20 and you want to go back and change something in chapter 3 you can because it is still there.  So you have this vertical freedom which I really enjoyed a lot.