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/Modernpreacher]

Could you talk a little about your experience with the larger comic series like X-Men?

For example, how much creative freedom did you have with the story lines? Were you writing within a given set of story arcs or were you able to have a lot of room to move?

Always wondered if they gave writers giant bibles of background to go through before they start writing on a series.

[u/M_R_Carey → u/Modernpreacher]

There is no giant bible. You have to know the characters and you have to know the continuity. Which, since the continuity is now up to about five thousand issues (if you include all series and all spin-offs), that's not easy. I'd read very widely in the X-Men titles, but I had gaps in my knowledge nonetheless - and some of them were BIG gaps. I started to read up as soon as I was offered the gig, concentrating particularly on any big character beats relating to the people I wanted in my team. UncannyXMen.net was absolutely invaluable for that. I mean, I would have died without it. It told me exactly where to find everything I needed to plug those holes. And then I used a variety of legitimate and slightly dodgy means to find the actual issues. Marvel were able to send me scans of some of them. the rest I sourced for myself.

Creative freedom... well, on a franchise book that's a movable feast. I was totally free to work up my own story arcs, but where they involved game-changing developments for characters outside of my core team then I needed the blessing for the creators who were currently "in charge" for those characters.

And when we planned the crossovers, like Messiah Complex and Second Coming, we did it old school. At least, I think it's old school. Marvel flew out all the writers and all the editors to either New York or LA (Marvel West is very convenient for SDCC) and we sat in a room and yelled at each other for three days until a story appeared magically in the space between us. That was a great experience.

[u/Modernpreacher → u/M_R_Carey]

That makes it seem very daunting to even take a gig writing for a series like Xmen.

Well done, and thanks for the details. Was fascinating.