L'interview en version originale anglaise

Mike Carey, hello! Thank you for talking to us! We’ll start by talking a little about your life and your career. You were a teacher for 15 years before you became a comic book writer. Did you want to be a writer all along, or was there a turning point?

I think I always was a writer, a storyteller. When I was teaching, I would use whatever free time I had to write short stories and novels, and a lot of criticisms, reviews, and articles about American and British comic books. I did it as a hobby alongside teaching. And then, at a certain point, it was round about 1999, I started to get work with Vertigo: first of all on Sandman Presents: Lucifer, then a few short stories, and then a Lucifer monthly book. I had to choose between continuing to teach and writing as a career, because I couldn’t do both. I couldn’t write a monthly book and still do my day job. So in the year 2000, I resigned from teaching, and I’ve written full time ever since.

Did teaching bring you something useful as a writer, maybe in the way you address the audience?

Teaching was very useful in a lot of ways. I think there’s a sense in which any job is useful for a writer. It brings you into the world and makes you meet people. As a teacher, you meet lots and lots of people – hundreds of people. I taught mostly at the top end of the school age range. For twelve of those years I was teaching 16 to 18 year olds – is that baccalauréat? And then for the last three years I taught adult learners in the further education system. So I was meeting people with a lot of different life experiences, and I think that’s invaluable for a writer. But I think there’s also just the discipline of working a job which is not just full-time, it’s a profession which requires commitment and ongoing effort. I think it’s useful to get into the habit of working long days! (laughs)

What pushed you towards fantasy literature?

I think to begin with, when I was growing up in Liverpool, I used science-fiction and fantasy as an escape. It was a very bleak time and a very bleak place. Since then I’ve come to see that actually, fantastic literature has many, many applications, and most of it is not escapist. Most of it engages with the real world. But the escapist side of it was probably what attracted me first: it opened the door into other worlds that were much, much more interesting than the one I was living in. At first it was the works of Enid Blyton that gave me the addiction. She wrote a series called The Faraway Tree, which is about a tree that has other worlds at the top if you climb up. Every day you’ll find a different world in the top branches. And she has another series of books, about a magical chair: if you sat in the chair and wished for something, it would take you there, take you to where you can get it (Translator’s Note: the Wishing Chair series). At age 5, I thought there was nothing better in the world than those stories. So I got the bug, the addiction, very, very early. It’s shaped my life to a large extent!

Did you have other references growing up?

One of my early heroes, although I didn’t know his name at the time, was a comic writer and artist named Ken Reid. Actually, I guess there were two: Ken Reid and Leo Baxendale. They were geniuses, writing and drawing in British comics in the 1930s to 1960s. They had very long careers. But this was at a time when your name wasn’t put on the story. If you wrote or drew the story, they did not credit you. So I had no idea who these men were, I just knew that I loved their work. The comics were called The Beano, The Dandy, Wham!, Pow!, Smash! – simple, one-word titles. They just had these wonderful, wonderful stories drawn with insane intricacy and beauty. They were big influences on me. There was also Michael Moorcock, with the Eternal Champion stories. I loved Ursula Le Guin, an American science-fiction writer. And Mervyn Peake, a British writer of the 1950s. Gormenghast was an extraordinary eye-opener for me, I’d never come across anything like it. I think what’s fascinating about Peake is that he was a visual artist first: he was a painter and a sketch artist, and he brings that visual imagination into the novels. There are chapters in Gormenghast which are just static visual descriptions of amazing places. It’s like he’s literally painting with words in your mind.

I think he’s done drawings in an edition of Alice in Wonderland?

Yes, he has, Alice in Wonderland and Hunting of the Snark. I thought nobody could illustrate Alice except for John Tenniel, but actually Peake’s drawings are lovely. His Alice is very different from Tenniel’s: she’s older and she seems a little bit more world-weary. But yeah, very beautiful!

You write for a famous collection, Vertigo, but also for Marvel’s superheroes. Which do you prefer? Is there a particular character in these worlds that you would like to write about?

It’s hard to say which I prefer. They’re very different pleasures. Mostly the work I’ve done in Vertigo has been using my own characters, creating worlds. Actually that’s not always true, I also wrote Lucifer, obviously, and Hellblazer. But there’s a pleasure that comes from just creating a world out of whole cloth. And there’s a different pleasure that comes from adding chapters to a story that you already love. When I was a child, growing up, the Fantastic Four and the X-Men were very real people to me, and those stories were part of the furniture of my mind. And thirty or thirty-five years later, to find myself adding chapters to that same story – that was just amazing! It really felt like the culmination of something for me, as a writer. And I still love those characters.
So it was great to be able to do both. I probably won’t go back to superheroes now; I did it, and I loved it, but it’s hard to write the X-Men. It’s a full-time job, because the continuity is very long and complex. As you’re writing one of those books, there are seven more books that are coming out, and you have to read all of them and know where they’re all going. You have to know where the Marvel universe as a whole is going, which is exhilarating, but also very, very time-consuming!

It has to be complicated because you can’t do exactly what you want…

You have to negotiate with the other creative teams… There are stories that I started to tell, and then the game changed and I couldn’t tell them!

Speaking of creative teams, how do you work with the graphic artists? Do you always use the same method, or do you work differently with every artist?

I have a default method if I don’t know the artist. There’s a method that I will use, which is a very fully detailed style, where I specify a lot of things in a lot of detail. If I know the artist, and if I’ve worked with the artist over any length of time, then I start to change the script towards them. When I work with Peter Gross – and I’ve worked with Peter now for fifteen years – we know each other so well, I write in a very telegraphic style. Peter takes my script as the first move in a game. He’ll read the script, and then he’ll say: Yeah, we could do that… or we could do this! And he’ll take it in a different direction – which is great, because we trust each other. I’m kind of a control freak, and if I don’t know the artist, I like them to do what the script says! (laughs) But if I know the artist… Obviously, that freedom develops as you come to sort of relax into the relationship and learn each other’s methods and ways of engagement.

Are there any artists that you’ve never worked with and would like to?

There’s a French artist, David B. He’s part of L’Association. I don’t know what his real surname is; someone told me once, but I’ve forgotten it. (Translator’s Note: David B.’s real name is Pierre-François Beauchard.) He wrote Les Chercheurs de trésors, Par les chemins noirs, and Le Jardin armé – and he’s a genius. I would love to work with him, but I think he mostly writes and draws his own thing. But that would be wonderful! In terms of the artists I have worked with, Peter Gross and Mike Perkins are the two that I always seek out, because I love their work. And Sonny Liew, who I worked with on My Faith in Frankie, is also wonderful, but he’s usually busy with other things. We’ve worked together three times, and it’s always been great.

In France it’s very different, the writer and the artist usually remain the same for the whole series, like Goscinny and Uderzo for Asterix. In American comic books, creative teams change regularly. How does it work? Are you contacted by a publisher to work on a specific project with a specific artist? Or do you have a project and go to a publisher with it?

It can work either way. It’s possible to come together on a pitch with the artist. When I developed The Unwritten with Peter Gross, we pitched the idea to Vertigo together. It was ours, and the deal was, it stays ours. We did rotate the teams, we did have fill-in artists who worked on specific issues, but that was always with Peter’s approval. He and I share the copyright, we own the book. It’s more usual I think for the editor to decide who the artist is. And in that case, as a writer, you might have a veto; you might be able to say: I don’t want to work with that person. But you’re not likely to be able to say: Please, let me work with this person! The editor needs to feel in control of the process, I guess. But usually, I’ll work with anybody. It’s very, very rarely that I can’t find a way to make the collaboration work. I think it happened only once, and that was with an artist who worked briefly on Hellblazer. There was a mismatch between our respective styles. But usually, it’s fine.

Were you consulted for the movie or TV adaptations of Hellblazer or Lucifer?

No, not even a little tiny bit. Because they’re characters who existed before I came on board. For Hellblazer, I think they used one of my stories in one of the episodes. They acknowledged me and let me know that it was happening, but they didn’t consult me. But I think the problem is exactly what you just said: there are so many writers who’ve worked on the series, and so many artists. If they were reaching out to all of those, it would never get made. Most of the work that writers and artists do in the American market is work for hire. That is, they do not have a copyright interest in the stories. It’s just the reality of the way the industry works. You have to accept that.
There was a small revolution about 30 years ago, when some creators, including Alan Moore, said: Let’s not do work for hire anymore! If we’re gonna write these characters, we get a copyright share. All creators should refuse to work for hire. It didn’t work, but it did lead to some changes in the contracts. It led to creators getting better royalties and more creative control.

There was also the creation of Image, I think?

Yes, it was around about that time – late 80s, early 90s. There were a lot of people going to Image. That phenomenon was another aspect of that same battle, or another battle in that same war. The Image guys, Jim Lee, Marc Silvestri and Todd McFarlane, all these colossal, hugely successful mainstream artists saying: No more work for hire, we’ll create our own imprint – and two years later, they’re taking other artists in and giving them work-for-hire contracts…

You’ve worked on many adaptations, including Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere. Was it difficult to adapt a novel? Because you adapted the novel, which was already an adaptation, and not really the TV show… How did you manage it?

It was fun, and I loved that project so much. It was specifically the novel that we were allowed to adapt, because the rights to the TV show had not reverted. So we had to work with the novel, and we had to be careful that we didn’t use any visual representations of the characters in the TV series. But it was fun. It was the first big adaptation I did. Since then I’ve done Ender’s Shadow, by Orson Scott Card; I did an adaptation of the first Fantastic Four movie into comics form. And of course I’ve worked on The Girl With All the Gifts both as a novel and as a movie. I like adaptation, because you kind of have to take a story to pieces, and look at what all the pieces do, and then you have to put them together in a different shape. You can never just go directly from one medium into another. So you learn a lot about your story-telling by doing that. And Neverwhere is a lovely story. I think if you look at my adaptation of Neverwhere, you can see me, in the first few issues, steering too far away from the source material. A lot of the dialogue is mine. At a certain point, I just think: This is not the way you do it. The way you do it is choosing the best of what’s there already. So it actually comes back around, it becomes more faithful as it goes on.

Was Neil Gaiman involved in this adaptation?

He was a creative consultant, as he was on Lucifer. We had to pitch a version of the story to him. It was quite an active conversation for a long time, because we made some quite important structural changes. We made a crucial change to the narrative, in that obviously the novel is a third-person, omniscient narrator, whereas our version of the story is told by Richard Mayhew. We did that I think for very good reasons. Omniscient narrators work in fiction because everybody does it. But in comics it feels weird now, nobody does it. It’s become a very marked choice, it’s quite rare. But obviously, if you have a first-person narrator, that person is going to survive until the end of the story. So you could say you’re removing some of the frisson, some of the tension. But we argued our point and Neil agreed.

The publication of The Unwritten was interrupted in France. Do you have any particular links to your French editors?

No, not for the comic-book work. I have absolutely no control over that process at all. It doesn’t even happen in Vertigo itself, it happens in another part of the DC organization. Foreign rights are a separate department. I don’t have any say, and my editors don’t have any say. They’re constantly renegotiating contracts, breaking off the publication schedule for series that were already in the process of being translated and published. It makes me very unhappy, but I can’t influence that. I have much more of a say when it is prose work being translated. I will often have a dialogue with the translator, and it’s much better.

It’s very disappointing for the French fans, because we won’t know what happens next!

I think it will happen. I think they’re going to redo the entire series with a different publisher, but I don’t know who that is.

It could be Urban Comics. They’ve owned the DC rights since 2012.

That makes sense, that fits with what I’ve heard.

I would like to go back to something you said at the very beginning. This year’s theme here at the Utopiales is Reality/Realities. Could imaginary literature be a way to dream another reality, or a means to better express or explore and understand our reality? At the beginning you said it isn’t escapism, maybe that’s linked with this theme?

It’s a good question. I believe quite passionately that science-fiction and fantastic literature are inherently subversive genres. They’re genres that question reality in a radical way. It’s no accident that in the Soviet era, in Russia and Eastern Europe, the only writers who were able to really challenge the status quo were science-fiction writers. They got away with it, because they could say: This isn’t Russia, it’s just imagination! I think sci-fi has an honorable and valuable tradition of playing exactly that role of looking at reality aslant. Most post-apocalyptic stories are really exploring one big question: if you strip away civilization, what is left? What are we without that framework? So again, it’s a philosophical enquiry. Sci-fi’s often a political or a psychological enquiry.

My next question would actually have been: Is sci-fi necessarily political?…

Not necessarily. I guess I think every genre is a toolkit, and sci-fi and fantasy are wonderfully versatile toolkits. I have a close relative, my wife’s father, who says quite proudly: I won’t read or watch anything that couldn’t happen in reality. I only like realism. As I said to him once, saying you only like realism is like saying you’ll only eat vanilla ice-cream. It’s saying you’ll live your life on vanilla ice-cream. There’s this entire array of flavors out there, and you’re just sticking to one. I think the answer is you can do anything in sci-fi. It’s one of the biggest and best toy boxes in the world.

Thank you very much for your time!

Interview by Izareyael and John Doe. Transcript by Saffron.

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1. L'interview traduite
2. L'interview en version originale anglaise