Liverpool-born comic writer and novelist Mike Carey is another talented creator with fingers in many pies – perhaps best known for the Eisner Award-nominated Lucifer comic from DC Comics’s Vertigo imprint, Mike is not only the ongoing writer for Marvel’s X-Men: Legacy comic series, but the fifth novel in his series following the adventures of occultist and ghost-finder Felix Castor, The Naming of the Beasts, was released by Orbit/Little, Brown earlier this month. The Felix Castor novels are gritty and noirish, and written with a flair that makes them, quite honestly, absolutely fascinating. The urban fantasy genre is crowded with vampires and gothic romance and teen angst, but Felix’s world is far darker and dangerous, and all the better for it. The magical and supernatural system that Mike has crafted for Felix Castor is also highly original and imaginative. Yes, you might call me a fan. Have I mentioned how good the Felix Castor novels are yet?

Ladies and gentlemen, Mr Mike Carey.

Mike Carey

Name
Mike Carey

Location
Just outside London, England

What do you write?
A lot of different stuff. Comic books have been my mainstay for at least the last twelve years, and they’re still (to put it bluntly) my bread and butter. But I’ve written five novels now, too, and a dozen or so short stories, and I’ve done both TV and movie screenplays. Radio plays, computer game scripting… there’s actually very little I haven’t at least had a go at. These days I divide my time more or less equally between comic books and prose fiction, except when some screenplay work comes in.

The Naming of the Beasts, the fifth book in the Felix Castor series

What are your writing habits?
I’m a spectacularly undisciplined writer, but I’m also a neurotically driven one so nobody notices.

My editors see me hitting deadlines, handling a very large workload, and they assume I must be efficient and organised. I’m honestly not at all. A woman I used to work with back when I was a teacher said that when she saw me working, she was reminded of the physical concept of entropy: energy dissipating itself into a vacuum. I work long hours, get a lot done, but I have no plan of attack. I just go from one thing to the next.

My working day tends to start when the kids have gone to school and my wife has gone to work (unless it’s a day when she’s at home). That would be about 8.00am, most days. I work through, with breaks, until the kids come home at 4.00, and then there’s a period when I’m both working and not working. I’ll talk to them about their day, maybe make dinner for the family, play a game of chess or some other board game with my sons, or whatever. But usually I’ll go back to the keyboard later in the evening and put a couple more hours in. I’ll also take a lot of phone calls in the evening from my American editors, because their day kicks in so much later than ours.

X-Men: Legacy

I work in bursts, if I’m honest: short periods of intensely productive writing, followed by lulls. I wish there was some way of getting out of those tramlines, but that seems to be the way I am. On a day when I’m chasing a deadline I can swing the balance a little, spend more time actually working, but the down time still has to be in there. But like I said, it seems to work: I get a lot done. If I’m writing prose, I’ll typically have a 2000-word-a-day baseline. With comics, I’ll usually aim to spend one day planning, one day roughing, one day writing.

What software or tools do you use?
Microsoft Word for novels, comic scripts and radio plays. Final Draft for TV and movie screenplays.

Final Draft is wonderful – a piece of software that’s absolutely fit for purpose. Word is more of a general function tool – the Swiss army penknife of word processors. It was a happy day when I discovered the macro function, though.

Lucifer, volume 1

I’ve found over the years that I can’t plan on a computer – it just doesn’t feel organic enough. It’s like whatever you decide gets stuck there on the screen and you can’t move on from it. So I have this massive page-a-day diary where I do my planning, mostly in the form of an endless catechism. “Why does he hide the revolver? He’s afraid that someone will pick it up and guess from the weight that it’s not loaded. Could there be two revolvers? Not unless we’ve shown both of them in the earlier scene, and then we give the game away.” And so on and so on. It’s a crazy thing, but it works for me. I’ve tried on occasion to move to one of these “idea processing” programmes, most of which allow you to draw mind-map diagrams of varying degrees of complexity: but scribble on a page seems to be a closer approximation to how my mind works…

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Mike, thank-you very much!

Mike’s website is MikeAndPeter.com, which he shares with artist Peter Gross. Mike can also be found on Facebook.

The Felix Castor novels are available on Amazon and at all good bookstores, as can collected editions of X-Men: Legacy, Lucifer, and his other comic work. For current issues of X-Men: Legacy, check your local comic store!

Mike is appearing at the Forbidden Planet London Megastore (179 Shaftesbury Avenue, London, WC2H 8JR) on Thursday 10th September 2009 from 6-7pm, where he will be signing copies of The Naming of the Beasts. I hope you can make it!

I must admit, I’m a latecomer to comics. I never liked them as a child, and aside from the odd Batman and Iron Man issue sometime in the late 1980s, it wasn’t until I was 25 that, on a whim, I picked up my first copy of seminal British weekly, 2000AD. Six years on, my taste is more for the American superhero periodicals of DC Comics (a lot of which, ironically, are both written and drawn by British artists), but two names still stick out as key writers who helped develop my latent appreciation for sequential art.

Leah Moore is the daughter of the legendary Alan Moore – and while I’m sure she’s sick of that being mentioned every time, given her own talent for writing, Alan is to me the greatest writer (comic or otherwise) in the English language, and I’m starting to think there is something genetic going on. John Reppion is Leah’s husband, and together they have formed a mighty writing partnership that has given us Albion (with Alan Moore, Shane Oakley and George Freeman), Wild Girl (with Shawn McManus), and Doctor Who: The Whispering Gallery (with Ben Templesmith), among many other titles. They also share my interest in the strange and Fortean, John having written one of my favourite features to appear in Fortean Times, The Childe of Hale, as well as 800 Years of Haunted Liverpool from The History Press. It came as a surprise to find myself living more or less in the same region as the pair when I moved to the UK in late 2006, and although I’ve only had the pleasure of their company on an afternoon in Manchester hot enough to melt boron, we’ve had many fascinating exchanges on Twitter regarding the importance of tea, the influence of steampunk, and popular moustache styles of the late 19th/early 20th centuries.

Their latest projects as a writing team have all been for Dynamite Entertainment using classic characters from literature – The Trials of Sherlock Holmes (with Aaron Campbell), an adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula in The Complete Dracula (with Colton Worley), and coming in November, The Complete Alice in Wonderland (with Erica Awano).

Ladies and gentlemen, Leah Moore and John Reppion.

John Reppion and Leah Moore

Name
Leah Moore & John Reppion

Location
Toxteth in Liverpool, UK.

What do you write?
Leah: We write comics mainly. Recently the classic characters Sherlock Holmes and Dracula, but in the past we have written zombie stories, fantasy stories, straight superhero comics, all kinds of things really. We are work for hire, so we don’t do a lot of creator-owned stuff, and we don’t usually get much choice about what we write next. The normal route is our editors say they need something writing, and we say okay.

The Complete Dracula (Dynamite Entertainment, 2009)

We both write other things too, John writes articles for Fortean Times, Strange Attractor, anything that is a bit strange or interesting, and he’ll have a crack at it. He wrote a book 800 years of haunted Liverpool which was a round up of lots and lots of weird stories from the area we live in.

I do less writing outside of comics, and more drawing, but I did write the story which accompanied the 2007 Royal Mail Christmas stamps, which was a lovely project. We both have novels we want to write separately as opposed to together but we haven’t ever started such a big project, so we have yet to get going on them. Maybe we can fit a chapter or two in around the comics. Hopefully something will come of it anyway.

Doctor Who: The Whispering Gallery (IDW Publishing, 2009)

What are your writing habits?
John: We don’t have a proper fixed routine but that’s party due to the fact that our work is broken down into very different stages.

We consider the typing the easy part when it comes to comics because it’s very much the last thing we do. An ideal mid-project day would see us get up at nine or ten, sort ourselves out with breakfast and a wash and whatever, probably try to clear the email inbox and then start roughing pages out. We break our individual issues down into a numbered list of pages and put a brief description of what occurs next to the number. The list means we’ll know where we’re up to in terms of the plot. So, Leah would draw out some rectangles to represent the pages and we’d sit and talk about what happens, what shots we see, etc and then she will draw those panels in. Once we’ve got a decent number roughed (between four and eight usually, depending on how dense and complex the series is) we divide those roughs up between us, move to our computers and start typing.

The Complete Alice in Wonderland (Dynamite Entertainment, coming November 2009)

You don’t want to rough too far ahead because there’s a danger you’ll forget some of the discussion that occurred as the pages were drawn by the time you get to typing and miss something important out. Once the pages are typed we repeat the process. Dialoguing comes last – more often than not once the whole script is already typed out.

We break the day up with lots of cups of tea and a bit of marmite on toast (for me) and pink grapefruit cordial and cereal (for Leah). We’re usually interrupted by real life quite a lot, especially since we both write. Stuff like paying bills, shopping, etc which might not stop an individual working if they had a non-writing partner who could do things on the way to/from their job tends to impact more heavily on our schedule sadly.

What software or tools do you use?
Leah: We just use Word for the typing, we do all our planning and drawing out of pages in A4 books, so we can both see what the pages look like and we can discuss layout more easily. We can also go back and find notes and bits we have scribbled next to the comic pages.

Its really fun when we get the pages through from the artist to go back and look at my thumbnails and see how similar they are. We can really tell if an artist is on our wavelength by how close their pages are. Other than the workbook we usually have a fair amount of reference from the internet, or the books we keep handy. Every writer needs a copy of Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable to hand, it’s the best resource you could have. We don’t really need much more than that, we used to have a laptop, but it was stolen, with the last issue of a series on it, so we stick with less portable hardware now!

Albion (Wildstorm, 2005-2006)

John: I’ve recently discovered that the sore wrist I get from using my mouse when the weather is hot can be avoided by wearing a sweat band on my wrist. It might sound stupid but it’s really, really helped and I recommend it to other writers!

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Leah and John, thank-you very much indeed!

Leah and John’s website is MooreReppion.com, and they can be found on Twitter as @leahmoore and @johnreppion. The Complete Dracula, The Trials of Sherlock Holmes, and the forthcoming The Complete Alice in Wonderland are from Dynamite Entertainment, and can be collected from your favourite comic store. Trade paperback collections of Albion and other works can be found at Amazon.

Leah and John are guests of the Merseyside Doctor Who Group on Saturday, 5th September at the Jacaranda, 21-23 Slater Street, Liverpool, L1 4BW from 1-5pm, where they will join Doctor Who Magazine artist Adrian Salmon talk about their work. Entry is just £1!