Broken Frontier

Mike Carey helps to launch DC’s Minx line later this month with Re-Gifters. He stopped by with his daughter Louise to chat about that book, the line itself and what it’s like co-writing with a teenaged daughter (or old dad)..

BROKEN FRONTIER: Re-Gifters is one of the first Minx titles to be released by DC. First and foremost, how did you become involved in this new line of comics?

MIKE CAREY: I was talking to editor Shelly Bond throughout the period she was developing the line. This was a very personal project for her and something that had been on her mind for a long time. So I was aware that she was moving towards creating this new line of books and I pitched a couple of ideas to her that I thought might be appropriate for the demographic she was aiming at.

Re-Gifters is the one that really stuck. It came about through an interesting process. There’s a game that Shelly and I play with each other where we’ll just throw words at each other and then free associate on them and think about ways that they could be applied to stories and ways you can spin stories out of the words. "Re-gifting" had been a word that we both noticed cropping up on television and in newspaper articles and it finally came up in this game we played. So the pitch arose just from that – playing with the word and seeing what you can do with the word.

BF: And this is a tale of a young Korean girl living in Los Angeles?

MC: That’s right.

BF: What was it like trying to get into the mind of a character who is seemingly very far from where you are?

MC: It was a challenge… but it’s always a challenge. This is something that you do often as a writer. I know people say "write what you know." But even if you’re writing about your own experience, inevitably you have to voice and give motivation to characters other than yourself.

As far as my protagonist being a teenage girl goes, I have a teenage daughter at home so I have a lot of second hand experience on teenaged girls. [Laughs] How they behave, think, talk, and the way they see the world.

On the Korean side of things I did a lot of secondary research and a lot of reading about 2nd and 3rd generation Korean immigrants in America. I read some stuff online – on websites and forums. I also read some books, including an excellent book called East is East, which was just a collection of transcripts of discussions with Korean Americans.

All of that came fairly late in the process though. I made the pitch knowing fairly little and filled in the gaps after that. More or less by accident I ended up choosing a very fertile subject. I knew vaguely that there were a lot of Korean families living in Los Angeles. So that’s what I chose as my setting, but it wasn’t until I started my research that I learned of the very compelling story that was to be told there. Because a lot of the Koreans living in L.A. had lost so much – their homes, their shops, and their livelihoods – in the Rodney King riots. I wove that into the Re-Gifters story as well.

BF: Now, with the Rodney King riots, that was quite a while ago. Is Re-Gifters set in present time or in the past?

MC: It’s present time, but the protagonist’s family lost a lot in the riots. The protagonist is a girl named Dik Seong Jen, but known to her friends as Dixie. Her father owned a store that was burned down in the riots and since then the family has had nothing but the house that they live in.

Dixie’s mother makes jewelry and sells it in a local store and the father just helps with that. He glues findings onto the jewelry and stuff like that. He’s hoping to get a loan to start a new store and that process is going on in the background of this story.

BF: So this is a going to strongly be a family tale?

MC: Yes, very much so. The heroine has two twin brothers who are both younger than her, plus the mom and the dad: they’re a very tight family unit and supportive of each other.

BF: Twins again? [Laughs]

MC: Yup. Twins keep coming up in my stories! [Laughs]

BF: And another facet of Dixie’s life is her Hapkido.

MC: Correct.

BF: Do you do Hapkido?

MC: No, I don’t. I do as little exercise as I possibly can. [Laughs] I feel hard done by if I have to go into the kitchen to make my own coffee!

Again I did a lot of secondary research. I bought books with a lot of Hapkido moves mapped out in photographs, went to a dojo and watched people go through the steps – not actually fighting but a sort of Kata. In the art direction I specified what moves I wanted the characters to be using and Sonny Liew was able to match me by doing the same research on his end. Or occasionally ignoring me and putting in other moves that looked a whole lot better, and then I just changed the text to match, which was easy enough.

BF: Now, I always thought Hapkido was a Japanese martial art?

MC: No, it’s Korean and it’s an interesting thing that I referred to in the story. When the Japanese occupied Korea, they banned martial arts. They wouldn’t allow Koreans to practice any martial arts at all, so it was a part of their culture that was totally suppressed. I think it was both because it could have been useful as a sort of resistance and because suppressing the culture of the conquered is something that the conquering often do as a way to break the spirit of the people.

So Dixie’s family regards hapkido as vitally important to her life. They’re incredibly supportive of her studying and practicing these fighting techniques and the philosophy behind them. And when she enters this tournament, they’re only too pleased to give her the entry fee, even though they really can’t afford to. This of course turns into the beginnings of her problems since she doesn’t use the money to enter the tournament, but instead spends it on something else.

BF: One of those "gifts"?

MC: Yeah.

BF: So was the decision for Dixie to start Hapkido a personal decision on her part or did that come from family pressure?

MC: It’s a personal decision on her part and you really get the idea that it is very important to her. And it is something that she is very good at. The master of her dojo refers to her as the best student he’s ever had.

But when we meet her in the story she is spectacularly off her game. We see her getting her butt handed to her in sparring at the dojo because she has a huge crush on one of the other students. So her concentration has gone all to hell.

BF: That is often what happens.

MC: She feels that she absolutely has to get this guy’s attention and she’ll do anything to get it.

BF: This love interest is another student named Adam. Is he also of Korean descent?

MC: No. He’s white, middle class, from a more prosperous area than Dixie. I think it’s fair to say that in the story we cover almost all of the ethnic and social groups - - well, that’s a bit of an exaggeration - - at least a very wide range of the ethnic and social groups living in present day Los Angeles. We have both rich and poor. We have white, black, and Hispanic kids (who live in the adjacent area to Korea town, where Dixie lives). And we see how all of these advantaged and disadvantaged groups interact with each other.

But Adam is definitely from the upper end of the social spectrum.

BF: You mentioned that her family is very much behind her in Hapkido. Are there any issues there then with her interaction with other races and cultures in the area?

MC: Yes, there are some that do spring up over the course of the story. I don’t want to say too much about that, but it’s safe to say that it’s not an idealized portrait. I guess you could say that it is an idealized portrait on the level of Dixie’s family. They’re a very sympathetically drawn and very mutually supportive family. But when we look at the relationships between the racial groups you do see the tensions and the conflicts as well as the more peaceful and benign interactions.

BF: Now, let’s go back to the money situation. You mentioned that she doesn’t spend the money on her tournament entry but instead spends it on something else. Is this where the whole "re-gifting" idea starts in the story?

MC: Yes. Instead of using the $100 to gain entry to the tournament, she spends it all on a birthday gift for Adam. She is gambling that she can still enter the competition, because the organizers of the tournament have set up what they are calling a "Street Sweep" where 4 places in the tournament will be free to the winners of a set of qualifying bouts. And Dixie, of course, thinks, "How hard can this be? I’m a black belt, so I can easily pick up one of those four tickets."

So she spends the money, enters the tournament, and nothing goes according to plan. In fact, it all goes spectacularly wrong.

BF: Wouldn’t have it any other way.

MC: [laughs]

BF: So then the rest of the book is then her dealing with how things have gone wrong and the problems therein?

MC: Yeah. And we introduce a fairly big supporting cast: some of the other students at Dixie’s school, some who attend the dojo and some who don’t. There is a very tough kid called Dillinger who Dixie has a clash with early in the story and who then comes back into the story in a different context. There are some of the rich kids from the school who get involved in different capacities. There’s one named Gifford Schofield who is always trying to borrow money from people. It’s really a bit of a comedy of manners as we see how they all have their part to play in how Dixie’s situation is ultimately resolved.

Hopefully the end will come as a surprise to readers: things don’t turn out as you would expect them to.

BF: Is the book going to be a comedy then?

MC: It is. It’s a comedy, romance, martial arts story, and social commentary. It’s pretty lighthearted but not tame or bland.

Continued tomorrow…