A Q&A with The Unwritten‘s Mike Carey

Vertigo’s The Unwritten, by Mike Carey and Peter Gross, is currently my favorite ongoing comic: It’s smart, unabashedly literary in its influences, and pretty damn original when it comes to synthesizing those influences.

An author writes a series of beloved children’s books about a boy wizard named Tommy Taylor (a boy with two best friends and a scar that burns when trouble is near), and then disappears. The author’s son, Tom Taylor, on whom the wizard character is based, is a young man with an uncomfortable relationship to his father’s work: He resents the books, but doesn’t hesitate to cash in on their popularity, either. In The Unwritten‘s first story arc, collected in a paperback released this week, Tom finds the line between fiction and reality beginning to blur, as characters from the books begin appearing in his own life, and his identity is thrown into question. And in the comic’s tremendous fifth issue, which focuses on Rudyard Kipling, a mysterious cabal is revealed to have been influencing the world’s storytellers for hundreds of years, shaping humanity’s fate by controlling the stories they tell.

The Unwritten is a total package: Peter Gross’ art is versatile and atmospheric, and Mike Carey’s writing manages to turn a theoretical exploration of the importance of narrative into genuinely compelling storytelling—he uses the tools of storytelling expertly, even as he deconstructs them. The first trade paperback, Tommy Taylor and the Bogus Identity, collects issues 1-5; issue #9 will be in stores next week. You can also download the first issue for free here, if you’re curious.

Hit the jump for an interview with Mike Carey, in which we discuss Winnie the Pooh, transatlantic phone calls, and Carey’s yen to “borrow Superman.”

Why did you choose Harry Potter as your starting point?

We didn’t, really. We chose Christopher Robin from the Winnie the Pooh books as our starting point. When we were talking about this idea, about following a character both in fiction and in reality (we being me and Peter Gross, the artist), it struck a chord with me, because I’d read Christopher Milne’s biography—he’s the Christopher Robin from Winnie the Pooh—and he grew up hating what his father had done, hating the fact that he was famous as somebody else’s fictional character. So that was our starting point. But when we started fleshing out the idea and it became about celebrity and the sort of viral spread of ideas in popular culture, we decided to choose a fiction that would have more resonance for a modern audience. The character of the boy-wizard seemed to be tailor made for us, really. Sorry, no pun intended.

Can you elaborate a little more on Christopher Milne?

He was actually bullied a lot in school. I don’t know if you’ve seen the books, but [he’s drawn as] a little tiny boy in a girl’s dress, essentially. He wears this very, very long coat that looks like a dress, and that was the image of him that he went to school with. And it was a fairly tough public school—in the British sense, which means it was fee-paying—and the other kids used to give him a lot of grief because of this, and apparently used to beat him up while reciting poems from the Winnie the Pooh books.

Tommy, though, capitalizes on his dad’s success.

Yes, he does, but I think only as a last resort. Only because he can’t do anything else. We’ve heard that he’s tried to be a movie star, he’s tried to be a jazz trumpeter, he’s tried to have all kinds of careers and he hasn’t made a go of any of them. So this is kind of his default option. Whenever he can’t do anything else, he gets back onto a convention circuit and signs his father’s books and does photo opportunities and stuff like that.

That sounds about right.

I’ve been to conventions where you come across people that are still servicing a role they played 20 or 30 years before, and sometimes you’re really excited to meet them, but other times you think, “Wow, that’s kind of a sad way to earn a living.”

How have Harry Potter fans have received your parody?

We haven’t had a backlash yet. It may come. There’s a kind of other dimension to this for us, because for many years Peter drew, and wrote some of the time, a series called The Books of Magic, where the hero was a young, bespectacled wizard named Timothy Hunter. And he actually draws Tommy as Tim Hunter. So we’ve kind of got multiple-boy-wizard action going on. And it is kind of an archetype. That would be an argument that I’d like to advance. Before Gaiman and before Rowling you’ve got Diana Wynne Jones, you’ve got Jill Murphy’s Worst Witch at School books, and so on. It goes a long way back.

Have you read all of those?

[Laughs] Yeah, I’ve read all of them. And also The Magnet and The Gem, which are sort of 1920s and 1930s British public school stories. That’s where the character of Billy Bunter came from, the fat schoolboy. And I think Tim Hunter and Harry Potter, they draw on that tradition as well. They’re public school stories or boarding school stories as much as they are magic stories.

Your henchman character is named “Pullman”; I assume that’s a Philip Pullman nod?

I guess it is a nod to Philip Pullman. I absolutely love the Dark Materials books and so it is sort of a little homage that he’ll never notice.

A strange one.

What, to name a psychopathic killer after him? [Laughs] I hope he would be flattered.

There’s a map in the book that has a lot of significance, although we’re not sure why yet. Can you talk a little about that?

That’s an actual map of the world—it’s the Waldseemüller map, which is a late-Medieval map. I can’t give you the exact date off the top of my head, but it’s significant because it’s the first map to label the North American continent as “America.” So it embodies an idea of the world at a particular place in time and it’s a very significant locus in time when America is being born, and the idea of America is being born, and that adds to its potency in the Tom Taylor context.

Does that relate to the fact that, in the Kipling one-off that concludes the trade, Samuel Clemens in America rejects the influence of the behind-the-scenes storytelling cabal, but Kipling, in the British Empire, allows himself to be influenced?

Yes, it all ties together. Ultimately, the big mystery that we’re seeding will be behind the mystery of, “Who is Tom Taylor?” The bigger mystery will be, “Who are these people?” This cabal, this mysterious group that’s been manipulating stories—what is their agenda? And clearly at certain points they’ve promoted certain countries and certain ideologies. They’ve been going for a long time and they seem to outlast the countries and the ideologies that they promote. They have a bigger plan in motion.

Can you give us any hints as to what that might be?

I’d rather not hint too much, because it does unfold very slowly through the course of the book, but I will say that the cabal, this group, is as old as storytelling. They go back to the preliterate roots of humanity when stories were only told orally. They’re all very old and they’ve been working for a long time. And Tom has arrived at an important, pivotal point in their plans, in their machinations.

The book encompasses original prose, original comics, and comic adaptations of other people’s prose, as well as other sources like TV reports, online message boards, and newspapers, that all contribute to our cultural storyline. But those sorts of narratives are increasingly generated collectively, online—has that been a factor?

Yeah, that’s a huge factor and it became more important as we were going through the planning and drafting process. I can remember very vividly a conversation I had with Peter. It would have been about last June or July. We were talking about the New Testament of the Bible and how that message of Christ’s life and death and the significance of it eventually kind of conquers the Western world, and big portions of the Eastern world, too. But it takes centuries to do it. You can actually chart the spread of Christianity across what had been the Roman Empire and then beyond it, and it’s literally two-and-a-half centuries before it reaches that global spread, whereas nowadays, with the internet, a story like that could spread literally within the space of a few hours or a day. There’s suddenly this totally frictionless medium for propagating story, for spreading story, and we felt like we had to reflect that.

One example that you can point to—it’s kind of stretching the sense of story, but there is a narrative in this—the fear of Avian flu. Which, from kind of a curiosity, became a worldwide panic in a very short space. I think there was a swan that died in the UK in Scotland and turned out to be infected with the virus and, again, within the space of probably two or three hours that news was everywhere and everyone was saying, “Don’t feed the birds!” Something like that, a scare, a panic, can spread very quickly. But I think if you knew what you were doing, so could a religion or a political ideology.

Has it been challenging incorporating so many different forms of media into the book?

No, it’s fun. It’s wild fun. I’m fortunate enough to be working with one of the best artists in the medium. I worked with Peter for seven years on the comic Lucifer, and I learned there that there was nothing I could throw at him that he couldn’t turn into gold. He’s just incredibly flexible, incredibly open-minded, and incredibly inspired and inspiring to work with.

The art is great. I especially like the transitions between “reality” and the scenes taken from the Tommy Taylor books.

It is incredible. An awful lot of the impetus of that came from Peter, because initially I wrote that as prose. Peter said, “I think I can turn this into a comic book, but still give the sense that it’s a novel,” and I said, “I don’t see how that could work.” And he said, “Well, I’ll show you,” and this is what he came up with. I don’t know if you noticed, but the coloring is also different on those pages. Peter’s wife, Jeanne McGee, is a colorist and she painted those pages in watercolor to give the sense of book illustrations, so they’d be different from the inking style of the rest of the book.

The lettering helps, too.

We’re very fortunate to have acquired Todd Klein, who’s just an incredibly good letterer.

Can you describe the story development process between you and Peter Gross?

It’s very open and collaborative and it’s not something that I could do with just anybody. Because we’ve known each other for so long, I’m happy to do the planning and the writing in a more open-ended way than I normally would. Normally I’m a control freak. I write very, very highly specified scripts and I get itchy and uncomfortable if the artist moves away from the page breakdowns that I specified. But Peter, we’ll plan it together, we’ll have a long, long conversation on the phone and we’ll talk about the story beats for an arc and I’ll turn that into a detailed scene breakdown, which gets approved by our editor, Pornsak Pichetshote. But after that Peter will phone me up again and say, “Look, I think we can do this scene differently.” Or, “I’ve got this idea for how we can frame this page.” It’s much more of a two-way street. Normally I throw the script down and if the artist wants to make changes, they have to negotiate it back to me or to the editor and it’s more of me in the driving seat. We’re kind of a three-headed monster on this; it’s me, Peter and Pornsak. We have very, very long trans-Atlantic phone calls that are costing DC a fortune. [Laughs]

I really liked the horror sequences in the the comic’s fourth issue [in which Tommy Taylor finds himself at a horror writers’ workshop held in the house where Frankenstein was written], where you play around with horror movie tropes. Are we going to see more experimenting with genre conventions in future issues?

It seemed to fit with that storyline, because Frankenstein is one of the very early horror texts, so we wanted to play with that potential. But yes, we will do it again. Issue 12 is our kids’ funny animal issue. It’s sort of based on the Beatrix Potter stories, but it has a serial killer in the mix, so we don’t get too far away from horror and dark fantasy. But yes, we will be playing with genre, we will be playing with theory. We’re hoping to tackle some of the huge and great fictions. There’s going to be some Shakespeare in there, Herman Melville… Moby Dick comes in the second year of the book.

It must be daunting, grappling with the canon like that. How do you approach the classics?

With a mixture of humility and barefaced cheek, I think. [Laughs] Obviously when you’re dealing with writers who are bigger and better than you are you have to be careful. There is some potential for falling flat on your face. We love playing with inter-textuality. For example, Moby Dick, we both really love the book and the various movie versions, but there’s stuff you can do with it because it’s already a self-aware text. It’s a book that plays with conventions and certain stylistic shifts beautifully, so when you put that into a comic, it’s kind of wide open for more of the same. We’re not just going to have Moby Dick. We’ve actually got more whales in that story than you can shake a stick at. We’ve got Monstro from Pinocchio, the whale from Sinbad and the Arabian Nights, we’ve got Hobbes’ Leviathan, every famous literary whale all doing cameos for us.

With different styles for each?

Yes, they’ll all be different styles as we shift between those texts. And there is a point to it, it’s not just, “Let’s have another whale.” There is kind of a key here to what’s going on. Actually, the key lies in Hobbes’ Leviathan, which of course is not a whale at all, it’s a metaphor for the human race, for people.

[At this point, Carey pauses to say goodbye to his daughter]

Is that the one you wrote the Minx book [Confessions of a Blabbermouth, co-written by Mike and his daughter Louise] with?

Yes. We had a blast doing that. It was the hardest thing I’ve ever written, but very, very rewarding. The problem was that, to begin with, I was telling her how to do it, because it was her first script and my 301st. I wasn’t giving her enough room to develop her own style and she told me to back off. When I finished being indignant about it, I was very proud of her.

Will we see more comics from her?

She’s working on a novel at the moment. I don’t know if she’ll write more comics. She reads comics, but she reads completely different comics than me. She tends to read manga and I only read a tiny, tiny smattering—well, I read a lot of horror manga, but she reads these weird romance books. They go on forever; they’re hundreds and hundreds of volumes.

So far you’ve borrowed quite a bit from the literary canon—will any comics characters be popping up?

We have a real yen to do Superman. We would love it if the DC guys would allow us to bring Superman in, but we suspect they won’t because there are Chinese walls between Vertigo and the superhero bit of DC and you have to have a really, really good reason for breaking those walls down. We’re planting the seeds. We’re talking to the senior group editor of Vertigo and saying, ‘Wouldn’t it be nice if…” So we’re hoping she will have some of those conversations for us and in due course we will go to Dan DiDio, cap in hand and say, “Can we borrow your biggest icon, please? We’ll give him back!” [Laughs]

He’d be in good company!

Yeah, that’s what we’ll say.