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)…

Part One

Part Two

BROKEN FRONTIER: Since you mentioned Louise’s new role in the Minx line as a creator, let’s move over to the book that the two of you are co-writing, Confessions of a Blabbermouth.

This one is a different story than Re-Gifters, do you want to go into it a little bit?

MIKE CAREY: In a way this story is a good contrast to Re-Gifters. It’s another family based story, but this is a family that is breaking down. The main character, Tasha, is a girl who lives with her mother, who is either divorced or separated from the father – it’s never really made clear. The mother is back on the dating circuit and keeps bringing home a succession of unsuitable and appalling men, all of whom Tasha cordially despises.

The story starts with Tasha meeting the latest of these guys, a man called Jed Hazel. Jed is a romantic novelist with a pen name of J.D. Hazel and he writes a kind of fast-food "Chick Lit", like Mills and Boon romances. Jed has a daughter from his first marriage, Chloe. And Tasha doesn’t get along with either of them. Jed keeps going out of his way to try and be the strong father figure that he thinks Tasha needs in her life and, of course, she sees it as an intolerable interference in her life. She does try to be cordial to the daughter Chloe, but finds her to be cold, stuck-up, arrogant, and emotionally unavailable.

So there’s all this stuff going on with the two families not meshing at all despite the best effort of Briony, Tasha’s mother. It becomes a sort of war of words because Tasha has a blog called "Blabbermouth", which she uses to vent and get her side of the story down. And that becomes a source of tension between Tasha and her mother and Tasha and Jed.

At one point, the adults decide that if the families are going to mesh at all they have to do something extreme. So they plan a trip to America (the setting of all of this is London) to go see the Grand Canyon and Las Vegas. But over the course of this trip, Tasha comes to suspect that Jed isn’t just obnoxious and overbearing and arrogant and exasperating, he actually may be much, much worse than all of those things. She has this new suspicion and she has to put it to the test to see if it’s true.

And that’s basically the story and main plot.

BF: I have actually read elsewhere that the trip aspect of the story is inspired by one of the Carey family trips?

MC: Yes that’s right. My family came out to join me in San Diego one year after Comic-Con, and we hired a van afterwards and did the same tour. We drove to Vegas, then out to the Grand Canyon, and on through Flagstaff and the Navajo reservation and the Canyon de Chelly and places like that. We really had the time of our lives doing that. But then again, we’re not a dysfunctional family. We’re wonderful human beings. [Laughs]

BF: Since this is the story you are writing with Louise, did the two of you come up with the story together, or did you pitch the idea and bring her into it later?

MC: It was a joint effort from first to last. What happened is Louise is writing a novel, called Bethany’s Words. Writing it very slowly because she has a life that is even more confused and overstuffed with things than mine is. [Laughs] But I showed some of the chapters to Shelly to see what she thought of it and she was very impressed. She said that Lou had a very mature style for a 15 year old. So she suggested that we pitch something together for Minx. I was already writing Re-Gifters at this time.

So, I asked Lou if this was something she was interested in doing and she was very enthusiastic. She reads comics herself, a fair bit of manga. She’s even read quite a bit of Vertigo stuff by now, although I initially vetted what she could and couldn’t read in that line [laughs]. So we brainstormed and Blabbermouth is what we came up with. It was a joint effort right from that first moment and I have to say that Lou refused to let it be anything other than 50/50.

To begin with I was thinking that I was—well, not the "senior" partner, but the more experienced partner in the relationship so I’d take the lead, but Lou dug her heels in and she wouldn’t settle for less than a full half of all of the writing duties. And I had to learn to back off, not to look over her shoulder and say "You can’t do it that way, do it this way." She just did it her way. [Laughs]

BF: As teenage girls are wont to do.

MC: Yes.

BF: So, did you have to kind of wear two hats during this process? One as a co-creator and then another one as a father?

MC: That’s really what I wasn’t allowed to do. Initially I did provide her script samples that she could use as a template for the scripting and for the pitch. But that’s really where it ended.

At first I was giving her advice on art direction, advice on pacing of the dialogue and so on. And that’s when she turned around to me and said, "You know, you aren’t the editor. We have an editor. The editor should be saying this to me. You don’t need to say it!" [Laughs] So I had to learn to back off.

BF: [Laughs] It must be fun to do this with a teenaged daughter like that!

MC: It was a learning experience, but it was a very, very positive thing. This is something that I’m so glad we did.

BF: It does sound incredibly rewarding.

Going back to the characters and the story, you said that this was a broken family. Was that a direction you wanted to go in to contrast with the family in Re-Gifters or did it happen naturally?

MC: I’ll tell you, Sam, the reason it played out that way was because we were thinking of ways to capitalize on having the two different viewpoints—to actually make that into a feature of the storytelling. So we were looking at a story where you would have an older man and a teenaged girl and put them into conflict with each other and make that conflict part of the dynamic of the story.

Initially we had this plan where we would have Tasha’s blog and a newspaper column written by Jed and that the two of them would alternate as narrators. So we’d have a chapter from Tasha’s perspective and then another one from Jed’s. And Lou would write Tasha’s chapters and I would write Jed’s. But it didn’t work out that way; we ended up with something that was much more organic and much more effective. But that was the genesis for the central situation.

BF: How did it work out then? Can you discuss that or did you want to keep that surprise for the readers?

MC: As we got further into the planning of the story, the Tasha/Chloe relationship – the relationship between the two teenaged girls – became more important. And so ultimately we decided that it wouldn’t be Jed who had the newspaper column, but Chloe. Even though Chloe is just Tasha’s age (15), because her dad is a novelist and she is in this privileged position, she writes this occasional column for a London based newspaper.

So, there’s the Tasha/Jed clash of personalities and the Tasha/Chloe clash of personalities, and ultimately there is a crisis and resolution that pulls in the whole family in an unexpected way.

BF: Now, you mentioned the older man/teenaged girl conflict in there that you and Louise wanted to take advantage of, but did you ever get worried that your daughter would use that to take a shot at you?

MC: [Laughs] Not really. She took enough shots at me when we were doing the writing! [Laughs] I think we both found the whole writing process cathartic enough so that very little of the tension comes out in the finished product.

BF: I mean, you keep talking about the story and I’m seeing certain similarities thinking, "Man if I had a chance to write something like that with my dad, I would have to put something in there!" [Laughs]

In terms of splitting up the writing, did you decide to split certain scenes and characters, or did it go more organically, with you writing some and then handing it over to her to write some?

MC: It was the latter. It was pretty much unplanned. Initially I was surging ahead, because Lou was still learning the ropes and going at a more deliberate pace than me. So what we found is the first third of the book is predominantly me, the second third is predominantly Lou because she wanted to do an equal amount of pages, and then when we get to the climax we were effectively writing together. There were sessions where one of us would be typing and the other would be dictating and we would be discussing it throughout.

BF: I want to try and get a little more into the characters again, was this character of Tasha easier or harder to get into than Dixie?

MC: Easier. Because Tasha’s life parallel’s Louise’s life very closely. It has a North London setting – it’s actually set in Barnet where we live. And so most of the things that are important in Tasha’s life are things that are important in Lou’s life. So the only real research I had to do was to basically just ask Lou, or even just watch Lou.

BF: The idea of using a broken family, was that a way to try and get to a different portion of the targeted audience aside from just using the opposing viewpoints?

MC: I was trying to do something different from Re-Gifters because the family there is very idealized and supportive of each other. This time I wanted to take a look at the darker family dynamic and Lou was definitely up for that.

It has to be said that we know a lot of kids who have some pretty extreme problems… Actually, I have to watch what I say here because Lou will kill me if I say too much. But there was definitely an imput from Lou’s side based on her own experience, from talking to friends.

BF: Did you find it better to have someone "in the know" when putting the story together?

MC: Oh yeah, it was great having Lou there. She was the "docent guide." [Laughs]

BF: And is this one also a comedy book?

MC: Yes it is. Comedy is a feature in both of the books. There are things that are meant to make you laugh. But in both cases there are serious themes on the line, in Blabbermouth more than in Re-Gifters. There are certainly darker themes that come up.

Oh, and before you speak to Louise, I’d like to take a moment to plug the artwork… It’s done by Aaron Alexovitch and the guy is a genius. The art is absolutely gorgeous. He’s doing another Minx book, Kimmie 66, which I cannot wait to see. He’s really brought the characters to life. From the moment we saw the sketches it was as if they were fully fleshed out, fully realized figures. We just heard their voices as soon as we saw their sketches.

To be completed tomorrow…