by Mike Collins

YMB: You first gained recognition with your work for Vertigo. What is it about that imprint that seems to draw in very creative writers and artists?

Carey: I think it's that Vertigo has always been a line where you could take risks and follow up wild ideas. Having said that, obviously I'm best known for writing a sequel to one established Vertigo title and a three-year run on another, which in itself isn't exactly ground-breaking. But I think what I was doing in Lucifer would have been very hard to do anywhere else - and a book like My Faith in Frankie was pure Vertigo in its bizarre conjunction of humour and fantasy.

Vertigo has also proved to be very successful indeed at spotting and developing new talent. It's certainly been a proving ground for the best that the UK has to offer, repeatedly identifying great writers and artists and giving them their first outings. It's hard to think of any British writer of note who hasn't cut his teeth at Vertigo - and it's noticeable how many people now writing core DC and Marvel titles have a Vertigo series in their background.

Part of this just comes down to a great editorial team. Some of the best editors I've ever encountered have been at Vertigo, and they seem to have a very strong team ethos there - a very strong commitment to what they're doing.

When you first began writing Lucifer was there any hesitation? You're creating an epic about Lucifer Morningstar, aka the Devil. I can imagine there might be some concerns about the stories you might be able to tell.

Concerns about whether the pitch would be approved, yes - not about the story itself. The Lucifer book isn't an advocacy for Satanism or a sustained attack on religion, although it does explore the mechanisms of belief and the place of belief in our lives. It also looks at some of the central questions of the Judaeo-Christian faiths - questions of predestination and free will, particularly - but not in a one-dimensional or polemical way. I think it's a discourse rather than a tract, an open-ended questioning of these things, and in that respect I'm very proud of it. I never felt any ambivalence about it.

I accept, though, if this is what you meant, that we now live in a time where that kind of approach to religious matters is under threat. A couple of weeks ago the British parliament almost passed into law a bill which would have allowed religious organisations to sue any and all broadcaster, commentators, stand-up comics and comic book writers for material which they felt was abusive or disrespectful of their faiths. If it had gone through with its original wording intact, I'd have been a sitting duck. There's been a rise, over the past decade, in the kind of unexamined faith that can fairly be called fundamentalist, whether it's Christian, Muslim, Jewish or whatever: unexamined faith is a bad thing, in my book, and it disturbs me to see it becoming such a large and central force in the society I live in.

In light of the proposed bill you mentioned, what is your take on the huge uproar over the Danish political cartoons that have outraged Muslims worldwide?

I'm with the free speech brigade on this one. I think the cartoons were unfunny, fairly crude and woefully clumsy in the point they were making. I also agree that they were offensive. But there ought to be complete freedom of expression so long as you're not committing or inciting a crime. The freedom to speak inoffensively, as someone else already said, is no freedom at all. And similarly, all Muslims who feel themselves offended have the absolute right to express their indignation and to take part in a public debate on the issue. That's how the system ought to work. You don't win arguments by stifling debate, or by threatening to kill people who disagree with you. Most people on both sides of the issue accept this: unfortunately a few rabid radicals in the two camps have stolen all the headlines as usual.

It all reminds me powerfully of the Salman Rushdie affair, when an Iranian imam declared a fatwah on Rushdie after the publication of his novel The Satanic Verses. Then, as now, instead of defending the principle of free speech the UK government of the day made a lot of twittering noises about religious sensibilities and responsible use of civil liberties. I mean, on the one side we have satirical commentary, and on the other we have threats of murder. I know which one offends me.

I've seen you talk about Lucifer's quest for autonomy being similar to a struggle between a growing child and his/her parents. Can you expand on that idea a bit?

This is the way it's always struck me. You reach a point in your life where the most important thing is finding out who the hell you are, and for a lot of people pulling away from parental influences is part of that. Whether you love your mum and dad or hate them, you rebel against the parent inside you: the part of you that has its origins in them, the ideas and attitudes and behaviours that you absorbed from them. It may not last, but I think for many of us there's a phase where you define yourself in antithesis against your parents just to find out, by a process of triage, where your own space is.

For Lucifer, that dilemma presents itself more starkly than for an ordinary man or woman. His father is omnipotent and omnipresent: everything he is and everythng he does has already been foreseen and included in the divine plan. So where does he go to find ground that's his own to stand on? He's on a quest that's tragically - or maybe tragi-comically - doomed to failure, because his very rebellion is already something that his father has anticipated and turned to his own ends. Whatever his goals, he must be doing God's will and so he can't ever escape from his position as a made thing. He wants to be his own author: he can't. We all go through it, but for him it's a situation without a remedy.

You're approaching the end of your run on Lucifer. Looking back what are the high points for you? Any regrets?

I think we've been on a sustained high for about a year now. The whole of the Morningstar arc came out as well as I could have hoped, and built to what I thought was a really satisfying resolution. Now in the next five issues we're giving all the charcters their codas, their nunc dimittis, and I've really enjoyed being able to do that: there are a lot of emotional beats that we've hit in these final issues which we haven't attempted elsewhere in the series and which have surprised us by how well they've worked.

Looking at the series as a whole, I think a lot of the one-off stories were high points for me. The centaur story in #24, the Gaudium one-off in #28, Zim'et's tale in #33, and more recently The Eighth Sin and The Yahweh Dance - they were all unique and distinctive pieces that enriched the big tapestry. In terms of longer arcs, I was very happy with what we achieved with Stitchglass Slide and Wire, Briar, Limber Lock - the interweaving of all those strands into one narrative framework. And I like the quest story, Naglfar, a lot - because what Lucifer is trying to do in retrieving Elaine's soul is about as ludicrous as you could imagine, but it tells us everything we need to know about his concept of honour.

I'd like to ask you about the comics adaptation of Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere. How did that project come about?

Basically I was invited to pitch, and I said yes. Jon Vankin called me up and told me this project was on the table, and Neil had suggested me as one of the people who might be approached. I like the book a lot - it's probably my second favourite Gaiman novel after Coraline - and when the prospect of Glenn Fabry doing the art was raised it was very hard to say no. So we talked about how I might go about adapting the story for comics, and what the parameters were, and then we brought Neil in on the discussion and he had some ideas and suggestions too, and it all came together really fast. As with Lucifer, Neil is very flexible and open-minded about most of the things I come up with, and he's honest and straightforward about the things that he doesn't want to have changed, so adapting his work has always been a pleasure for me.

Neverwhere has been both a television series and a novel. What were the challenges in adapting it again for a third medium?

The biggest problem is how to handle dialogue. You just can't be as expansive with conversations in a comic book as you can in a novel: you have to be really ruthless. There were so many great lines in the book, and some of them we agonised over for a long time, but we usually found ways to hit the same beats through on-panel action, visual juxtapositions and so on.

Probably our biggest departure from the source material was a structural thing. There's a point halfway through the book where the main characters meet the Angel Islington through a device called the Angelus: and then they meet him again at the book's climax. Both of those meetings are very important, and very necessary scenes. But I wanted to handle the first of the two meetings in a different way, so that the final scene would in its turn be set up differently. And I couldn't think of any way to do it, at first: but in the end I had a flash of inspiration, and I think what we've got is a take on those two scenes that works better in a visual medium like comics, where the novel's version is more suited to prose. Sorry, that was very vague, but I didn't want to include any accidental plot spoilers.

Oh, and we did Down Street differently, again because we were working in a visual medium and I wanted a setting that would really surprise and disturb people. Down Street is a real place, of course, and in the book that's where Richard and Door ultimately go. Our Down Street is a sort of imaginative reconstruction.

Are there any plans for a continuation of the Neverwhere story beyond your adaptation?

Not as far as I know, or at least not with any involvement from me. It does very much lend itself to sequels, though. An ongoing Neverwhere series with Fabry on art would be well worth the price of admission...

Moving forward, lets talk about the Wetworks re-launch. It was initially announced awhile back. Was the delay because of this summer's reboot of the Wildstorm Universe?

No, it goes back further than that. When we first started work on the book, Whilce was a staffer at Wildstorm with a lot of different duties, a lot of things on his plate. For that reason, it took a long time to work through the details for our opening arc, go to script and then start putting the book together. Now that he's freelancing again he's been moving a lot faster, and we were able to put the book on the schedule at last. There was another complicating factor which has to do with my own position and some stuff that's upcoming for me, but I can't really say what that is right now.

Aside from Jackson Dane it seems that this is a largely different team. Can you give us some details on who the members are?

Absolutely. It *is* a different team, although the original team are still extant and we do ultimately get to meet them. Apart from Dane, we've got one other Wetworks regular on the squad - Mother One, the cyborg, whose relationship with Dane we really wanted to go back and revisit. There were strong hints in the shorts that Whilce - and then Whilce and I - had done for various Wildstorm books that Mother One was going to be resurrected - and for once we can say that this was always part of the plan. In other words, that the decision to have her on the team came first, and the revelation that she was dead (Dane's discovery of her mummified body) - came afterwards. We've also got Persephone - Red - who was my favourite vampire character from the original series and who I was very keen to use. Then we've got a werewolf named Ashe who comes from an alternate Earth, and a very odd character named Ab-Death (the name is a homage to China Mieville) who describes himself in these terms. "It's best to think of me as amphibious. I can be alive, or I can be dead."

All in all it's been a fascinating team to write. There isn't a single weak link in narrative terms. I should probably also mention a sixth character, a female doctor named Linda Bethell, who isn't strictly speaking a member of the team but who has a large part to play in Mother One's resurrection and who then continues to be important - mainly because we got interested in her story.

Wetworks was originally a book about a strike force taking on Vampires and Werewolves. Will the new title follow the same themes? If not what will you be exploring this time around?

That's very much what we wanted to take the book back to. But without saying too much, the nature of the vampires and werewolves - and the nature of the threat they pose - is a little different this time around.

You'll be working on this with Whilce Portacio, the original creator of the series. What kind of working relationship do you have together?

It's been very open, very two-way, very cordial. As you'd imagine, Wetworks remains a project that's really close to Whilce's heart. He's been wanting to revisit the team and carry on with their story for a good few years. Then I came on board with what I thought was a very strong idea for a vampire-based story that was a little out in left field, and we talked - at great length - about how we could incorporate that into Wetworks continuity and where we'd go with it after the initial story was told. It was a real jam session: very productive, and we got to know each other very well in the process.

Is it a limited series or an ongoing?

Ongoing.

On to the topic of the day. It was recently announced that you will be taking the reins on X-Men in July. Had you been hoping to get a crack at the X-men?

Hell, yes! The X-Men and the Fantastic Four are the two coolest super-teams on the planet.

You've created a bit of a stir with your cast of characters. Can you give some insight into why you went for this particular group?

I was given a clean slate, more or less: I knew that a lot of the team's core members would be somewhere else at the start of my run, so I was given carte blanche to put together a new team around the few extant members of the old one. I chose with one thing uppermost in my mind, which was instability. I wanted a team that had so many tensions built into it that it would be pulling itself to pieces even when it wasn't under attack from outside. That seems to give the most scope from a narrative point of view.

But within that - and beyond that - I picked characters who I thought would be cool to write - characters I felt I had an interesting take on.

The most interesting character for me is Sabretooth. He's a mass murderer, cannibal and overall unpleasant fellow. Are you going to try and redeem him or just turn him loose?

You can't redeem Sabretooth. He doesn't have a conscience, or even a stable enough personality to want to reform. He's a monster, essentially, and we're going to play him as such. There will be ongoing problems arising from his inclusion on the team, but we're not going to flinch from those problems or try to soften his edges in any way.

Since you are getting to play with Cable, is there a chance we might see his maniacal sidekick Deadpool over in X-Men?

Not to start with, because I'd be afraid of what Deadpool's arrival might do to the tone I'm trying to create in the book. But I'm a huge fan of Fabian Nicieza's writing on the Cable and Deadpool book, and at some point if he's cool with it I'd love to give Deadpool at least a cameo.

Will the team be based out of the mansion or will they be on the move? If so, can you tell us at this point where we might see them going?

They'll be in the mansion to start with. As you know, the mansion is a very unstable and inhospitable place at the moment, in a lot of different ways. Tensions are going to arise, and some very significant decisions are going to be made. I can't say more than that, but I will say it all happens early on in my run.

You've mentioned you are going for an epic tone for your run. What kind of stories are you planning on telling?

I'd like to tell stories where readers are surprised by three things: by what's at stake, by the way the victory is won and by the price of it. It's easy to say the word "epic", but epic is a matter of structure first and foremost: you've got to make the build-up a huge pleasure in itself, as Grant Morrison did for example in his Imperial arc. That's the tone and approach I want to take, to put it bluntly.

Your artist on X-men is Chris Bachalo. He seems to inspire strong opinions across fandom. Personally, I love his work and think he's at his best when he gets to play up the oddities of the characters he's working with. How do you feel about having Chris on board?

I'm delighted. Chris is a huge talent, but more than that, if you've been following his work on Uncanny X-Men he's currently at the thundering, spectacular, kaleidoscopic top of his game. He's been doing character designs that make me weep, they're so beautiful - and some of the action sequences, for example in the current Marvel Girl- centred story arc, have been absolutely breath-taking. Also, and this is no small thing, since I'm coming into the X-universe for the first time, it's great to do so alongside someone with as much experience and knowledge of these characters and their interactions as Chris has.

How do you plan on playing to his strengths artistically?

I'm introducing a hundred and fifty new characters in #188, and another two hundred in #189. And they all fight. And they all have superpowers you never heard of before.

No, we're at the pleasurable stage of taking each other's measure at the moment. I suspect that, as with Peter Gross, Chris is going to turn out to be an artist who can not only handle anything I can throw at him but can infallibly give it back to me turned into gold.

Did you expect the type of buzz the announcement of you on X-Men has brought?

Have we got buzz? Good! I admit I was unprepared for the intensity of the spotlight. I had about a dozen requests for interviews within three days, and suddenly there was all this activity on the message boards - people saying "who is this Carey guy? What's he done?" or in some cases, I'm happy to say "oh I know him from Lucifer, he's cool." It's been a strange experience - fun, exciting, but... yeah, strange. Suddenly you're out there. People are watching.

The X-Men titles seem to inspire a lot of hardcore loyalty with their readers. Some seem genuinely upset at creative changes. What would you say to these readers to give them a taste of why they should give this title a look?

I'd say please judge me by the actual product, not by rumour or hype. But I think most of the hard-core X-fans - at least the ones I've spoken to or met on message boards - are prepared to do that. And I hope they'll enjoy what they find.

Thanks for taking the time to talk to us Mike!

My pleasure.

Discuss this article in our forum.