Interviews
Mike Carey
Managing Editor Ian Murphy talks to the influential writer about his work on Voodoo Child, Re-Gifters, The Stranded, poetry, and some of the psychological reasons behind his fondness for the Mystique-Rogue relationship in X-Men.
LWW: I bumped into Bryan Talbot yesterday while out and about in Birmingham, and nodded to him in recognition. I suddenly realised that while you can live most of your life in relative anonymity, when you come to a convention you suddenly transform into a bit of a celebrity, recognised whilst out in public. How does that feel? Is it a bit of a shock to the system?
Mike Carey: No, it’s actually very pleasant. It’s not like real celebrity because it doesn’t spill over into your life and make things complicated. It can be a huge morale booster. And of course over time you get to know some of the people who come to the cons very well. You forge friendships. There isn’t the same distance between fans and creators in the comics scene as there is in, say, TV or movies. Maybe because most creators got into it by being fans in the first place…
How do you cope with fandom? Some of the internet fans can be hardcore and aggressive online – have you ever had any problems in person?
MC: I’ve been very lucky. Ever since the old Vertigo message board days, when we had the Morningstar High posse going, I’ve only ever had positive experiences with internet fans. You don’t have to look very far to see how bad it can be when it goes wrong, but so far – barring a couple of threatening letters right at the start of my Lucifer run – it’s all been good.
You received threatening letters at the start of Lucifer? How did they affect you?
These were online, so the guys writing them didn’t have my real, physical address or anything. It was very perfunctory hate mail along the lines of “you’re glorifying the devil and his works and you should die.” Then they disappeared. Much later, the Vertigo Lucifer board was colonised by trolls who I think had a religious agenda, but by then successive remodellings had kicked the stuffing out of the boards in any case and I wasn’t posting there any more.
It never really bothered me, but that’s not because I’m too brave and tough to be scared by hate mail – it’s just because there was no real conviction or heat behind this particular hate mail. It was like – - you know – - being savaged by a couple of dead sheep
Has fan response – positive or negative – ever influenced your storytelling?
Do fan responses influence my writing? Not in any direct way, but sometimes when you’re working on a book like X-Men, which has such a fantastically rich backstory, online discussion can wake you up to certain possibilities that you might not have seen for yourself or might have come at from a different angle. For example, there’s a beat in Supernovas where the brainwashed Northstar meets Anole – and that relationship was in my mind because of a discussion I’d been reading on a message board a few weeks before. I thought “yeah, that would be a really cool beat to put in there”.
We’ll come to Voodoo Child shortly, but your other book for Virgin is The Stranded, a co-production with the Sci-Fi Channel, the first issue of which ships in December. I haven’t found it easy to find information on this. What’s the premise?
The Stranded is about a group of humanoid aliens living on Earth under deep cover – so deep that they themselves think they’re human. It’s kind of like a trans-dimensional witness protection programme, although perhaps the pre-world-war-two kinderluft from Nazi Germany would be a better analogy. They’re refugees, and they’re also something else, and someone is killing them one by one for reasons unknown. But there’s one – a woman named Tamree – who knows what she is and where she’s from and it’s her duty to protect the others. So she steps in to head this unpleasantness off, and things go to hell in a handbasket right around the end of issue one. It’s a very cool story, I think: the initial set-up seems familiar, but it twists and turns into some very fun and unexpected places.
Given the involvement of the Sci-Fi Channel with The Stranded, is the plan to eventually develop this into a TV series? If so did they have any specific input into the writing of the comic?
That is certainly an aspiration, and yeah, the Sci-Fi channel are very interested in the shape of the story and are offering their own insights and suggestions as we proceed – which is very cool. Inevitably, as with Voodoo Child, there are some things that work in the comic book medium that would necessarily play differently in an audio-visual narrative, but we’re making all the big creative decisions together and it’s working out really well so far.
You did a Malibu comic early on in your career which cast Ozzy Osbourne as an unlikely hero. What would a follow-up to that be like with Ozzy as is in 2007?
A lot more picaresque, I’m thinking…
God Save The Queen was a fascinating graphic novel – miserably dark and gripping and in ways I hadn’t expected. The faerie aspect has completely passed me by in solicitations and publicity material, so that all came as a pleasant surprise. Do you see Linda and Ava’s story as fulfilled now, or do you have ideas for a sequel?
I think it’s done. You could certainly follow Linda and Ava as they explore the other realms adjacent to Faerie, but in a sense Linda’s character arc as I wanted to explore it is now complete. It’s not that she hasn’t got more to learn about life, and about her own nature: it’s more that at this point the story becomes infinitely open-ended, so any sequel would be arbitrary. Unless it was about her relationship with her father – I think there could be something more to explore there.
I just finished reading Re-Gifters, which I really enjoyed. How did you come to be so involved with the minx imprint? What was it like to work with Sonny and Marc again?
Minx is very much Shelly Bond’s baby, and we’ve been working together since the year dot. Since before Lucifer, even, because she edited my short story,The Wedding Breakfast, for Flinch. So I knew all about the Minx plans and I was in a good position to pitch for the imprint very early. I was already sold on the idea of doing a Minx book because it had been such a blast doing My Faith in Frankie. So yeah, bringing the Frankie crew together again for another outing was a big part of the appeal, as was flexing that set of creative muscles again – writing for a YA audience. It’s something that I find hugely rewarding to do.
To what degree was My Faith In Frankie a trial run for the minx line?
When I wrote it, I didn’t have any idea that Minx was in the works. In fact I’m pretty sure it wasn’t, back then – but I think it was one of many things that fed into Shelly’s burgeoning desire to create a new line and to have it address a certain core market.
With Re-Gifters, which was harder for you to write – the voice of the teenage girls, the Korean family dynamic and culture, or the hapkido training and fight scenes? How much research did you have to do to feel you could accurately and comfortably write these aspects of the book?
I’m pretty brazened to admitting this now: my research process is NOT thorough. I research enough (I hope) to give my books an authentic feel, so I did read up extensively on the experiences and reminiscences of Korean immigrants to West-Coast USA. The hapkido stuff… well, I had some fighting guides open in front of me, and I described sequences that seemed to make sense from the pictures in those guides. I also told Sonny that he didn’t have to follow those art directions for the fight scenes if he came up with something that was more striking visually. So long as the moves described in caps matched what we saw, I was happy.
For teenaged girls… well, I have a daughter who is one of that noble tribe, so I don’t need to stir very far for that research. I really enjoy writing teenaged girls, for some reason. Especially really confident, in-your-face teenaged girls. There’s something curiously liberating about it.
What were you like as a teenager?
I was the exact opposite of my own teenaged protagonists. I was very quiet, very disengaged socially, and very conformist at school. You would have beaten me up and stolen my lunch money, just on general principle.
Not me personally, no … The move that Tomas teaches Dixie – is that a real hapkido move or one you invented?
Oh, that’s totally invented – and I doubt it would really work. If it did, someone else would have come up with it…
Why do you think you’re the only big name to write for minx thus far?
I’m far from the only big name to write for Minx. Cecil Castelluci is a stellar name in YA fiction, and I think Aaron’s rep as a writer artist is about to explode.
I loved The Plain Janes, and the concept of high school art terrorism. Which is your favourite minx line book that you didn’t write?
Ooh, hard question. I have to say Kimmie 66, which is Aaron’s solo book. The same gorgeous art style as in Blabbermouth, and a very cool cyber-gothic mystery plot. The Plain Janes would be my second favourite, I think, and I’m very much looking forward to the sequel.
What was it like to work with your daughter in writing Confessions of a Blabbermouth for minx? Were you surprised by how matter of factly Louise approached the whole high school scene? Do you have any plans to work together again?
It was very tough, objectively speaking, but very worthwhile. We clashed early on about working methods and how much autonomy Lou was going to have (clue: all of it), but then we worked it out and got on with the actual writing – which was a lot of fun. I’d do it again like a shot, even given the fact that co-writing is always twice the work for half the money. We do have a couple of pitches in, although I’m also encouraging Lou to peel off and do her own thing. She’s not going to want to be part of a novelty double act forever.
Speaking of novelty double acts … I finally got the chance to read Voodoo Child. What kind of input have Nicholas and Weston Cage had on Voodoo Child, beyond the overall concept?
Their input was most evident at the early stages. It was Weston’s idea, and their pitch to Virgin, which I then came onboard to turn into a miniseries outline and script. Since then they’ve been involved as consultants and have also been promoting the book very actively.
Were you concerned that the collaboration might be dismissed as a gimmick?
I don’t think it’s a gimmick – it’s just a new formula for this kind of multi-media creation. And it seems to work well. I’d point to Gamekeeper as well asVoodoo Child in that respect. They’re not just generating headlines, they’re good books.
How easy a project has this been for you?
It was a challenge in one respect, in that I didn’t know New Orleans or Louisiana at all, and I was therefore writing far outside my comfort zone. But in this one instance I did the research very diligently, not just through written and online sources but by visiting New Orleans and interviewing residents about Katrina and its aftermath. By the time I came to write, I was very happy with the way the project was coming together – and I’m very proud of the finished book.
You packed an awful lot into the first few issues of Voodoo Child! How much did you know about Voodoo and related faiths before writing this book?
I did some reading up on voodoo for Lucifer a few years back, and I was fascinated then by what a unique palimpsest it is – African polytheism with the trappings and rituals of high church Catholicism. Again, though, it’s superficial knowledge acquired mostly from secondary sources. I did talk to some voodoo practitioners in New Orleans, and went both to the voodoo museum and one of the churches, but I wouldn’t want to hold myself up as any kind of an expert. I put in enough authentic touches to avoid jolting readers out of the story with glaring inconsistencies. Anything else is incidental to that goal.
I understand that there are long-term plans to develop the comic into a movie, which would star Nicholas Cage. Is that correct? If so, does that have any influence on the way you write the book?
That’s correct, but it hasn’t influenced the storytelling in any way. The movie is bound to work very differently from the comic in any case because that’s just the nature of the beast: different media demand different approaches and different kinds of story. I did my own thing, and hopefully if the movie happens then the comic will be a useful starting point in terms of defining the main characters and the central problematic. But I haven’t tried to second-guess the film-makers because they’re not in any way bound or limited by what I do.
Gabe makes a different kind of monster for a monster book, and is the more scary for that. How would you describe him?
He’s driven – an avenger with a very personal axe to grind. But crucially, he’s also a boy into whose hands enormous supernatural power has been placed. A lot of the focus of the book is on his character arc and the extent to which his mission subsumes his humanity and his own better nature. I like Gabe a lot for exactly that reason. He’s sort of my attempt to do a dark fantasy take on Hamlet.
Detectives always seem to come with a quirk these days. What’s Detective Robert Julien’s? What sets him apart?
Julien is pretty straight down the line, really. He doesn’t take bribes but he’s sleeping with a colleague. He loves his job, and he has a huge – usually justified – faith in his own instincts and resources. He’s an arrogant SOB, in effect, but his arrogance is founded on actual competence.
I like the way the murder mystery plot has quickly moved to the forefront now the key characters and alliances have been established. Is that the kind of story we’ll see after the first arc concludes?
I think the conceptual heart of the book is the relationship that gets established between Gabe and Julien – almost but not quite a father-son dynamic. So crime noir elements will always be in the mix.
I know nothing about artist Dean Hyrapiet, except that his work is stunning! The first depiction of Baron Samedi has all the passion and the horror that’s missing from, for example, recent Ghost Rider comics. How excited were you to see the first pages of completed artwork?
The first pages I saw were the ones that were produced for the ashcan, and which ended up being the opening scenes of issue one – in Mason Moore’s library, with Mason talking to his fellow abolitionists about the coming war. As soon as I saw how beautifully and authentically Dean had rendered that period setting, and how solid and believable these nineteenth century American men were, I knew the book was going to have a unique and powerful visual identity. And I’ve been really happy with everything he’s done since. He’s taken everything I’ve thrown at him and turned it into gold.
Voodoo, Legion of Monsters, manga, mutants, sci-fi, theological fantasy, teen drama – there’s no one common theme running through your work despite the range of genres you work in …
There *are* themes that cut across the different kinds of material I deal with. I always seem to come back to parent/child relationships, in different ways and from different angles.
What is it about parent/child relationships that is so attractive to you as a theme for you to write about? Is this interest what encouraged you to include Mystique in your X-Men line-up?
I’m not sure I’m able to answer that. My guess is that it’s integral to how I see the world. The moment when my first child was born was such a powerful experience for me it was almost like a rebirth, and my kids are right at the centre of my life. But even before that I was fascinated by the extent to which your parents inscribe themselves on you, in all sorts of unexpected ways.
My mother had serious health problems for most of her life, and I always thought of her, when I was younger, as kind of a passenger in her relationship with my father – carried, protected, nurtured by him as we all were. Then when he was in his terminal illness mum had to be the strong one and we suddenly saw another side of her. Belatedly, after her death, I realised how much of my personality I get from her rather than from dad. That thought would have appalled me once, because I underestimated her so much – gave her so much less than her due.
So these are issues that are, you know, running in background for me all the time. Even when I’m not consciously thinking about them, they’re there. So inevitably they come through in my writing. And yeah, I’m sure that’s why I put Mystique and Rogue on the same team.
Is there any subject or genre you’re currently afraid to put your hand to?
Is there any genre I’m afraid of? Well I’ve never told a war story, and I sort of feel like there are lots of ways of messing war stories up. You know Chris de Burgh? Passable tunesmith, good live performer, but he has a tendency to pick on subject matter that’s too big for his songs (the third crusade, for example) and make himself look silly. A war story would be a challenge.
It can feel like some writers and artists are submitting what’s essentially the same story month after month – what keeps you fresh? What makes you different?
Fear, maybe. I obsess about exactly that – retreading ideas and becoming a pastiche of myself. I don’t know if that keeps me fresh, but it keeps me *trying* to be fresh. To find new ways into stories and new twists on old formulas. Having said that, I suspect that when you do start recycling your own old ideas, you’re probably the last one to realise the fact.
Comics, novels, screenplays, short stories, you seem like a master of all … what’s your poetry like?
Find out at http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/xconnect/v6/i2/g/carey1.html. That’s my only published poem…
What poetry do you like to read?
I enjoyed the Helen Kitson book [Love Among The Guilty, published by Bloodaxe Books] very much . I really loved Wolves on the Beach: it reminded me powerfully of a Louis MacNiece poem – one of my favourites – that used similar imagery. Southern Belle is splendid and barbed. I liked both Blue Movies and The Lightning Struck Tower a lot, as well as the one about white women dancing, which I can’t now find. She’s very good – brilliant, even – at evoking the way in which sex and sexual desire lie athwart everything else in our lives, at awkward and unworkable angles… I have to admit, I don’t read very much poetry these days, and mostly when I do I read stuff that I already know. Wallace Stevens is a great favourite of mine, and I also like Gerard Manley Hopkins (which I know is a strange admission for an atheist). Mark Strand is very cool. Some of Wilfred Owen’s poems move me powerfully.
With novels, screenplays and multiple monthly comics – that actually ship monthly – on the go … interviews, conventions and your personal blog … what drives you to work so hard?
Insecurity, mostly – that freelancer mind-set where you drive yourself forward in a frothing frenzy because the work could dry up at any moment, leaving you with bills to pay but no dosh to pay them with. I ought to be past that, but I still keep belting on like a bat out of Hell. I’m probably going to die in harness, because slowing down seems to be something I’m incapable of achieving. Mind you, it helps that I love what I’m doing…
What’s your favourite thing about your job?
Seeing the finished art come in for a new issue – seeing what a given script looks like when it’s been filtered through the artist’s mind. That never stops being an enormous thrill.
LWW: The first thing that hit me when I came to Birmingham, the first thing I saw about the convention was this amazing cover of What’s On [a local guide to events in the Birmingham area that usually gives prominence to theatre and live music]. How does it feel to know that it’s the cover of your comic –Ultimate Fantastic Four #47 – that’s been used to advertise this weekends convention?
MC: It was a real thrill. I didn’t see it myself until this morning. I love the image, and to see it there on the cover of a mainstream media guide was just wonderful. It’s great that comics are coming out of the ghetto and becoming accepted in the mainstream.
This is the first issue of the new arc of Ultimate Fantastic Four. Can you sum up what that’s about for us, please?
It’s called Ghosts and it’s our Red Ghost arc, obviously. It’s one of the most enjoyable aspects of writing UFF – going back to the original Lee/Kirby stories and cherry picking, choosing the stories that blew your mind when you were a kid and reinventing them for a modern audience. I’ll never forget the origin story of the Red Ghost – how cool he seemed as a character, how scary he was. He deliberately exposed himself to cosmic rays where the FF were accidentally exposed. He got a bigger dose and he was more powerful. You start off from that position of unstoppable superiority, plus he was Russian and he was Communist – strange and unknowable.
We’re approaching the character from an oblique angle. We do have the Red Ghost and we do have the Super Apes but they come into existence in a different way and there are lots of things about the way the story plays out that I think are unexpected.
The arc with Psychoman has just finished, which contained a lovely little surprise, the Silver Surfer being the herald of someone other than Galactus and taken in a completely different way. I’m curious as to what degree the story was a dialogue with Christianity, with the plot being about freedom of choice and agency and so forth?
It was not at the forefront of my mind but as you know from Lucifer and elsewhere it is an issue – a whole core of ideas there – that exercise my mind a lot. Free will and predestination is at the heart of Lucifer, and the place of faith, the place of religion in people’s lives, both on an individual, psychological level and on a broader, social level, it’s something that I think about a lot and write about a lot so you can see it as my old obsession resurfacing again in a different context.
Is it true you’ll be leaving Ultimate Fantastic Four before long?
Yes. I can’t give you chapter and verse but I’ll be there for issue #50, which will be very cool, and for a while after that, and I think it’s fair to say we’ll go out on a very high note. The last story – the story we start in issue #50 – is calledFour Cubed, which tells you a certain amount about what we’ll be doing there.
Do you know what your last issue number will be?
I do, but I probably shouldn’t tell you before Marvel announce it themselves.
I know you’re a big fan of Doctor Strange. I just wondered if there’s any particular reason why you didn’t get to write his chapters of Endangered Species?
It was just the way the logistics played out. I did the overview, the planning of the story, in conjunction with the X-Men editors, and then it was a question of the timing of the individual issues, which is of course very tight with one coming out every week for the 17 weeks leading up to Messiah CompleX. There wasn’t much margin for error there. The way it panned out I wrote approximately half of the episodes and I have to admit I did choose the ones that I thought were irresistible. I’d have loved to have written the Doctor Strange ones, but I couldn’t do everything. I have a pitch worked up with Pablo Raimondi for a Doctor Strange story which we’d still like to happen at some point.
But if you look at the arcs that I did steal for myself, I kickstart the whole thing, I do the scenes with the Guthries, I do the scenes with Wanda at the end, they were all things … I was irresistibly drawn to those character dynamics, to those beats.
Speaking of pitches, I understand you pitched an Omega Flight book, is that right?
No, that’s not true. I was talking at one stage about possibly doing an arc onOmega Flight, I was talking to John Barber, and it was a cool idea and I said I’d love to do it, but I realized once I started thinking about it that actually I didn’t have anything much to say about those characters. The inspiration just didn’t come. After kicking some ideas around that never really went anywhere I talked to him and told him I couldn’t do it at this stage. Not that the characters aren’t cool, it’s just that there was something about the team dynamic and the situation. I couldn’t see where to take it that would be fun and original.
If you’ve not got the right story idea then there’s no point in doing it for the sake of doing it …
No, that’s right, particularly when the work I’m being offered at Marvel is so cool.
You have a new book in the works …
Yes, I’m going to … spinning out of Messiah CompleX I’m going to be doing a very different kind of book, a solo book or sorts, a solo book with a very large supporting cast.
This is the X-Men Legacy book?
X-Men Legacy, yes. We’re taking a character who’s been in the X-Men universe pretty much since day one and has a really, really fundamental place in X-Men lore.
Can I take a guess at who it is?
You can, but [laughter] I’m not going to tell you if you’re right or not
Professor X
Could be. [both laugh]
It’s a lovely idea for a book and we’re going to do some very cool things with it. One of the things that I’m happiest about is that it allows me to take forward some of the beats that I was setting up in Adjectiveless X-Men. So that’s in the pipeline.
What can you tell us about the cast for X-Men Legacy?
That’s a hard question to answer, because arguably if I’m doing it right pretty much everyone in X-Men continuity is going to come in at one point or another. But I’m planning to bring two female characters – one old, one new – in for some pretty profound and revelatory beats. And there’s a triumvirate of X-Men villains who play a crucial part at different times: the grand old men, in some ways.
The new female character – is that a brand new character of your own creation or someone who’s just fairly new in comics terms, and fairly new to the X-Men?
The latter. Someone recently introduced who I find very compelling, and whose backstory has never really been more than hinted at.
Will any of the the villainous triumverate appear as allies of the lead character?
At certain points in the story they’re part of a shared project, as you might say – not allies, but travellers on the same road.
Given the specifics of the cast and your options for weaving in additional characters – is it fair to say that this is the X-book you’ve always wanted to write? How much latitude do you have in the direction and cast of this book?
This is… a unique proposition, in a lot of ways. Very exciting, and very unlike the other books in the line. I’m having a lot of fun with it, and I’m being given a lot of creative freedom. The constraints come in a different way, from the actual core concept of the book. This is material that has to be handled very carefully. But if I can pull it off it will be tremendous.
With your work on X-Men Legacy … does that mean you’ll be coming offAdjectiveless or that Adjectiveless is stopping altogether?
I’m not sure exactly what’s still to be announced but it’s fair to say that there’s going to be a fundamental shake up of the line that will leave all of the books redefined. Some books will stop, some books will launch. My involvement with the whole X-Men franchise is going to be fundamentally changed. I’m still going to be there – I love the characters, I love the books, I love playing in this sandbox.
When you look at the team you started with on Adjectiveless, that team is completely destroyed now. Was that your plan from the start?
No, not exactly. It kind of became inevitable as we firmed up our plans forMessiah CompleX and particularly as we thought about how events in Adjectiveless would set up Sinister’s agenda for Messiah CompleX it became obvious that most of my team could no longer be on the playing field for the event and for the aftermath of the event. It would have been possible to spare them some of the carnage but I think it’s actually very dramatic, the way it did play out. I don’t think anybody saw it coming, some of the beats are less surprising than others, but when you put them all together they’re pretty shocking.
There’s a scene in #204 where Iceman says to Cyclops ‘You’re going to disband us, aren’t you? You’re going to bench Rogue’s team.’ And he says ‘What team? It’s you.’ He enumerates what’s happened to all the others, one by one, and of course he’s right.
How do you think that will affect Bobby and Sam’s relationship with Rogue? She’s the one who chose to bring these people on to the team, to bring them into the family.
I think their loyalty to her remains unaffected. That scene I was just describing is actually Bobby passionately defending Rogue. You have Cyclops there saying … a lot of her choices didn’t pan out … and perhaps that was wrong, perhaps my faith in her was misplaced. Bobby very eloquently tells Cyclops why Rogue was a great team leader and why the blame for what’s happened has to fall elsewhere. I think it’s a very powerful scene. I’m definitely on Bobby’s side, I’m using Scott as devil’s advocate there.
I always intended Sam, Bobby and Rogue to be the stable core of a very unstable team and the dynamic between the three of them – the way they can just rely on each other without needing to say anything, without having to give specific orders – I wanted that to come out strongly in the story.
Given the way you’ve put Rogue through the wringer – probably more than anyone else during your run – until she’s barely functioning, barely in control … do you plan to continue with Rogue from here or is she left like that for someone else?
Oh no, she’s not left like that. Everything, every single Rogue beat was planned in advance, we knew where we wanted to take her and where we wanted to leave her and the story’s emphatically not over yet.
Was it your idea to bring the Marauders back as a threat or did editorial ask you to?
It was an inevitable corollary of bringing Sinister back. We’ve been planningMessiah CompleX for a year and a half, ever since I came … two years now … ever since I came onboard X-Men as a writer. In January 2006 they flew me over to New York and we were brainstorming then what would we like to do with the crossover, where would we like to take it and who ought to be involved and I think the conversation that clinched it was … we were walking towards the function suite where we were having these discussions and CB Cebulski said to me ‘given what we’re saying about the trigger for Messiah CompleX, the bad guy has to be Sinister. It makes so much sense for it to be Sinister’. And once you’ve got Sinister how can you resist bringing the Marauders in?
The fact that Exodus and his Acolytes are in the mix too – and they are an eclectic mix, they’re not all ex-Acolytes, they’re people culled from other mutant teams … that was just because I wanted to do something really cool and maybe unexpected for the annual last year. I pitched that idea, let us bring Exodus in as well, and then if you have Exodus and Sinister fighting side by side you have a force that really is pretty much unstoppable.
It’s hard to think of any other amalgamated force that’s as dangerous and as driven as the X-Men have ever had to face, such combined forces – which is good given we’ve got so many X-teams now, it needs something of that size to give them a serious threat.
Yes, you’re right, absolutely.
Did you think about adding to the Marauders cast, of adding someone to it, or was it the case that there are enough already?
I think … no, I don’t think it was ever seriously discussed, adding or subtracting. Sabretooth was taken away but Sabretooth was taken away because of decisions being made elsewhere in the line. We wanted to get the vibe of Mutant Massacre. I remember reading Mutant Massacre … I was going to say as a kid, I wasn’t a kid, I was already well into my teens but … that story, the sense that nothing’s safe, they come in like thunder, out of nowhere, and they’re killing people from the get-go, and every time you think you know who they are it turns out there are more of them, they keep on introducing more characters, and they just get more and more formidable as a force and it was really scary and really edgy. We wanted to get that same vibe and we felt it was appropriate to get the same cast, as far as possible. So I started that arc with Riptide walking into an elevator and using his power and basically just killing a whole bunch of people who he hasn’t got anything against because of one target, Quiet Bill, in the elevator too. We felt that served the same function as those opening scenes … those unforgettable opening scenes … of Mutant Massacre.
So other than Sabretooth, who’s off the team for other reasons, we’ve got Karima, Lady Mastermind, Mystique … and Karima forced against the team. Do we see any possibility of any of those coming back to the side of the X-Men in the immediate future?
I don’t want to say anything that would … I don’t want to drop any hints about that … I will say that the various defections are all very differently motivated and that we don’t yet know the whole story.
We already have a hint of a mixed agenda for Mystique with her letting Iceman go.
Yeah, I’ve had a lot of questions about that. I think people have mixed feelings about it. My take on it – and I’m not sure whether this is ever going to be explicitly stated in the book – is that she genuinely … she identified Iceman as the biggest threat in that team. She realized that if he was allowed to use his powers in his ice form then he was the one who could conceivably bring everything down before it got going, so she cold-bloodedly and cynically seduced him in order to take him off the table. But somewhere in that process a connection was made. She can’t quite bring herself to shoot him in cold blood. It may be anomalous for her but I’d like to think that we made it work, even if on a later occasion she does kill him. I think her hesitation at that point makes psychological sense.
I think the kind of intimacy they’ve shared … even though it’s done from a callous viewpoint … it’s still intimacy and it’s very hard to switch yourself off from that.
I think Iceman’s not stupid, he knows how big a threat she is and he knows how tricky a customer she is. I think in order to get him to lower his guard she has to lower hers to a certain extent. I think she has to go in further than she intended to at the outset.
With all the talk about precogs, Destiny’s diaries etc. – and even a mention of Irene in Endangered Species – I have to ask if this is building up to anything with Destiny?
In a sense it is, yes. Certainly the Destiny’s Diaries – even though they’ve been destroyed now – continue to be a story element in the Messiah CompleX. There’s more going on there. In a much less direct way I’m also setting something up which I hope to play out in this solo book which relates to the mystery of the Destiny/Mystique relationship, which I think is a really, really cool relationship. I love the joints of that relationship, even the ambiguity of how far it was a romantic sexual attachment. I think it’s fitting because we know so little of what makes Mystique tick We know it was the most intense relationship of her life but we’ll never see it from the inside.
So there are no plans to resurrect Destiny?
No [emphatically], no, there aren’t.
Adjectiveless has jumped between the two artists, Humberto Ramos and Chris Bachalo. How do think that’s worked out and what was the reason for using two artists?
We … this is a model that’s almost becoming the industry standard. I think it’s because if you look at an artist like Chris you can see that doing a page a day is not always going to be a viable game plan for him because his work is so fully rendered, so beautifully detailed, so finely drawn that you’re inevitably going to have – in the long-term – deadline problems and so you need a pinch-hitter. It sounds insulting to Humberto to describe him in those terms but you need somebody else to come in to give Chris a dispellment so that he can take all the time he needs on his issues. And then Humberto comes in with a very different artistic style and one that I think is equally powerful and equally suited, in a different way, to the material we’re dealing with. It’s kind of like … it’s something I learned when I was doing Lucifer, that it’s easier to go from A to Z than it is to go from A to B. If you have two art styles that are very, very similar it jars more. We have Peter Gross and Dean Ormston, Peter Gross for the long arcs, Dean Ormston for the one-offs in between times and it was a superb model because it almost became a form of punctuation – a visible diastole and systole in the life of the book.
Congratulations on Endangered Species – how satisfying a project was that to be involved with? How enthusiastic were Marvel to have Beast headline so important a story?
Thanks! It was very rewarding to do because it was such a different structural model. The one-off is like an overture, and then we have a suite of reflections or moments that take us to a lot of different places, a lot of different aspects of X-Men continuity. It’s interesting to read the reviews, because where they’re negative they’re negative because of the repetitions. Beast tries A and it doesn’t work, then he tries B and it doesn’t work. But that tragi-comic striving and failing is the central plank of the story, and against it we’ve got – I think – a real crisis and a real character arc for him. So the ending, although it can’t in the nature of things be a surprise, ought to be both convincing and moving. IfMessiah Complex is the grand epic, Endangered Species is the lyric counterpoint. Marvel were very satisfied with that concept, and with Beast being the rationalist Everyman who acts as our guide.
Partnering up Beast and Dark Beast made for some satisfying contrasts. They really are wonderful foils for each other. Is it a relationship you enjoyed writing, and one you plan to return to?
It was a wonderful tool for this particular story, because it dramatises the moral choices facing Hank as nothing else could. But yeah, it was also just all kinds of fun on a dramatic level. I’d like to pair them up again, and I’d like Doc to become a force to be reckoned with in the X-verse.
Was that meant to be Cecilia Reyes we saw dying in the Neverland chapter? Did you ever consider using Endangered Species as an opportunity to bring her back? Does she hold any interest for you?
I always liked her as a character, but I don’t think that affection is universally shared. And unfortunately her power is a variation on a very well-worn theme, so when I suggested a context for bringing her back, nobody ever took me up on it.
How challenging was it to write such short chapters? Did you find any benefits to such staccato writing?
It was maybe easier than it seems because there was a single problematic throughout which meant that very little time had to be wasted in repeated set-ups. All the episodes are driven by the same dynamic, and it’s very stark and very simple. Hank strikes out, again and again, with the stakes getting higher all the time. It’s like Synge’s Riders to the Sea, but with mutants.
The staccato structure works well for a back-up story – in fact it’s almost mandated – but I’m worried about how it may read when the stories are collected. It’ll either produce a very concentrated effect or it will just jar, and I won’t know which myself until I’ve read the whole thing back-to-back.
Are you still working on the Beast: Mythos one-shot? It seems like forever since it was announced.
It’s still happening. The art is all but complete, and it should be solicited soon…
Is there anything else coming up for you at Marvel that you can tell us about?
I’m doing a Wolverine one-off that comes out in December. I’m doing a one-off that comes out next year that’s going to be very cool. I don’t think I can announce it until Marvel have but it’s something that as soon as they offered it me, I jumped at it with both hands.
Can we do a little quickfire word association to round things off with?
Northstar & Aurora – Bullets.
Mercury – Platinum (of the Metal Men – sorry)
Dark Beast – Hippocrates
Sunfire – Clint Eastwood (no idea what was going on there – I think it was because I’ve just seen Letters From Iwo Jima)
Armor – Unus
Messiah – Baptist
Blindfold – William Tell
Anole – The Beatles (“I’m fixing Anole where the rain gets in…”)
Legacy – Virus
Pixie – Dust (hey, that works)
Apocalypse – Now!
