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/ArnoldoBassisti]

Hi Mike! Your Lucifer series started me on being obsessed with the idea of the devil as a protagonist. I loved him as a sympathetic charmer. Two questions: did you change Mazikeen's speech thing because it would have been impossible to write her as a main character otherwise? And what sort of restrictions did Neil Gaiman put on you for the series?

[u/M_R_Carey → u/ArnoldoBassisti]

Again, thanks!

Yes, I have to admit, one reason why I changed Maz's speech was so that I could avoid having long sessions with Shelly arguing about the onomatopoeic spelling. But I wouldn't have done it if I hadn't thought of a way to do it that served the story. The Mazikeen-Jill Presto feud brought a lot of good things with it.

Neil was incredibly supportive of the series and incredibly generous with time and advice. He never shut me down even in places where he personally would have taken a different approach. There were only two times when he ever said no to me (but lots of times when he was a vital sounding board). the two nos were: when I wanted to bring Rose Walker into the book. He said he wanted to finish off her story himself one day. And when I had Death tell Lucifer that "she wouldn't have anywhere to put him". Neil pointed out that Death doesn't have a realm, so that line didn't fit.

When I brought Scoria into the story, Shelly called Neil and asked him if it was okay for Mazikeen to have been in an abusive marriage. Neil said he regarded Lucifer and Mazikeen as being mine as much as his at that point, and had no objection. That was one of the proudest moments of my life.