Broken Frontier

Today sees the release of Mike Carey’s One-Sided Bargains from Image Comics and Desperado, a one-shot that reprints two short stories Carey did for Caliber in the Nineties with Mike Perkins and P.J. Holden respectively.

The title of the edition refers to the premise of the stories included, Dr. Faustus and Suicide Kings, which both deal with people who decide to strike a deal with the devil and end up with the short end of the stick. According to Carey, the idea to reprint both tales was thrown on the table not too long ago. “I think it was about four months back that Desperado approached me and asked me how I would feel about having some of the Caliber work from way back reprinted.”

Readers who’re familiar with the Caliber editions of Dr. Faustus and Suicide Kings know that they fit right into Carey’s overall body of work. “It’s really obvious when you read them,” the writer says. “The same kind of obsessions that are on display in Lucifer are also on display in these stories. The themes that links the two is the idea of bargaining with the devil and the way in which those bargains inevitably turn out against you. I think it’s interesting for readers of Lucifer particularly to see what’s going on in my head a few years ago.

What Carey explains especially holds true for the Dr. Faustus story, which is very strongly based on the late 16th Century version of Faustus, as he was written in the classic English play by Christopher Marlowe. “I was working on the story with much respect for the European tradition, and the way Marlowe wrote him especially,” Carey adds. “What Mike Perkins (the artist on the story – ed.) and I found interesting about his play is that in some ways it’s a story of a seduction; obviously not a physical one but more in a spiritual context.

“Yet, the erotic undercurrents are there in the relationship between Mephistopheles and Faustus. You have this great, unsettling scene where Mephistopheles gives Faustus Helen of Troy, the most beautiful woman that ever lived, to be his concubine, so you get the devil acting as a pimp for Faustus, if you like. We wanted to put that in and were also very fascinated with the relationship between Faustus and his manservant, Wagner, in the play. There’s just an incredible loyalty and friendship between the two men—Wagner is probably the closest thing Faustus had for a friend.

“So, our story is really centred on this triangular relationship between Faustus, Mephistopheles and Wagner.

Since both Perkins and Carey hold the Marlowe play in such high regard, the Dr. Faustus story has to be seen as both creators paying tribute to this epic story in literary history, but also as a giant riff on Marlowe at the same time. “It was done very much to kind of explore the unspoken aspects of the Marlowe play, the things that went one in-between the scenes,” Carey says. “You can see it as a very straightforward and very serious religious morality tale. If you overreach yourself and become too arrogant, you know what’s going to happen to you. If you go too far, god will strike you down and, bang!, there you are.

“At the beginning of the play, though, Faustus is portrayed as a very intriguing and attractive figure. We like his arrogance and the fact that refuses to accept all of the dogmatics of his time. He is the embodiment of human curiosity and the human urge to understand and to get an intellectual grasp on the whole of creation. He’s a humanist hero—Marlowe paid lip service to religion, but he really celebrates the humanist values.

[Suicide Kings] is much more straightforward—twist ending, you make deal with the devil and know what’s going to happen. It’s a much more classic, simple horror story.

“You know, there was also a third bargain-with-the-devil story, The Wedding Breakfast, which was published in the Vertigo anthology Flinch (in issue #16 – ed.). It was a free-standing story, but we couldn’t get the rights, so it wasn’t included in One-Sided Bargains.”

One-Sided Bargains doesn’t feature the only Caliber work being reprinted these days. With titles like Deadworld leading the pack, Desperado has made a habit out of putting some of the better stories to come out from the publisher back on 21st Century shelves. For Carey, the decision all comes down to an opportunity of putting these stories in the hands of a larger and more receptive audience. “Mike and myself are doing much more high-profile work now and we’re seeing this as a chance to Dr. Faustus and Suicide Kings out to people that didn’t read them at the time.

“Back then, there were real problems at Caliber with scheduling and distribution. Sales on these two stories were very low. Mike and I are very proud of the material, and I hope these stories will find more of a reading public this time around. Desperado too hopes that more people will pick it up out of curiosity on the basis of our current work.

Speaking of current work, Carey says it’s possible there may be some more Desparado in his future, either in terms of new material or more reprints. “I’ve been talking to Joe Pruett about doing some more work for them, and one of the things we may end up doing is writing more stories in the Inferno saga, which I did with Michael Gaydos for Caliber in the mid-Nineties.

“But it will all come down to timing. It gets progressively more difficult to schedule stuff, but I like creating material of my own and there’s a certain logic to doing that at Desperado.”

One-Sided Bargains is on sale from Image as of today, with 64 B&W pages of story retailing for $5.99.