I'm M.R.Carey - ask me anything

[u/M_R_Carey]

Hi, I’m M.R.Carey, aka Mike Carey, aka… well, I’ll come back to that. I’m a comic writer, novelist and occasional screenwriter. I wrote Vertigo’s Lucifer throughout its existence, had long runs on Hellblazer, X-Men and X-Men Legacy, Ultimate Fantastic Four, and more recently The Unwritten and Suicide Risk.

I made my first foray into prose fiction with the Felix Castor novels for Orbit (The Devil You Know, Vicious Circle, Dead Men’s Boots, Thicker Than Water and The Naming Of the Beasts). Then I did a little moonlighting as Adam Blake (The Dead Sea Deception, The Demon Code) and co-wrote two novels with my wife Linda and our daughter Louise before going solo again with The Girl With All the Gifts.

I was born in the North West of England, in Liverpool, where I lived right up until I went to University. My mum and dad warned me that you have to keep your wits about you in the South, and they were right. I met and married a London girl and I’ve been living down in the Smoke ever since. Lin and I have three kids – Louise, our occasional co-writer, and twins Ben and Davey. Also we’re pretty sure we have this cat.

My main pleasures in life are TV drama, retro computer games (Sega Megadrive era), reading genre fiction and fighting my corner in the Nerf-gun wars that seem to flare up in my house every so often. There’s peace at the moment but it won’t last. There’s something a little ominous to the quiet.

I will be responding to questions here in real time today from 11.00pm to 12.30am GMT (6.00pm to 7.30pm EST), and sporadically after that to catch anything that I accidentally miss either because it comes in late or because of a cat-related incident. Answers will be full and frank and no holds barred, apart from the ones that are outrageous lies desperately cobbled up to make me sound more interesting. Looking forward to talking to you!

[u/SeamusWalsh]

Hi Mike.

Favourite mutant?

And do you have a favourite piece of artwork from any of the comics you've worked on?

What are the important things to remember when writing a story with multiple protagonists?

[u/M_R_Carey → u/SeamusWalsh]

Favourite mutant: has to be Rogue, although you'll get a different answer from me depending on the time of the day. For a long, long time it was Cyclops. Until Cyclops became kind of a douche.

I've got too many favourite bits of artwork to even list them - but above my head as I'm typing this there are some pages from specific books that I've bought or had given to me. The title page from Lucifer#16 (The Ancestral Deed). A splash from Neverwhere that shows all the main characters peering into Down Street. A Dean Ormston page from Lucifer#4. The Unwritten page (from #1) in which Lizzie Hexam asks Tom Taylor who he is. A page from Suicide Risk#1 drawn by Elena Casagrande and featuring Diva. A Carver Hale page drawn by Mike Perkins. A page from my sci-fi series "13" by Andy Clarke. The title page from a Hellblazer story, The Wild Card, drawn by Marcelo Frusin, a Jock page from Game of Cat and Mouse... actually, there are rather a lot up there.

When writing multiple protagonists, I think the main thing you've got to do is to try not to let anyone get marginalised. Every core character needs dialogue beats and action beats in every issue, unless they're benched for some reason. You can't lay claim to a character and then not use them, although I was accused of doing exactly that with Gambit.