"Mike Carey on Comics Writing & Beyond"
conversation, Mike Carey + Neal Romanek
How did you become involved in DC's Minx line and "Re-Gifters"? Did you have to employ any new tools to write specifically for a young female audience?
Well, that's not true, of course, because "Frankie" also had that element of playing on mythological themes and questions of religious belief. In "Re-Gifters" that wider dimension is much more subliminally present in the relationships between the different L.A. subcultures and the protagonist's trying to find her niche within that complex web of relationships. But what I mean is that we knew where we were going, and we knew how we wanted to get there. There was never a phase of sitting around and asking ourselves "How are we going to do this?"
Clearly, though, the narrative techniques are very different from my superhero work and from most of my Vertigo work. That was part of the fun.
I guess the big difference is that I'm writing for a living now. When I started out, and way, way into my run on "Lucifer", I was a teacher who wrote in the evenings and at weekends, around the edges of a very demanding job. Then I made the big jump - as two smaller jumps, because at the college's invitation I took a sabbatical before I quit teaching for good - and for the past five years I've just been doing this, full-time. That was a huge change in my life, and at first it was hard to adjust. Obviously I began to take on a bigger volume of work, but that's never really been a problem: what was weird was sitting at home, waving my wife off to the office and my kids to school, and then hammering away at the keyboard in a room by myself for eight hours.
But that's just logistical stuff, obviously, and you get used to it. In a more significant sense, I had to start seeing writing as a career rather than a hobby and I had to start making decisions about where I was going, what I was aiming for. That didn't come naturally to me: I'm both a disorganised person and a retiring one, so I don't push hard towards specific goals, treading the slow and the unwary under my feet. My instinct is to keep plugging away and wait for things to happen, which was why it took me so long to progress from comics journalism into comic scriptwriting. I'm still not aggressive: but I do have more of a sense of direction now, even if it wavers a lot.
What's the biggest roadblock you've had to face as a writer?
Two things saved me. One was that Alisa commissioned a second miniseries - "Petrefax" - from me before she left DC, giving me a lifeline and an ongoing link to Vertigo for at least four months. And the other was that I made the decision to go to San Diego that year for Comic-Con and made contact with Shelly Bond, who edited me on a short story for the Flinch horror anthology and ultimately commissioned the "Lucifer" ongoing. I stayed in the game, in other words - with the help of two exceptional editors. And everything since, as far as my career is concerned, has really followed on from the decisions of that time.
There's the adage: "It's not enough to have talent, you must have a talent for having talent." So how do you operate as the Mike Carey "brand", as a business person who may sometimes have to act and think differently from the author?
I think you develop a kind of double-vision where - even while you're immersed in one project - part of your mind is always engaged in racking up the next one. That's a change that comes about as soon as you're relying on your writing income: you worry about gaps, about periods when there's nothing happening, so you try to keep them as short and infrequent as you can. I'm always talking to editors, and I'm always throwing out pitches or jotting down rough ideas for possible stories. Having said that, though, I know a lot of creators who are much more pro-active, much more aggressive than I am in doing that stuff - who set up and maintain the brand with great skill and great dedication. I'm kind of ham-fisted at it, if I'm honest. And I do the bits of it that come easy to me, like writing the blog and chatting on the occasional message board, and doing signings every so often. Stuff that looks daunting I shamelessly duck.
The part of marketing that I enjoy most is going to cons. I don't really regard that as work, because my own inner fan-boy is still alive and well and any sci-fi or comics convention is going to provide me with a lot of pleasure and diversion. But it does also get you onto people's radar, so in that sense it's a promotional thing.
The communications revolution has affected the balance of power in all areas of business. Do you see UK and European popular media changing in prominence or influence? Or do you suppose there'll be more consolidation of US influence, with stuff farmed out to international artists?
What have been your observations of the "New Authorship", with creators working easily across multiple media - in your case, films, prose, comics. Is there a real falling away of specialization - or pigeonholing? Or has it always been this way?
I don't see this as a bad thing. Very few writers in my experience think of the medium they work in as their natural home or as the limit of their ambitions. Most writers like telling stories, and most writers like to experiment: I know generalisations are dangerous but I believe those things to be true. The medium may be the message, in a lot of cases - has to be, in a lot of cases - but for that very reason, if you've got something different to say you'll often reach out for a different medium to say it in.
What's the most practical lesson you've learned? The thing you've used most in improving your craft?
Peter says there are three qualities that it's desirable for a comics creator to have: to be really good, really quick or really nice. To be all three of those things would be great, but any two will do. It's the honest-to-God truth.
Will we see you this July at Comic-Con?
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Labels: comics and illustration, writers
