Interviews 

Multiversity Comics Presents: Mike Carey and Peter Gross

By | February 15th, 2010
Posted in Interviews | % Comments

On the first edition of Multiversity Comics Presents this week, I have the writer and artist of one of my favorite titles, Vertigo’s The Unwritten. Mike Carey and Peter Gross are two of the class acts in the business, having previously collaborated on a hell of a run on Vertigo’s Lucifer. Their most recent work together has taking the comic world by storm, bringing universal acclaim and a more buzz with every passing issue.

I’m proud to present our interview with the two of them after the jump. Don’t miss this one, as we discuss everything from The Unwritten to Avatar to Sarah Palin.

That’s right.

How exactly did you develop the concept of The Unwritten?

Mike Carey: We’d been trying ever since Lucifer tried to wind up to get another project going at Vertigo. We enjoyed working together and we had a great dynamic going and we wanted to see if we could make that happen again. We pitched a lot of ideas and none of them sort of took off. Then we both got involved in other projects. We started talking again at San Diego in…was it 2006 or 2007, Peter?

Peter Gross: I forget the dates.

MC: We started pitching ideas to each other again. Peter had an idea and I had an idea and they ended up being two separate ideas. Mine was about sort of reality changing musical instruments and Peter’s was about telling the same character’s story both in fiction and reality. It was the parent telling the story about a child.

PG: It was an idea I had about doing a story about my daughter. In the story you find out that this kid becomes the most famous kid on the Earth. The idea was why would a parent do that to a kid?

After we pitched the book we were both kind of like “which one is going to win?” (laughter) Then I thought “I like mine, I like yours, too bad can’t we combine them?” I think we went “I think we can combine them.” So that’s how we came up with this.

You guys did a hell of a job combining them, because so far the reaction has been exceptional. Everyone loves it. Has that surprised you at all?

PG: You know, no, because that’s what we hoped for. But yes because it never happens (laughter).

MC: It definitely surprised me because the last outing at Vertigo, Crossing Midnight, kind of had a checkered history. It never sold particularly strongly and there was a fairly steep decrease in sales before it reached the end of the second year.

So yeah, it’s what we hoped for but I had a sort of pessimistic feeling that things would go well.

PG: Yeah, it’s been a long time since I got what I wanted for from comics (laughter).

MC: Exactly.

PG: But the reception…people are getting exactly what we hoped for them to get from it. Maybe it’s because we really know what we’re doing. But we’ve planned really carefully…like, what is the reader getting out of it each step of the way. We really wanted to be in control of them and giving enough, and it’s worked.

MC: It’s the luxury of a long planning period. We were going over the beats of the story for the best part of the year before we wrote the script.

PG: And I think we’ve had the luxury of it being a collaboration of the best sense of the word. We go over it on so many levels that it just keeps improving rather than degenerating.

I was talking to someone about writer/artist books, I mean, I really like writer/artist books. I think that’s one ideal to shoot for in comics. But there’s also the idea of a collaboration when it works…like if I was writing and drawing this it wouldn’t be anything like this. And if Mike was doing it all on his own with just an artist illustrating his script.

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MC: It’d be a different book.

PG: It’s something that doesn’t happen that often, but when it does, it’s better the sum of its parts.

MC: I think Lucifer established that this was possible. It gave us a bit of the sense that this was possible. Because as Lucifer went on we were more and more approaching that kind of incest. We started much further along the path this time.

PG: This is amped up from that because I think on Lucifer I always thought this was Mike’s story. I might question something but I might not question the depths of that. But on The Unwritten I can question anything.

MC: Because it’s mutual property, yeah.

PG: And we did get…it’s amazing how deep we did get into it.

Oh yeah. Just reading it seems like there is so much planning into it it’s absolutely absurd. One of the things I really love about it is the Literary GPS that Tom Taylor has and also the Waldseemuller map. While reading that I constantly wonder, how far ahead did you have to plot to use literary figures and the locations that you have in there. How much planning ahead did you have to use to make it work?

MC: I think it’s a combination of planning and organization. We know exactly where we’re going in the long plot. We know when the story ends; we know the emotional arc that will take place. That still leaves room for us to say “well, we want to go to this place” or “we want to do this story.” It’s effectively allowing us to follow our instincts.

PG: And it even leaves room for massive changes. We have characters in there that we realize that are much deeper than we intended. They may not be a central character but as other things resonated and we planned we realized “oh this goes way deeper, we can make this character into this and this and this.” And it’s huge. It doesn’t change the architecture of the series at all; it just makes it deeper I guess.

One thing that comes to mind when reading this title is the effect fiction has on the real world. Mostly when I’m reading the blog/forum pages and seeing everyone’s reactions to events in Tom Taylor’s life, and with The Inside Man you have Richard Savoy who is blogging from the inside. How important is that concept to the title?

PG: I think it’s hugely important. One of the things we’re looking at is that we have a need for fiction but it’s been eroded a bit. A lot of it has been eroded by things like Twitter. I don’t know if it’s eroding it, but everyone writes now. Everyone writes little 135 character things or whatever…and that has to be doing something. I think that’s a huge part of it…what is that kind of thing doing. The lighting is being taken away from those who make fiction.

MC: The need for stories is fundamental. Everyone needs them. Fundamentally what we get out of stories is something that satisfies us on a very deep and primal level. But it’s culturally determined too. Storytelling evolves because of the way communications, the path communications takes within a given society. Now society has a sort of instantaneous transmission of messages across the world. It’s making storytelling mutate.

PG: It’s started to become more about the medium than the message. If at all the medium is the message. We’re so obsessed with that next bit of information that sometimes we lose sight of the content.

I read an article the other day about how teens in America are moving away from blogging because it’s too time consuming, and moving towards Tumblr and Twitter because short messages are all that matters to the young audience. Which is amazing considering where we’ve come from, and all of the literary figures that influence your story. It’s amazing.

PG: It’s hard to keep on top of it even. We’ve become such a fame obsessed society that for me I think this cult of fame has replaced deep stories in some ways. The whole thing is interesting. Our idea is just what if someone is manipulating that more than we think and profiting from the whole thing?

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That ties in perfectly to another question I had. I think it’s indicative of modern culture how pretty much every move Tom Taylor makes is known to the world in minutes. How important is the spread of fame and notoriety to The Unwritten? When you look at the Waldseemuller map at the end of the fifth issue it says fame is a story.

PG: Yeah, it’s a big part. Mike do you want amplify on that.

MC: We like the lives of the people we admire, and we expect those people to have a shape. If the shape isn’t there we impose the shape. It’s the trajectories of fame, the templates that you get if you’re in films and the like. That’s the problem Tom has is he has this fame and this notoriety, this recognizable face and he knows it. But that isn’t his curse. It’s that he knows he doesn’t have the power to shape that. He knows it’s a definition his father has stamped on him. I think that affects his relationship with other people as well.

PG: It’s really interesting that JD Salinger just died. I was just reading in the New Yorker this week some articles by some friends of his and what his reasoning behind being reclusive was. It almost makes me feel guilty for doing an interview. He had a security about him that he believed all that stuff was a seduction that really weakened your work and weakened the message you were trying to do. I’m sure he had some sort of psychological thing that got him into that.

But it’s really interesting, as it’s kind of an equivalent to Wilson Taylor disappearing, there’s a little JD Salinger in that. You know, just to see now that we’re rushing to open his safe to find what he’s written and to kind of find out more as to why he didn’t want to be a public figure. It’s pretty interesting.

One of the more interesting things about Tom Taylor is that his entire existence isn’t based off his own fame, but his father’s fame and the story’s fame, which has been as well read as anything in modern society (in The Unwritten). How exactly did you develop that character? Is he a reflection of anyone in real society?

MC: I guess Tom isn’t based on any one person, but there’s definitely a flavor of Christopher Milne in there, the son of A.A. Milne, the guy who wrote the Winnie the Pooh books. A.A. Milne puts his own child into those books as a cute little moppet, a boy always dressed in girls’ clothes. He looks like he’s wearing dress.

It was definitely a burden that Christopher Milne carried with him as he grew up. He ended up being deeply resentful of his father’s legacy and tried to distance himself from it as far as he could.

PG: I think as far as uniquely how we developed Tom, I think it was more we created the scenario for him and then started to think how we’d react to that. Knowing some of the things that came later, there’s reason why he couldn’t turn his back on that. As much as he hated that, he had such a connection to it that he couldn’t break. He creates this real ambivalence; he’s so ambivalent at the beginning that he’s almost like a downer character. He starts caring more about what’s going on, and he’ll open up a little bit.

When you read the story he’s kind of self centered and full of himself for a guy who hasn’t accomplished a whole lot. Still somehow you imbued him with…you still have to feel for him and be empathic towards him. How difficult was it to walk that line between understandable and despicable?

PG: Well, it was hard.

MC: We talked about that a lot didn’t we, because we were aware that there was the possibility that he could become intensely irritating. (laughter)

PG: I think the one thing we wanted with him was that idea that he knew, that inside he was always capable of something. He just had to bust away from this thing that was holding him back.

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MC: I think he grows…he definitely grows with his experiences and that adversity brings out the best in him. It’s like he’s been in a state of paralysis for a lot of his life. The weight of his fame has sort of crushed him down. There’s definitely a sense of a huge question, so when he takes his life to pieces it frees him from something. And he starts to change and starts to grow.

PG: I think he feels like he’s got something he can do with his life for the first time. I think he’s still kind of worse than he ever was. The irony we wanted to build into him from the very start was that from the very moment Lizzie outs him his task is to kind of prove that he’s really who he is and not some fictional being. The irony for him is he has to prove that he’s the person he least wants to be because the alternative is even worse than that. (laughter) He’s kind of stuck in a strange position.

Yeah, from the very beginning he’s thrown for a loop. His options are he’s actually Wilson Taylor’s son, he’s the son of a Ukranian family, or he’s a fictional character.

PG: In one of the early issues he’s given a chance to walk away from it. He’s given the chance to walk away from it all.

So far there has been a lot of focus on “the Cabal” I guess you could call it. Like Locke and Pullman, and all of the people who are pulling the strings and using the power of story to control the fate of the world. How did you develop that whole mythology and that whole group?

PG: I’m not even sure it’s a mythology. Sometimes I think it’s real (laughter)…you keep seeing things…I mean I think the first impulse for it for me was the neo-cons manipulating the story to get us into Iraq. So what if you take that and amplify it across the whole scope of the world? I mean, there’s a lot of cabal sort of theories, there’s people out there running the world, the Illuminati, whatever. It’s kind of combining those two worlds. It’s not a big stretch to go to.

MC: We live in the age of spin, and we tend to think of spin as a relatively modern invention. Our idea was what if the whole of literature has been spun. What if there’s been an agenda behind every story we’ve read and every story we’ve been told?

PG: And then it’s a quick jump to, all of human history is really just a bunch of lies and stories. It’s whoever tells the best lie and the story. There’s very little empirical fact holding things to a line.

I guess that pretty much defines modern political culture.

PG: And ancient political culture.

One of my favorite things when I’m reading the book, I love that every issue seems to have two to three different lettering and artistic styles. There’s a real chameleon like feel to the book. The story sections, the blog/forum sections, and the real life sections all have a unique look. How did you develop the idea to come up with the varied styles?

MC: I was going to say it’s Peter mostly. He’s always trying to push me to tell a story in different ways. To embody the ideal of the exchange of messages and the transfer of information are enjoyed in different ways. Those multimedia pages were really something he built.

PG: I think we initially started with those being newspapers.

MC: And then Peter was like (Peter joins in) “newspapers are dead!” (laughter)

PG: But then we tried to get closer and closer to what the web pages would look like, so they kind of set themselves. And then when you do something like Kipling telling a story, you just automatically go for a different style. It’s come about organically and it’s worked, so we’ve tried to keep it going.

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Some of those TV reporters from the first issue I want to keep touching base with them like they’ve almost become running characters.

There’s the one online therapist for parents who are affected by the Tom Taylor fiasco. It’s very interesting to see these almost recurring characters who don’t have a lot…they just appear randomly and they seem very important. I love reading the blog pages for more details.

PG: I wouldn’t be surprised if that child psychologist ends up being a major character in the book later.

MC: Yeah, we really like Elizabeth Strong. (laughter) We think she should probably be in the book more.

Well, I’m looking forward to seeing how you use her.

I do have to say one thing about your forum pages — you make people online seem way too nice.

Everyone: (laughter)

PG: Well, yeah. That’s probably true.

MC: We haven’t had those particular experiences with online discussions. You seem flame wars going on somewhere else, but we’ve never had that experience with fans.

PG: You know it is interesting because our editor keeps saying we know we’re a hit when it becomes fashionable to bash the book. There’s a couple people out there who like to bash the book. It’s kind of funny to see because there’s some people who totally get what you’re doing, and there’s these other people who can’t get what you’re doing if there life depends on it. There’s still people who won’t forgive us for this being a Harry Potter ripoff.

MC: Allegedly! Allegedly!

You know I have to admit that was one of those questions I cut immediately because I didn’t want to be the guy who asked about Harry Potter.

PG: Although if you do, it automatically gets picked up by all of the Harry Potter sites. It does that now because we mentioned Harry Potter.

I love that there are regular appearances from figures in literary history, writers like Rudyard Kipling and Mark Twain, but you also have in real life Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein’s Monster in the chapel in the prison and you also had Roland from the Song of Roland. Are we going to be seeing that a lot more going forward?

MC: Yes. Oh yes.

PG: But there…we have rules for when and where and why.

MC: And it’s not a static situation. You are going to see more of that. But you’re going to see other things happening that are kind of like an escalation of that and different extensions of the idea. As Peter said, there’s a consistent explanation but you’re going to see some crazy stuff happening.

PG: Even in issue 10 there’s kind of a twist on that that starts to happen.

MC: Even more in issue 12.

PG: Right.

I even have a theory on that. I swear, every issue I come up with a new theory just because some much happening and there is so much mystery to it.

PG: That’s funny because I don’t really think that was our intention going into it. I’ve seen a lot of people we answer a question and give ten questions, as if it’s like watching Lost or something. It wasn’t ever intentional, but it’s working really well after the fact.

MC: We want every issue to move the core situation forward, and not ever be standing in place.

PG: We always try to have one big payoff in each issue that furthers that story or that you get a sense that “wow, there’s a new thing I learned.”

Issue 9 definitely had a lot of those. Can you elaborate at all on…I loved issue 8, I know a lot of people responded oddly to that because it was about Governor Chadron’s children, but I thought it was a perfect set up for 9. Can you elaborate at all on the events where (SPOILER ALERT) (SPOILER ALERT) Chadron turned into Count Ambrosio?

PG: You’ll have to put “spoilers” there. Well, I think we can’t really elaborate on it, but it will get developed fairly quickly. The whole point of that interlude issue was to really focus on the personalities of the children and Chadron so that there was some emotional investment in that when the events of issue 9 unfolds. It’s those emotions involved that are key to what is going on.

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MC: Yeah. Again, considering Ambrosio is a fictional character, yes what happens to Chadron is kind of, you have to see it in the light that Frankenstein’s Monster and Roland are appearing. There’s obviously a kind of bleed between fiction and reality. Having said that, we don’t want to define how or why that’s happening yet.

To go back to the literary figure question, is there any way we’ll see other mediums come into the story. I’d love to see Yorick Brown (from Y the Last Man) and Jesse Custer (from Preacher) appear.

PG: There will definitely be other mediums. We’ve tangentially talked a little bit about a comic book character, but we’re not sure if that’s going to happen. But I doubt we’ll bring characters like that. I kind of hate that self-referential kind of stuff.

MC: Having said that, we do have a hankering to bring Superman in. We think it would be very cool.

PG: But it’d be more about the creation of Superman. About the people who created him when they first wrote it.

MC: But in terms of other mediums, we do have movies in issue 10.

PG: I think we’ll have a lot of other mediums coming in as we go throughout the book, and even branching out from fiction into psychology and other things.

MC: We’ve already gotten into epic poetry, with The Song of Roland being a song in poetic form.

Well if you guys want to quintuple your sales you should see if you could get a character from Avatar in your story.

Everyone: (laughter)

PG: We’ll get some sort of smurf in there.

MC: We’ll have an all blue issue, the Avatar special.

That’d be a huge hit. I know you guys have to go, so just a few more. What do you have going forward for us in The Unwritten? Inquiring minds wonder.

PG: That’s a good question. I think in the broad strokes I guess it’s just going to get deeper. I always look at it like an onion. You keep peeling it away and there’s another layer under that. I think we’re just going to get deeper and deeper into all of the things we’ve set up.

Do you have any plan as to how long you want the series to run?

MC: We’d like it to run for 5, 6, 7 years. It’d be cool to have a canvas that big. Sort of along the same lines as Lucifer

PG: I think that’s our ballpark right now. That’s negotiable, like if it’s really rich we’ll keep going, but if we start repeating ourselves we’ll take less time.

MC: The ending is already there, it’s already implied in the setup. We know where we’re going, but like in Lucifer we can explore the people’s stories along the way. It’s a moveable feast. It can be done in 30 or 40 issues, ideally we’d like to take longer and make the journey richer and stranger.

PG: The trade is selling so well they’ve pretty much said we can take all the time we want, as long as it keeps selling. (laughter) If it takes a downward turn…it’s up to us.

I have to say congratulations so far, it’s one of my favorite books. I try to praise it as much as possible on Multiversity.

PG: And we appreciate that.

MC: Yeah, thanks David.

I do have one last statement from one of the other Multiversity writers. This is mostly for Mike, sorry Peter. You’re writing X-Men Legacy right now, there’s a character from the late 90’s, early 00’s named Maggott that he loves.

MC: Yeah!

If there’s any way you could even work him into the background he’d pretty much lose his mind. (laughter)

MC: Well he’s supposed to be dead.

PG: How could a character named be truly dead? (laughter)

MC: I like Maggott. I’ll try to put a Maggott reference in there somewhere.

That would probably be the greatest gift you could give him.

PG: You’re in Alaska?

Yeah.

PG: What part?

Anchorage.

MC: We had some friends from Anchorage stay with us over Christmas. We started to make Sarah Palin jokes…and…they didn’t laugh. (laughter) They said it stopped being funny a long time ago.

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PG: I don’t think it will ever stop being funny, will it? Once she’s president, that’s when it will stop being funny.

There will probably be some sort of edict that says we can no longer make Sarah Palin jokes.

Everyone: (laughter)

PG: There’s a cabal for that as well.

I’m sure there is considering she’s already sold over a million copies of her book.

PG: There’s a cabal for that. Just keep reading.

I can hardly wait. I hope you guys can work in Sarah Palin somehow. I’m sure that would also increase your sales.

Everyone: (laughter)

PG: Actually, Lizzie’s look was influenced by Sarah Palin. We knew she’d kind of have the naughty librarian look, and we kind of had her drawn out, and then the Sarah Palin thing hit. We were talking on the phone and it was like “Oh my god, she’s kind of Sarah Palin-ish.” They are definitely Sarah Palin’s glasses and kind of her hairdo.

I can tell you this is already going to be the biggest post in the history of Multiversity. We’ve referenced Sarah Palin, Harry Potter and Avatar.

PG: And Lost too!

Everyone: (laughter)

We’re going to have thousands upon thousands of readers just from that. Well, thank you for making all of our dreams come true at Multiversity.


David Harper

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