Hub - Issue 20 Read online

  Fast forward nearly 100 years. Barset’s grandson heads another expedition, seemingly to discover the truth about his grandfather’s trip. When the new expedition uncovers a strange blue box buried deep in the ice, with a strange little man frozen solid close to it, Barset begins to uncover the horrifying truth about what really happened to his forefather all those years ago, and it’s not just the TARDIS that’s being thawed out…

  In Frozen Time, Briggs has crafted a hugely enjoyable drama – one which gives McCoy possibly the best script he has had to work with for Who in any medium. McCoy truly is a pleasure to listen to, and he is supported by a strong cast and highly-experienced director in Edwards. The slow build-up to the eventual reveal is effective, and when the adventure really gets going the action barely rests until the end of the two hours.

  If McCoy had scripts like this when he was on the small screen, it’s entirely possible that the series would not have been cancelled! If you’re a fan of McCoy’s Doctor, this is a must-have purchase. If he’s never really been your cup of tea, you should still be very, very tempted by this production.

  This is audio Who at its very best.

  Cats Who Like Felix… An Interview with Mike Carey

  Following in the successful footsteps of Neil Gaiman, Mike Carey has made the transition from writing comics (his hit list includes The Fantastic Four, X-Men, Hellblazer and Sandman spin-off Lucifer) to writing full-blown fiction novels based around his freelance exorcist Felix Castor. The Devil You Know and Vicious Circle have proved to be big favourites with readers, and his new novel Dead Men’s Boots is about to hit the bookshelves. Here Paul Kane and Marie O’Regan catch up with the man himself to ask a few pertinent questions.

  Marie O’Regan: How did you learn to write comics?

  Mike Carey: By looking at Alan Moore scripts (laughs), which was probably a mistake. I think his scripts were the first ones to appear. Because they are such beautiful literary works in their own right publishers were quite keen to show them off. The trouble is they’re a bad model for other people to follow – its okay if you’re Alan Moore, you’re writing these novels. But it’s A) labour intensive and B) If you’re not Alan Moore, it’s probably sending you in the wrong direction because most artists have a better visual imagination than most writers. So if you’re nailing them down too much on irrelevant detail, then you’re preventing them from getting an imaginative feel for the thing, and the important stuff gets lost in the verbiage. When I wrote my first comic script, which was something called Legions of Hell, I was literally describing where all the furniture in a room was, if people were drinking coffee I’d describe what was on the mug. It was just bananas, not trusting the artist even to wipe his own nose. That script was offered to Paul Grist, who turned it down. He said, “It’s an interesting story, but what do I do? I’m not a machine.” So that’s how I learned, and then I had to unlearn it and develop a style of my own which is more telegraphic. Not as telegraphic as people like Brian Bendis, whose scripts are incredibly brief and terse, but include everything that needs to be there. That’s a great model, I think. I’m somewhere in between those two extremes.

  Paul Kane: Were the Alan Moore scripts published in books?

  Mike Carey: Yeah. I think there might have been one at the back of Watchmen, maybe not a complete script, might only have been a partial one. Then later of course I read some Gaiman scripts in Dream Country, they had the script for Calliope, which is a masterful, masterful script.

  Paul Kane: How did you first start to get published and when did that transition come from teaching to writing?

  Mike Carey: It was a very, very slow transition. I don’t think it necessarily had to be as slow as it was for me, I’m just naturally cautious. I was doing some work for Fantasy Advertiser, I did reviews for them, and then I started writing critical appraisals of people like Morrison and Gaiman, of the work they’d done by that time. The distributor, Neptune, who’d taken over Fantasy Advertiser, started doing their own comics line. So I pitched two ideas: Aquarius – which was an embarrassing Watchmen rip-off, it was just Watchmen with the names changed – and Legions of Hell, which is a story I’d still like to write at some point. It’s about a woman who has multiple personality syndrome, and she thinks she’s possessed, but actually what’s happening is that she’s chopped her personality into chunks and assigned a name of a demon to each of these parts of herself, so that when she wants to be angry, she allows herself to be possessed by the anger demon. This was before Crazy Jane by the way. So that one was actually quite an interesting story, and I wrote the first three scripts but the company went bankrupt so the comics never appeared anywhere. The one full issue was drawn by Gary Crutchley and Ben Dilworth, but it never appeared.

  But through that I met Ken Meyer jnr, who was doing the art on my superhero story, Aquarius, and through Ken Meyer I met Lurene Haines, who was married to Dave Dorman for many years. She did a couple of ‘How To’ books about getting into comics, one of which was for the writer, one for the artist. Lurene and Dave were trying to set up an agency at that time called Big Time, a comics agency, and they offered to represent me. But because the agency didn’t yet exist they basically said, we’ll do it for free, and if we get anything formally set up later you can start paying us. She found me work with Malibu and later with Caliber, just because she’s a nice person, not for any kind of reward at all. So that’s how I broke into the American scene. From Malibu I went to Caliber, from Caliber I went to DC because everything I brought out I was sending to Alisa Kwitney who was the editor on the last issues of Sandman and on the first issues of The Dreaming, and I was just saying: I want to work for you, I want to work for you, look at this. Which is what you have to do.

  Paul Kane: So it was a gradual transition. Were you teaching as well at this point?

  Mike Carey: Yes, I was teaching full time all through that. I didn’t stop teaching until the year 2000, and even then I only went on a sabbatical – it later turned into a permanent sabbatical. I just wouldn’t let go of the salary until I had enough money in the bank to survive a year, because I thought if it all goes really, really badly, then within a year I can definitely get another teaching job. So that’s when I cut loose, when I had about 20 grand saved up, and I had a little bit of a buffer.

  Marie O’Regan: How did you decide in which direction to take Lucifer initially, and how much of Neil (Gaiman)’s character is in him by the end?

  Mike Carey: That’s a tough question to answer. I think there’s an awful lot of Neil’s Lucifer in him to begin with and I think it’s really apparent through the first two years of the book, that gradually he morphs into something a little bit different. He starts to become a vessel, a vehicle for me to explore ideas about free will and predestination. But certainly the initial situation, it’s as Neil defined it. The fact that Lucifer rebels again, a second time, by resigning from God’s plan - by walking out of Hell, is the keynote. And it continues to be the keynote throughout: Lucifer is the character who says no to God; the character who refuses to play the game by somebody else’s rules, who would rather not be in the game at all than accept somebody else’s rules. He’s like a character in a story who wants to be the author of the story, wants to be his own author – or like a child who wants to be his own parent. So I think the seeds of that definitely are there in Season of Mist but I put the elements together in a different way, and by the time we get to The Divine Comedy, Paradiso and Purgatorio and Inferno, he’s something different than he is in Sandman. He’s become something else. And his style of speech changes as well. Neil’s Lucifer is very much a “calling a spade a spade” kind of guy, he refers to God as ‘the old bastard’ at one point. My Lucifer becomes a bit more austere, a bit more patrician in his language, gradually.

  Marie O’Regan: Lucifer, and Sandman before it, is a family drama isn’t it? Is there an element of soap opera to it do you think?

  Mike Carey: It’s a good question – yes, I think there probably is, in the sense that soaps have overlapping and convoluted stories about lives going through spectacular changes. Yeah, I guess there is an element of that. I definitely think the central theme of Lucifer – which is restated again and again in every arc – is parents and children. All of the most important relationships are parent and child relationships, including the God/Lucifer relationship.

  Paul Kane: What was the inspiration for Felix Castor as a character, because I can see certain parallels with John Constantine?

  Mike Carey: It’s been said, yes. Yeah, there are elements of John there. But I think it’s possible to exaggerate those parallels too much. There are bits of Constantine, and there are bits of Lucifer in there, although they’re small bits. And there are bits of me, a lot of his backstory is my backstory, especially in the fourth book which I’m writing at the moment. It’s turning out to be hugely autobiographical. It takes Castor back to Liverpool and back to his childhood, investigating something that happened to him and his brother when they were quite young.

  What other strands came together in Felix? I’m interested in good people who do bad things. I think that is a Constantine thing, yeah - that like John, Felix has done appalling things to people who he actually loves, people who love and trust him. But he carries the weight with him, he’s not a ruthless amoral bastard, he’s just someone who does what’s necessary and then can’t work it out – he just carries it around and gets more and more screwed up by it. What he did to Rafi and also what he did to his sister: the fact that he exorcised his sister’s ghost and he doesn’t know what became of it. You realise during the course of the first novel that there is this terrible unanswered question at the heart of his life, which ultimately becomes the question that the books set out to answer. We start to look at the mechanisms:
Why are the dead rising? What’s happening to the afterlife, to the eschatological framework of the universe that’s making this happen?

  Marie O’Regan: What separates Felix from other occult PI’s like Harry D’Amour and Harry Dresden?

  Mike Carey: I don’t know…the fact that he’s from Liverpool? (laughs) I think he’s got a dry wit and a very ironic, acerbic take on life that is kind of distinctive. Beyond that…I don’t know, really.

  Paul Kane: Do you do a lot of research, and does an interest in the paranormal fuel the books?

  Mike Carey: It’s very superficial, my research; I do whatever it takes to get by. Again, you look at someone like Alan Moore or Grant Morrison, someone who actually knows about real magic and brings that knowledge into their stories…If I live to be 1000 I could never have written something like Promethea, which is a treatise on actual magic. I am interested in the paranormal, I do research it – but most of my research is done on the fly and it’s shamelessly superficial.

  Paul Kane: Do you want to admit to that in print?

  Mike Carey: (laughs) Yeah, I don’t mind. Someone’s going to find me out one of these days (all laugh) You look at the way I use Navajo mythology in the Morningstar arc and the way I use Norse mythology in the Nagafaro story arc in Lucifer, it’s really just ‘I like that and I like that, that’s good’ and you weave it together into something that looks really good, and you hope no-one’s going to pick you up on the details.

  Marie O’Regan: You take Felix out of his natural environment of London for some of the new book, was that a purposeful experiment?

  Mike Carey: Yeah, definitely, it was a case of ringing the changes again – to do stuff that people won’t expect. I wanted to take, not just Felix but Felix and Juliet into a situation where they wouldn’t be in control of what was happening so much. No network of relationships they can call on, Castor can’t use his regular informants like Nicky. Juliet is badly damaged, not just in the fight, but also by the process of flying – by losing contact with the earth. So when she has a fight in the Alabama scene, later on in the book she remains far from full strength, which makes some of the things in the climax that happen much more problematic for her and for Castor. The worst thing you can do is establish a formula, and just keep on playing out the formula again and again and again. You want to take the readers to new and interesting places in each story. So the fourth book is going to be different because it’s not multiple plotlines, there’s just one thing that Castor is investigating, it’s something very personal to him; it’s not a case he’s taken on for somebody else. And in the fifth one I think we’re going to get some interesting revelations about the aetiology of demons, about where demons come from.

  Paul Kane: How many books do you see it being, or are you just going to continue until you run out of steam?

  Mike Carey: There’s definitely something that happens in the sixth book which is huge, which is going to be a climax to everything that has happened so far, and I could stop at that point. Or I could go on. At this point I’d rather go on because I’m still having ideas for stories. But I think we’ll sit up and have a look around after book six and see where we are, see what the sales are like and whether Orbit are still happy with me.

  Mike Carey’s latest Felix Castor novel, Dead Men’s Boots is published by Orbit on September 6th.

  Hub Exclusive

  Coming Next Week: Fiction: Takes a Lot of Hate by Mike Carey – A Felix Castor tale.

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  IgorTeper / Paul Kane / Marie O'Regan / Lee Harris, Hub - Issue 20

 

 

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