Mike Carey's Three Amigos: Frankie, John, and Lucifer

By Tim O'Shea

Mike Carey delves so much into the myriad worlds of mythology and folklore in his writing, it’s a wonder that a Carey book of mythology has not risen from his body of work. Give it time, however, and maybe one will emerge. Be it his upcoming Vertigo miniseries, My Faith In Frankie; the impending collaboration with Whilce Portacio on Wetworks; his ongoing work on Lucifer and Hellblazer; or upcoming reissues of his earlier work, fans of Carey’s work should have an abundance of material to enjoy in the near and long term. SBC recently discussed his upcoming, current and past work with this lover of mythology.

Tim O’Shea: How did the four-part Vertigo mini, My Faith In Frankie, come about? What nuances/strengths do you most appreciate about the work of the series' relatively newly discovered artist, Sonny Liew?

Mike Carey: Frankie was an idea that germinated slowly. I'd been thinking for ages about the possibility of a character whose strength or uniqueness derived from the fact that he had his own god: a sort of symbiotic relationship, where the god needed to be worshipped and so rewarded his one worshipper with personally hand-crafted miracles on a regular basis. I think the idea first surfaced about three or four years back in a proposal I wrote for a team book called Border Guards.

I could never make it work as an element in a larger story, but it eventually occurred to me that there was a story sort of inherent in the idea - the story of the relationship between this god and his one, sole worshipper, and what that mutual dependence might do to both of them.

Then I turned the worshipper from a he into a she, and suddenly there was an erotic/romantic dimension that could be explored as well. I turned that into a one-page pitch, and Shelly [Bond] said "yes". Just like that.

It was Shelly who brought Sonny on board - and it was a really good call. Sonny's work is a sort of unique mix of Moebius and Sam Kieth, overlaid in this case with some beautiful riffs on old newspaper comic strips. He's just got a wonderfully playful approach to storytelling - giving you everything you ask for, but layering in all sorts of visual gags and easter eggs as well.

TO: Are you fearful that the religious right might jump all over a book that is "about a teenage girl who has her own personal god"? As an atheist, what is the appeal to dabbling in the world of religion, as you do here and to a certain extent with Lucifer and some of your other work?

MC: Oh, it's okay - we're under the radar. I've been writing The New Adventures of Satan for four years now, and apart from a few desultory "you're going to burn in Hell" emails very early on we've never had any problems. You can really get away with a lot more in comics than you can in TV and film just because they're a sort of niche market. If Salman Rushdie had written The Satanic Verses as a comic book, he'd have had a much easier time of it and probably still be enjoying modest but steady sales in Iran.

I can't help dabbling in religion: I grew up on it. And so did the entire Western world, if we're all honest. Whether you believe or not isn't the issue. I don't, as you know - but there's no escaping the power and the resonance of those ideas. I can read The Wreck of the Deutschland [SBC background info: Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poem “To the happy memory of five Franciscan Nuns exiles by the Falk Laws drowned between midnight and morning of Dec. 7th. 1875”] "Thou mastering me God, giver of breath and bread..." - and on one level I'm thinking "that's just bollocks". But on another I'm quivering like a tuning fork.

I guess religions and mythologies got into our heads in the first place because they were memorable and powerful and had this great, poetic force. That stays long after you start to feel dubious about the nuts and bolts of it all. And you can still use religion as a way of exploring big themes and big questions: God and Lucifer and Michael and all the rest of the characters I use in the Lucifer monthly are counters in a sort of symbolic logic game. I may not literally believe in them but I believe in what they represent.

TO: You've written Hellblazer for more than a year now. Looking back do you feel you had a grasp of the character from the start, or like a brand new pair of shoes, have you both had to break each other in for awhile?

MC: That's an interesting question. I think I started strongly, in that High on Life/Red Sepulchre was a solid arc that set out my stall: it put John back in a network of relationships that I think show him off really well, and it prepared the ground for a lot of the stuff I've done since. I already felt when I came in that I understood the character, having followed the devious old bastard from his first appearance in Swamp Thing all the way to the present day.

But there's always a feeling of kind of force-feedback effect when you start writing on a book that's already established before you join it. You push, and the characters push back, and you get a sense for how far you can take them and along what lines. Just as on Lucifer I had to go through a phase of writing like Neil before I got to writing like me, I think in High on Life I was initially borrowing a lot of nuances from Garth and Warren before - in Red Sepulchre - hitting something like my own tone.

TO: Given the elements of folklore and mythology that weave through a great deal of your work, I'm wondering are there any genres/families of mythology or folklore that you are partial to, consciously or possibly subconsciously?

MC: I love it all. It comes from being a voracious reader and having done an English lit degree. I'm a Brothers Grimm completist, but I also love Greek and Roman mythology, Native American myth cycles, the Mabinogion, the Norse Eddas, the Idylls of the King, and so on. I went through a phase of reading a lot of Levi-Strauss - particularly the essays in Structural Anthropology - and I used to try to spot places where you could map one set of myths onto another. Nowadays I think that's a fairly sterile way to look at myth, but it meant I read a lot and thought a lot about it. It ties in with what I was saying earlier on about religion. I'm drawn to stories that work for me even when I read them for the tenth or hundredth time.

TO: What attracted you to working on Wetworks with Whilce Portacio? Am I right in thinking this will be a departure to a certain extent from your recent Vertigo-type material?

MC: In many ways, yeah. I'm tempted to say "well, it'll be a departure from everything that's already out there - except maybe the book's original run." Wetworks is a sort of joyous fusion of horror, superhero and sci-fi elements into a very taut whole. It's action-orientated, plot-driven to an extent that I've not tended to do with my Vertigo books. This isn't to say, though, that it isn't also driven by the characters: I think we've got a very compelling and believable core cast, and I think people will get very involved in their stories.

In one respect it's going to be very similar. Although Lucifer and Hellblazer are both named for their solo protagonists, I always tend to write any book as an ensemble piece - establishing supporting characters and then using them frequently. So writing a team book won't be that big a departure for me: it'll just mean that the core cast are more formally identified.

TO: How much did you read of the original Wetworks series?

MC: At the time, about two-thirds. I was shaken loose at the point where the night tribes were written out of the scenario, and then I came back in for the end. I was very sold on the initial concept: covert ops team versus vampires versus werewolves versus superheroes versus mutant alien symbiotes. You can imagine how the movie pitch would go...

I read it because it was bizarre and fresh. You had the initial hook of these soldiers discovering the symbiotes and becoming something weird and post-human. Then the second hook that their enemies were out of horror movies rather than out of superhero books. And then the very clever stuff where their powers started to change in line with their characters, so that they became less and less uniform as a team.

It was a bumpy ride at times, because of the crossovers that were going on at that time in the Wildstorm universe, but it was fascinating and fun to follow those themes as they played themselves out.

TO: How annoying is it when some readers of your work on Hellblazer or Lucifer compare the quality and style to others that may have written the characters? It seems some people will just dismiss a work because "that's not the way Ellis (or insert name here) approached the character..."

MC: It's sort of inevitable, I guess, so I don't worry about it too much. In fact, when you take over a long-running book, it seems to me that you expect people to have the previous run in mind: whatever you keep, and whatever you change, you know that the context for what you're doing is what was done before. You expect to be judged against that, and you've got to take the half-bricks along with the love and kisses.

I was a little bit ticked off with some comments about my Red Sepulchre storyline in Hellblazer - that it depended too much on existing continuity. Someone accused me of writing "Hellblazer fan-fiction". Actually, although i>Red Sepulchre uses a number of characters who first appeared in Warren's run, you didn't need to know anything at all about them to understand the story: everything that mattered was there. What I was doing - there and elsewhere - was to use existing characters in a way that gives long-time readers some Easter eggs along the way. For example, the scene in #181 where the corpse on the slab talks to John has an additional resonance if you know that the corpse is Gary Lester (a character from the very start of Jamie's run on the book) - but if you don't know that, the scene still makes perfect sense and hopefully carries as much force.

TO: Is it gratifying or intimidating to have Hellblazer fans annotate your work, as done at the Straight to Hell: A Hellblazer Site message board? Is this something you read, or are you too busy writing to look over such analysis?

MC: I always read Ade's annotations of Hellblazer - and now, Matt's annotations of Lucifer on his Lightbringer site. They're both very literate guys, and they write wittily and entertainingly. I take it as a big compliment that they find enough nuances in my stuff to make it worth writing about.

Of course, Ade is a long-standing Hellblazer fan and part of the regular crowd at John McMahon's Straight to Hell site. In fact, we already knew each other through the Just One Page project that Ade organised and ran at last year's Bristol con - not that I expect him to cut me any slack on that account... :)

And Matt is working on a book of critical essays on Lucifer, so I know him outside of the message board/website context as well. I love that aspect of the job - getting to know the people who are into the books I work on, and getting into a dialogue with them.

TO: Looking back to an earlier point in your career, how well do you think your work on Inferno (work you did for Caliber with Michael Gaydos seven or eight years ago) holds up? How did the new collection from Titan come about? Upon reflection, what are you most proud of about that project in particular?

MC: That's three questions, isn't it? You can't fool me.

I think some aspects of Inferno hold up very well. It still *looks* great, for one thing. And it's still a story that develops in a very unpredictable way, I think. Most of the people who read it at the time (Victor and Edna Scrote of 39, The Mews, Stoke Penge) didn't see the pay-off coming, which pleased us a great deal because all the cards were on the table. And I still like both the characters of Travis and Shule and the central premise - the tactical use of reincarnation as a weapon in a battle against an unimaginably superior opponent. We had so many ideas up our sleeves, and so many directions we were going to take it in.

The new collection arose out of a chance meeting with Titan's Simon Furman at a drink-up in Tottenham Court Road. We were talking about our various exploits with indie publishers, and Simon mentioned that Titan might be interested in reissuing some of them. Then I mentioned that to Gary Reed (of Caliber), and he sent Simon a package which included the Inferno issues. Simon liked it and decided to publish a collection. I was delighted, because I was always convinced that it was only the erratic publishing schedule that killed the book. The ideas are still strong.

What am I most proud of. "When the battle was over, it was not Terence, nor Travis, who stood alive upon the field. It was me." But that only makes sense if you've read the book (bwahaha! Teasers!)

TO: If you had the opportunity, is there any other hard to find or out of print work of yours that you would like to see re-issued?

MC: Yeah! The Doctor Faustus one-off I did with Mike (Ruse) Perkins. It's a take on the Marlowe version of the Faust legend, which sort of centres on the triangular relationship between Faustus, Mephistopheles and Faustus's servant, Wagner (who is secretly in love with Faustus). We both put our hearts and souls into that book, and we ended up with a tragedy that was recognisably different from the classic one but - we thought - just as powerful. It's an odd length to be collected, though - about forty-some story pages - so I think Titan threw it back into the water.

TO: In an interview on a old Lucifer website a few years back, you expressed interest in doing a graphic novel using Garry Trudeau's Doonesbury characters. Given that you're from Liverpool, how did you come to discover and enjoy the Doonesbury characters? I'm a Doonesbury fan myself, but in many ways there's something distinctly U.S.-based/biased about the strips, at least I always thought there was. Or is that the appeal?

MC: The Guardian newspaper in the UK has run Doonesbury for decades now – and when I was at University they had a full-page article giving all the characters' backstories - which read like a David Lynchian soap opera. I was curious and picked it up. Then I started buying some of the old US collected editions (the very small ones with one strip per page) and I got hooked.

I love Doonesbury because it's unfailingly humane and civilised and unfailingly stomach-hurtingly funny. Very few strips manage that fusion of rasor-sharp comment and anarchic, unpredictable humour. In fact, for "very few" read "one".

Yeah, obviously it *is* dealing with the US political scene rather than the UK one - but the overlap is frighteningly large. Under Mister - sorry, president - Blair, we have tended to notice that when America has a couple of beers, Britain gets a hangover.

TO: I noticed that in an interview with Alexander Ness over at Slushfactory you mentioned an affinity for Michael Moorcock's work. Given that Moorcock is doing some work with Walter Simonson at DC, would you pursue an opportunity to collaborate with him?

MC: Probably not. I just meant that I learned some of the ropes from him, when it comes to storytelling. I don't think I'd be comfortable with any kind of a co-writing gig, especially not with someone who punches so far above my weight. There'd be the danger of disappearing into his artistic vision without a trace. I still dust off The Dancers at the End of Time and re-read it every few years, though: it's right up there in my top ten re-readable books.

TO: Given that you are delving into the worlds of movies with Frost Flowers have you resigned yourself to the fact that the movie Constantine more than likely will be a far different person than the Vertigo incarnation? Or is that not something you're even going to bother considering?

MC: I went through the same agonies as every other long-termHellblazer fan when the project was announced, and then when the rumours started to surface - about the Hellblazermobile, and his sidekick being a feisty lady cop and all that stuff. But from what I hear of the actual storyline, it sounds interesting - and Keanu certainly looks the part in the publicity stills. I'm keeping an open mind. Obviously it's not going to be the comic brought to life - it's going to be a separate entity, with its own look and feel. it's best to regard it in that light - maybe it's an "Elseworlds" tale of Constantine (I think that could be an Ade Brown insight that I've nicked).

TO: Is there anything else you'd like to discuss that I did not ask?

MC: No, I'm good. Gasp. Pant. Herf.