Multiversity Comics Presents: Mike Carey & Peter Gross

Yuko Shimizu’s cover to this week’s “The Unwritten” #35.5

It’s been far too long since we’ve talked to the creative team of “The Unwritten.” Co-creators Mike Carey and Peter Gross have been spinning one of the most complex and engrossing yarns in all of comics, and their Vertigo Comics title just hit a huge milestone with issue #35 from two weeks back. Their epic arc ‘War of Words’ just wrapped, and fellow MC writer Walt Richardson and I touched base with them on where the book’s been, where it’s at, and where it’s going.

You can find our huge interview with them after the jump, and if you are not caught up with the book, by god, avoid like the plague. Spoilers from issue #35 are heavily discussed.

Walt: Before we get into matters of narrative, and looking instead at how it’s structured, Peter was recently credited as co-writer as of the end of “Leviathan.” As reviewers, one of the things that makes co-writing an enigma is that we only get the end product. We don’t see who does what, even though everyone’s contributions meld together, in a sense. How has Peter becoming a co-writer changed the creative process, if at all, since he has been on board since the beginning?

Peter: (laughs) It’s no different than it ever was before.

Mike: Exactly. It’s only a difference in how Peter’s contribution was recorded. We’ve plotted it together right from the start. Basically, what happens is we discuss the macro plan together, I work up a breakdown for a particular issue, and then we thrash that out between the two of us and the editor. Then I do a script, and we thrash that out between the two of us and with the editor, and Peter is fully involved with coming up with the plot beats, the structure, and the pacing, in every stage of planning and execution.

Peter: I’m really the co-plotter. Co-writing is kind of a silly title. There’s just issues with DC with what they can credit and what they can’t credit, depending on what you’re actually getting paid for, etcetera. Working on the book is identical to what it has been since before day one.

Mike: It’s me who does the typing.

Peter: (laughs) It’s me who does the criticizing.

David: It’s good to know you guys are equally to blame for making us unhappy with this latest issue.

Mike: (laughs) We have to take equal responsibility for that, I think.

David: Going forward to “The Unwritten’s” 35th issue, it was no doubt quite the game-changer, with such a substantial amount of momentous and shocking events. When you were approaching the release, what ruled the most: excitement, or trepidation?

Mike: I think excitement more than anything. All the way through this process we’ve kind of been encouraging each other to push stuff, to front-load stuff to the foreground sooner rather than later. There were things, like Wilson’s death, that we knew would happen sooner or later, but that we got to quicker than we thought we would, and we both thought that was a pretty cool thing to do – to keep on false-footing the reader, to keep on playing the beats that maybe someone saw coming, but saw coming two or three years down the line. In many ways, we knew that this would have the feel of a series climax.

Peter: I think the hardest part of this one was knowing that… like, at one point I made a list and I said to Mike “These are the things we have got to get in this issue, because it’s gone off the table afterward!” If we don’t nail that concept down and let people know it, we’re never going to have a chance to touch it again.

David: I would imagine that would cause a lot of pressure on you guys. You would have to have everything you’d want to touch on involving the fiction in reality, is that right?

Peter: To an extent, yeah. It was difficult! That issue was pretty hard, because you didn’t want to throw a big concept in there at the last minute without all the supporting story that guided it along, but we got to at least get a line in there to justify it.

Mike: It was Peter who said at a certain point in the planning that this needed to be a double-length issue. There was just so much to hit.

Peter: We didn’t think we’d get it, because we had already gotten the .5 issues, and then I wrote to Karen [Berger] and said “Is there any way we can make this a double-sized? Otherwise, we’re going to have to use another issue.” She was like “Yep, you can do it.” We were kind of stunned, actually.

David: I was kind of stunned, too. I didn’t even know that this double-sized issue was coming until I was looking at solicits for [our weekly column Comics Should Be Cheap!], and I saw that and thought this was going to be quite the momentous issue.

Peter: It was not planned as we went into the arc for it to be double-sized, but because of what’s coming after, and was already getting worked on, it was either that or cram a whole lot of stuff into a single-sized issue.

David: Did you have the slightest urge to have a parade of fictional characters at some point in the issue just so you could get through all the people you wanted to touch on?

Peter: (laughs) No, but that might be coming up!

Mike: (laughs) We’ll do that later.

David: I demand a co-plotting credit.

Peter: You’ll have to talk to DC about that.

David: You guys have been putting out two issues a month for the past five months. How much pressure does that put on you guys, and how much relief was there when you started nearing the end?

Peter: Mike had a novel due in the middle of this, so it was definitely difficult. Going into it, it didn’t feel particularly hard, but coming out of it there was a great sense of weight lifting off of my shoulders.

Mike: Yeah, it was tough, wasn’t it? It was exciting, too, and I think with each of the .5’s – we both relished the .5’s, we both think that the .5’s took us to some really fun places and gave us a chance to do some really interesting things. The scheduling, I think for both of us, was pretty tough.

Peter: It was just constant work, because the way we work on this we’re kind of going over everything with a fine-toothed comb, all the way up until when it ships. I think that was the most exhausting part, because we were sometimes doing little fixes the day before it shipped out. As Mike wrote these, I didn’t expect them to play into the main storyline quite as much as they did. Did you, Mike?

Mike: No, that was just something that developed. Originally, we thought these would just give the back-stories of a lot of the main characters, and then it somehow became a counterpoint to the story.

Peter: Yeah, it really worked well, and I’m kind of curious: we had a lot of discussion about how we are going to collect these in the trade. Are we going to intersperse them every other issue, like they came out chronologically, or are we going to put all the one-offs in a separate book or at the end of the thing? Now they’re so essential to read before you read #35 that you’re going to have to get to them before.

Mike: It’s going to have to be chronological.

Yuko Shimizu’s cover to “The Unwritten” #33.5

David: One of the characters who appeared in the .5’s was Rausch – and I have to give you guys props for that issue, I really enjoyed it. All of the .5’s have been great, but I found Rausch’s interesting because I think that out of all the .5 characters, she’s the one who appeared the least in the main narrative of “War of Words.”

Peter: Not at all, really.

David: I was curious, how did you decide who you wanted to appear in the .5’s?

Mike: It’s mostly the characters who have a major role to play in the architecture of the series as a whole. Much of what Rausch has to do has yet to be seen, but Rausch is going to be more important as we go forward.

Peter: I think a lot of it was that we were following Pullman’s back-story, and I think that as we did that we realized “Oh, we need to do the history of the Cabal,” and it just kind of became the place to do the back-stories for Wilson and Rausch. It just kind of made sense.

Mike: The remaining .5 is something a little bit different than the other four.

Peter: We’ll have an epilogue, and afterword to the arc.

David: “Marginalia?”

Peter: Yeah.

Mike: I think it might end up being called “Gospel Creatures,” actually.

Peter: (laughs) One of those last minute, 24-hour changes.

Mike: (laughs) I’m constantly doing that. I’ll just throw out a title and it will end up being something completely different.

David: I was reading some interviews with you two earlier, and I saw that you had originally discussed doing the .5’s as a miniseries.

Peter: We were going to do a miniseries. It wasn’t the content of the .5’s. Oddly enough, I remember at one point Mike said it was a very reference-heavy story. It was all approved and ready to go, and because of the novel, you [Carey] were feeling a little daunted by having to get into it, right? And then we came up with these .5’s which were twice as much work!

Mike: That’s ironic. But there was another side to it, which was that it was partially about the Inklings, this Oxford-based literary group that included Tolkien and C.S. Lewis and Charles Williams, and there was some discussion around that time about what we could and couldn’t do, legally, and about some of the problems we might run into telling that story. The other component was that I was thinking maybe we can’t do what we want to do with the story and avoid lawsuits.

Peter: I think we were kind of on this path after the Tinker arc with Wilson in the 1930’s where we were going to go back through the 30’s and tell the Inklings story and then maybe do one about something else I won’t say. Maybe they’ll come into it. The end of #35 is kind of a game-changer, and it brought up a lot of – well, we know the direction we’re going toward the end of the series, but when you do something, all the sudden you realize there are repercussions that bring up new stories, and so we’re kind of in a little bit of a flux because there’s a lot of potentially different stories on the table right now.

Mike: We experienced this with “Lucifer” as well. When you reach a certain point in the storytelling, every story you choose to tell cuts out one or two or maybe even more other possible directions, and so it’s very much a question of discussing which of the various paths that you could follow are the ones that are indispensable.

Peter: I hate if we’re at that point.

Mike: But we are!

Peter: That’s the thing I don’t like, when you have to leave stories behind. Let’s go back, let’s go to where we could tell all the stories we want.

Walt: The question that is on everyone’s mind since #35 is “What now?” Pullman has ceased to exist, the Cabal’s power has essentially been stripped, and Leviathan, the powers that others have been trying to harness, is gone. With all these major changes, what is Tommy’s drive, and since that tie to Leviathan no longer exists, what can he do to accomplish whatever his goal may be?

Peter: Well, that would be giving away the whole next year of the book, right there. (laughs)

Mike: That’s a very good question. That is the core question: “What does Tom do now?” There is a new crisis that spins straight out of the resolution of the old crisis, and it involves Rausch, and it involves the question of what did happen to Leviathan in that room, what did happen to Pullman in that room, and what happened to Lizzie in that room.

Peter: And what are the repercussions? It’s not one we could easily answer. (laughs) That’s where we’re going.

Mike: There’s a tradition forming that every issue that is a multiple of twelve is a Mr. Bunn issue. We are going to check in with him, and check in with the realms of fiction. #36 cuts sideways into the fictional world. It looks at what happens there, and bounces us back into reality with #37, with a somewhat different place. It probably isn’t too much of a spoiler to say that when we rejoin Tom, a lot of time has passed. It doesn’t go straight on to the aftermath of the events of #35.

David: It’s funny, one of our questions was labeled “the most important question of all,” and it was directly asking what’s next for Mr. Bunn. We love him.

Peter: (laughs) You will find that out.

David: You mentioned Lizzie before. I have to ask, did you guys really have to have the last word of Lizzie’s dissipating fictional body be “love” right on Tom’s face? That was painful.

Peter: That was me. (laughs) The little drip on his face, the little drip of love.

David: Previously in the series, it seemed whenever Tommy got into too much trouble, some fictional character or another would show up to save him, whether it was Frankenstein’s monster, Mirshann the cat, Roland the knight, you name it. In this issue, he’s in his greatest danger yet, and his fictional protectors leave him alone. Was that decision tied more to similarities with the Tommy Taylor books, or just the nature of the temple?

Peter: Well, if anything, I think Tommy Taylor was there more than anything else, which is really the core character. Nothing else would have been able to break through that energy that Pullman was weaving.

Leviathan in “The Unwritten” #23

Walt: There’s obviously still some mystery about Leviathan’s role as a metaphysical concept, even though Leviathan may be no more after this past issue. How is the loss of Leviathan going to affect how fiction does – or maybe now doesn’t – affect the world?

Mike: Crucially and centrally. That is the big issue going forward. You’re right, though, we’re not putting all of our cards on the table. There are different versions of what Leviathan is and what it does, and most of the characters, at one time or another, have admitted complete ignorance as to what Leviathan is. There are compatabilities between the different things we have heard about it. There are more revelations to come about the impact of these events, about the impact of Leviathan being wounded, on fiction and reality, and revelations about Leviathan’s true nature.

Peter: One of the underlying themes of the book from the start is this idea that fiction is a little broken in our modern world, and that our relationship with story is not what it maybe should be or what it once was, so we get these confusing abilities of people to manipulate stories – especially political beings. If we had a stronger relationship with fiction, we would recognize stories as stories, and not be manipulated by them, like when the Neo-Cons come up with “Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction.” Maybe if our relationship with fiction was not undermined in the world we would have gone “Bullshit.” The metaphor with Leviathan mixes in with all that stuff, and those underlying themes are going to play out more and more in the book as we go on.

Mike: Actually, we have a huge revelation to come, which I don’t want to say much about at all, but we’re begging a lot of questions about what the realms of fiction are and how they work. At the moment, I think readers are just rolling with that, and assuming certain things which may or may not be the case.

Peter: What I’ve really enjoyed is seeing people’s reactions to the book as we’re working on it, and a lot of people saying “It feels almost like this could be the finale of the book.” A lot of people are saying “We don’t know where they’re going to next with it because they’ve answered all these questions,” and for us it’s really just getting into it. We know all the questions that are still coming up. The trick is to make it feel final, even when we know it’s just a step on the journey. We didn’t want people to be anticipating the next step, and I think we’ve kind of achieved that here, because no one seems to have a sense of where we’re going to go next.

David: We talked briefly about the influence of social media the last time we spoke, and I was curious if you had ever thought about working something into the story about the diminishing value of the written word to younger generations. Is that something you have discussed when talking about “The Unwritten?”

Mike: We’ve certainly talked about the changing role of story, and the changing mechanics by which story is delivered, and how, to a certain extent, it’s not quite the medium, it’s the message – but certainly the medium impacts on the message and changes the power of the message. It used to take centuries [for a story to circumnavigate the globe], and now it takes seconds.

Peter: I think there’s a lot more we would like to do with that, and I think what we run into is a little bit of what Mike was talking about: as you get further into the story, you start dropping off some threads that you could follow. The other reason we did the .5 issues is because there are so many other interesting stories that we would like to do, but to actually put them into the book kind of slows the main narrative down. It’s almost like it would be a little boring; even if it’s a great story, it would be breaking the flow of things. The reason they let us do the .5’s is because we said “We have all these great stories, but we don’t want to slow the narrative down to do it,” and that’s when we all came up with the let’s do this every two weeks thing, and that was great. If we get in a situation where we want to tackle something like that again… we have lists and lists of interesting tangents we could go off on, that we would like to. I was describing it as “Wouldn’t it be great if we could do a hundred issues every two weeks?” So you could have this really intense story over a shorter period of time. But I don’t think you could do that same story over twice the amount of time and have it really hook into the reader.

Walt: It’s the nature of the medium.

David: If you had all these concepts that you wanted to work in there, it might start to feel inorganic if things just started getting worked in.

Mike: Which is why the .5 issues were such a great way of doing it, as they really let us have our cake and eat it – that is, fit all this extra stuff in and enrich the main arc without slowing the rush to the climax.

Walt: One of the things about this series is that while there are tons of works referenced throughout, you don’t necessarily have to read them to understand “The Unwritten.” You don’t need know Hobbes’s Leviathan back and forth or have an in-depth knowledge of A.A. Milne and Christopher Robin. As “The Unwritten” goes forward, are there going to be any particular works that can supplement what readers are getting into?

Mike: We’re definitely going to revisit Moby Dick. Moby Dick is one of our core texts, and I guess Frankenstein is as well, for different reasons. They both seem to carry very powerful metaphors that relate to Tom’s nature, and to the nature of the things that we’re saying about storytelling.

Peter: I think people tend to label this as a book you need a literary background to read, which is completely not true. All the stories that we do touch on have to have been universally read enough to fall into the collective unconscious of mankind. I think everyone has heard about the stories we talk about – except when we do some obscure, like Jud Süß, the Nazi propaganda. I didn’t know about that before we did it, and we might hit some more stuff like that, but I think in general it’s stuff that’s in the mainstream of consciousness.

Mike: We tend to import enough of the story into our narrative to make sense. With Jud Süß, I don’t think you need to have needed to come across that at all to see what we’re saying with it, why we’re using it.

David: Have either of you ever read The Raw Shark Texts by Steven Hall?

Mike: Yes! Fucking hell yes! It’s a brilliant, brilliant novel.

David: It is! I read it two or three years ago, but when I was reading this issue all I could think of was Ludovician.

Mike: (laughs) Yes. I know exactly what you mean.

Peter: I’ve got it sitting here and I know exactly what you mean. You used to talk about it, and I just haven’t had the time to read it.

David: It’s not a perfect one-for-one or anything like that, but there are some elements to it that clicked in my mind.

Mike: There are, in some ways, deeper parallels than we can talk about at present. The idea of a whole ecosystem of creatures that live in texts is something that we touch on, some things that are not a million miles away from that.

David: For some time now, there’s been an artist handling the finishes and breakdowns that wasn’t you Peter, like M.K. Perker and Ryan Kelly. Was that something that the two of you knew would be needed eventually, or did it come up as a glaring need when you put together the idea of the bi-weekly “War of the Words” and the strict monthly schedule before then?

Peter: We knew going into the series…I think we always anticipated always using other artists. Issue five, the Rudyard Kipling issue, that was written for another artist who was all booked to do it but backed out at the last minute. I ended up drawing it, and I think it was when I drew that I realized that I didn’t want someone else drawing the book. So much changes as I draw an issue because Mike and I are talking about it so much, and I’m very reluctant to have someone else do the storytelling on the book.

From that point we decided if we’re going to get finishers, let’s get really different finishers. Normally, you try to get someone who apes the style of pencils, but instead we went for something totally different for different looks depending on the story.

It’s one of the things I most enjoy doing, doing layouts for other artists. Sometimes they’re kind of tight pencils, sometimes kind of loose, but I really enjoy doing that.

Even in the .5 issues it got to be to the point where it was impossible for me to do all of them. So Gary Erskine did his issue, and 35.5 is Gabriel Hernandez, and he did all of his. 31.5 I didn’t do anything on either.

The goal going forward is I’ll at least be doing layouts.

David: I mentioned Ryan Kelly earlier, I have to give you some retroactive praise. The choose your adventure was one of my favorite comics of the last while.

Peter: Thanks. (laughs) That one was a killer.

Mike: Yeah, we’re still in therapy.

Peter: That one was intensely difficult to work on because there was no way to know how it was going to play out. There was no way to replicate the reading experience of it. I know at one point our editor Pornsak had to lay out all of the script pages in this room to figure out how the mix would work on them…it was crazy.

I tried reading it on a digital comic because they didn’t put hyperlinks in. Even on the trade it was difficult on. It was really meant to be read in a monthly format.

David: I grew up reading those things. Seeing it in a comic…I pretty much immediately shouted “Yes!”

Peter: It was really interesting, like I was saying, because we didn’t really know what the experience would be like. But it was very interesting when you were paging through to another page, to see the other artwork. I think that part of the experience was great.

Mike: The fact you are seeing what is happening on the other paths when you’re on one path. And people did what we hoped they would do, which is read the comic multiple times to see all and check out all the ways it could play out.

Peter: And slowly catch on to that there weren’t that many paths (laughs).

Mike: That’s true. But that’s kind of cool, because you realize why they were there. Why we were choosing to tell Lizzie’s story in that way.

Peter: It was funny. Our editor Pornsak was like “let’s do a choose your own adventure one time” and we were like “yeah yeah yeah. Okay.” And when we knew we were going to tell Lizzie’s backstory we thought this was the perfect spot to do this. It’s exactly her life. It’s a choose your own adventure.

Yuko Shimizu’s cover to “The Unwritten” #28

Walt: In the past you have mentioned that DC was a bit reluctant to let you two use Superman. Did the Tinker originate as a stand in for Superman?

Peter: That was the results of our attempts to get to use Superman (laughs).

Mike: It was one of those things where the compromise we came up with was probably better than what we would have been able to do if we were able to use Superman. Superman would have brought his own constraints with him, and his own expectations with him. And the Tinker we were able to completely come up with from whole cloth.

Peter: We very early got away from the Superman idea, but we were going to do more of a Superman analogue at one point. They were a little nervous about that too. When we got to what we got to, it worked out much better because it really played into what Wilson was up to and it related more to Tom. I don’t even know where the idea that Milton was Tom’s half brother…I don’t even remember where that came in. Was that there early on Mike?

Mike: No, no, I think that just happened as we were working on it, didn’t it?

Peter: It’s so great now, it’s hard to imagine a point where it wasn’t. I think it came pretty late to the table probably.

Mike: It would have not been possible to get the same degree of pathos as we got with Milton, because I think he’s really a tragic character in a lot of ways. The breakthrough moment came when you had the idea for that character. When you started to play with…the Tinker Tailor thing, the magical artifacts, and we started to flesh him out from there. I think it was serendipitous that they said no. (laughs)

Peter: The fascinating stuff of this is, you get to these really interesting places where, I think the ending was exactly what we intended going into it but the guts were completely different than we anticipated.

Mike: We keep on having these vertiginous moments where we’re at the start of a new arc where we think “this could be great or this could completely fall apart in our hands.” (laughs) So far, I think we’ve stayed just on the right side of that divide.

Peter: When we fail, I think its just time to walk off the stage quickly. (laughs) I think we often think this is all going to totally fall apart. It’s difficult to juggle the whole thing. It’s a really complicated story. And it kind of demands our best attention. (laughs) When you feel like you’re slipping a little bit, it gets a little frightening sometimes. Like this is a house of cards and you’re going to get exposed at any moment. (laughs)

Mike: The pitch for that “On to Genesis” storyline was originally very different, and then we all got together in Birmingham, Peter, Pornsak, and Yuko [Shimizu, The Unwritten’s cover artist] were all invited to the Birmingham comic show. And we just had a couple really good sessions where we all talked it through and I think I came away from that weekend feeling much more on top of it.

Peter: I think that often happens. At the beginning of these arcs there’s so much potential and so many things on the table, it’s like we have to stumble upon the anchors that tie these things together. We’re sort of going through that right now with the arc after ‘War of Words.’

And it’s great. You think each one of these “that’s it. That ties it together.” And then the next week one of us will realize something else and we think, “that’s it, THAT ties it together.”

David: It’s kind of funny. You mentioned your Birmingham weekend. I had the chance to interview Yuko recently and she mentioned that as a very momentous weekend. She mentioned a drive you had with you Mike and she said it really solidifies her love of working with you guys.

Peter: She’s great.

Mike: She is great. I have very happy memories of that drive, even though it ended in a traffic jam. We could see the Mailbox, the venue where the convention was, for 40 minutes before we could reach it. It was the opposite side of the street, and we couldn’t reach it for 40 minutes. (laughs) That was a great weekend.

David: Were you involved with getting her pulled into the project, or was that editorial?

Peter: We were involved. I’m sure Pornsak must of suggested it first, and I think we were pretty much happy with the choice from the start. I can’t even remember if we considered anyone else.

Mike: As soon as we saw the sketches Yuko had made, we were totally onboard. We are really lucky to have her.

Peter: I realized something this weekend that is so great about her covers for this series. They’re never literal, they’re always metaphorical. Which means you look at them at the beginning and you get one reaction, and then you read the story and you look at it, and you get another reaction. It’s always about the metaphorical part of storytelling. You don’t get that often with covers.

Yuko Shimizu’s cover to “The Unwritten” #35

David: It’s funny that you mention that. I write a covers article for Multiversity, and I was writing about her cover to #35 and was talking about how you look at the cover, and it’s this dynamic, beautiful image with an atypical color palette, and then you read through the comic and realize how much it means to the comic. You just don’t see that.

Peter: That’s what it is so amazing about her covers. I worked out a deal with her so I now have the original of that cover.

David: I hate you. I wanted to buy that! (laughs) Can you convince Vertigo that they need to come out with a coffee table book of her covers like they did with James Jean’s Fables covers?

Peter: Boy that’d be great.

Mike: It’s a no brainer, isn’t it? That’d be a gorgeous book.

David: Obviously I enjoy the inside of the book as well, but her covers always blow me away.

Peter: I’d imagine if we got to the end of the series, if she’s been onboard the whole time, they’d do that.

Mike: What they ought to do is, if they ever did a book like that, they should do her original line art next to the colored versions. She does some with a brush, and the original art before she colors is incredible.

Walt: When David talked with both of you back in 2010, Mike mentioned that one of his original pitches that eventually folded into “The Unwritten” involved “reality-changing musical instruments.” After reading that, I can’t help but notice that Tom is holding the cover for issue #37. Yuko Shimizu’s covers nearly always reflect the issue’s contents, and often quite subtly, so will this original idea soon be seeing the light of day?

Mike and Peter: (laughs)

Mike: You guys are good.

Peter: The trumpet has always been meant to come into play. It’s finally starting to get its focus.

Mike: Yeah. It was there in issue #1 of course, in the Tommy story that started the whole book. Yes, there’s a story to be told there. There’s another musical instrument that we reference from time-to-time…the Maanim…there’s a story concerning that. There’s some revelations. It all has a part to play as we rush to the real, the ultimate series climax.

Peter: It’s interesting when you look at that. The whale…I think the whale was one of the big symbols to use from the very beginning. From the Kipling story on we’ve been using whales. When you think of musical instruments also, you think of how many stories have a magic trumpet in it…you realize that is a very potent symbol of something in the collective unconscious. I think that’s something we hope to explore.

Mike: The first human epic known is Gilgamesh, and that has one of the characters going into hell to retrieve a lost musical instrument. It’s one of the coolest things about this book is whenever we reach out to find something; we find it’s already there.

Peter: Yeah, frighteningly so. (laughs)

Mike: The universe was expressly designed to simplify our task in writing this book.

Peter: It’s like…Mike will mention some writer in passing and I’ll feign like I’ve heard the name before (laughs) and then I’ll look it up on Wikipedia, and I’ll send it back to Mike and say “you have to look at this” because there are three or four lines that connect directly to the story we’re doing. It’s eerie, but it’s not eerie in that all of this stuff does connect. All of these stories do connect. It’s like six degrees of Kevin Bacon in stories.

Mike: One of the things we’re eventually going to reference is something Peter sent me ages ago. The very first sound recordings.

Peter: I was just thinking of that the other day.

Mike: There was a guy who recorded sound before Edison, and the reason why he wasn’t credited was because he didn’t have a playback system. He knew how to record sound, he didn’t know what to do with it afterwards.

Peter: He didn’t know he was recording it; he did it as an art project. He was able to make a needle wobble on wax when someone spoke. To him, it was like a little interesting phenomenon. Now, 100 something years ago, someone was able to take the wax pieces and play it back.

Mike: It’s actually smoked paper, isn’t it? The medium is smoke on paper.

Peter: You can actually hear this ethereal voice. It was a core idea as we developed the idea. It represented something to us. I don’t know what yet. (laughs)

David: Here’s the question Walt and I decided was the most important of all to ask. In The Unwritten #35, Lizzie shares with noted blogger Richie Savoy that she thinks that blogs may have outlived their usefulness, or I assume that’s what she was going to say. We’re a blog of sorts. How dare you?

Peter: (laughs) I think she may have said “his blog.” I’m not sure.

Mike: (laughs) We would not want to offend the blogging community.

Peter: We should have caught that one, shouldn’t we?

Walt: They can be vicious.

David: We started up a petition. You guys are in trouble now.

Peter: We can fix that in the trade.

David: The real most important question of all: with everyone and their brother thinking the series could have theoretically ended right then and there at the close of #35, how long do the two of you expect to keep to keep this book rolling?

Mike: I think we feel like we’re at the halfway point. Well, I do. Peter doesn’t think we’re quite there yet. (laughs)

Peter: (laughs) You know I think you’ve been saying that since the start. “I feel like we’re at the half way point!” I think we’ve got more.

Mike: That’s true. (laughs) I keep saying, “end of act one! End of act one!” And Peter keeps saying, “yeah.”

I think we keep saying it will have roughly the same length as Lucifer. Maybe a little longer. But we know exactly where we’re going. Part of the joy is we don’t exactly how we’re going to get there. There are things that happen along the way because they are just too cool to ignore. But we know the end point of Tom’s odyssey is. We know where most of the characters ultimately end up, and we’re just having a blast getting there.

Peter: I think the big thing for me is we’ve stumbled upon this great way to tell a story. We can tell stories about just about anything. I kind of feel like where we’re ever going to have a spot where we can do that, so I always want to make sure we tell all the stories we want to tell.

Walt: You mentioned Lucifer. In an earlier conversation with David, we were talking about metaphysical ideas and such…how does religion factor into The Unwritten? I know it’s a topic people want to shy away from because people don’t want to offend others. Having worked on Lucifer, it seems neither one of you have a problem touching on religion. Will this be coming into effect in the book, or is this not the place to talk about it in?

Peter: Well, we’re definitely not going to be having that Quran arc we talked about. (laughs)

Mike: I think there is a sense that the whole book is about religion. The whole book is about belief. As Wallace Stevens said in Notes Towards a Supreme Fiction, “belief must be in a fiction.” It’s only a question of what fiction you choose. Because ideas are made things. Ideas are things that originate in our minds. Maybe they have an objective reality or maybe they don’t. But we believe in them as stories. So everything in our book is about religion.

Peter: I think one of my core things going into this that…let’s take something like The Bible. I’m fine with saying that is a world-changing book. The ideas in that book are all worth considering and acting on. But for me, it’s not important for it to not be a story. But a lot of people need it to be literally true. I think that’s a core idea we want to talk about. Why is it that people think a story is less important than a literal truth, when in fact, it’s not? Everything about the world is a story we tell ourselves.

For me, if people were comfortable saying that the Bible is the most important book in Western Culture, but it comes from story place. We’d have a lot less problems in this world, if we’d just comfortably leave story things in story place. But also accept that those things are of equal importance to other things in this world.

Mike: There’s another text which is very important to me when I’m writing The Unwritten…Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut, where he has the religion of Bokononism, and in that religion they have a concept of foma, which are lies, but they aren’t any less important for being lies. The religion says live by the foma that make you happy and good. Lies can impact the truth. Lies can have a positive and negative reality.

Peter: I think there was a point with Pullman where I said to you, Pullman might have been saying something about a story or something, and I said Pullman shouldn’t say story, because he doesn’t believe in stories. To him, stories are nothing but lies. He couldn’t relate to a story. He only hears it for what it really literally is.

Mike: He’s like Plato. Plato said there was no place in the ideal republic for storytellers because they are just liars (laughs).

David: I think you can look at ‘War of Words’ and see the fake Tommy Taylor stories and how they neutralize his powers. I think that, like you guys said, it’s not about the veracity of the words so much as the belief in the truth of the words.

Mike and Peter: Yeah.

David: The belief dictates what the truth is.

Peter: Absolutely.

David: I don’t know. I think that means Bella Swan is the most important person in the world at this point, so I fear for us.

Mike: Oh my god. (laughs)

Peter: Well it is frightening, and then you look at politicians trying to get you to believe the story they are telling. There is no attempt at truth anymore. It’s just telling people…the bad ones are telling people what they think they want to hear, and the good ones are telling people what they don’t know what they want to hear.

Mike: Didn’t Hitler say in Mein Kampf that if you’re going to tell a lie, it might as well be a big one? People much more readily believe big lies than small ones.

David: It’s not just politicians. You have stories in real life. Look at Tim Tebow. That guy…if he ran for president towards the end of the NFL season, he probably could have won.

Peter: He certainly could have been a GOP frontrunner (laughs).

David: No doubt. Stories like that…its like Pullman was talking about in #35 – saturation level. It can be a story that is in real life. It doesn’t matter if it’s written. It just matters if it’s being told. As a fan I can’t imagine how many directions you can take it.

Peter: I really believe we have a genetic need for story. For fiction. Maybe not genetic. But for whatever reason, when we don’t get that fiction, we grab out of the world and fill it that way. And social media and celebrity are the main ways people fill that vast need for fiction now. And I think that’s what we’re exploring.