WAITING
FOR TOMMY: MIKE CAREY
By
Richard Johnston
RICHARD:
That's a novelty right now. okay, if Lucifer has all the best
music, does his iPod need an upgrade by now?
MIKE: I strongly suspect his musical tastes run to
classical more than modern. He'd like great complexity - lots
of musical voices running in and out of each other in complex
structures. Bach fugues, maybe. I can't see him giving The
Strokes or the Barenaked Ladies the time of day, whereas I
personally love them.
RICHARD:
You media whore you. Talking of which, how are you coping
with the extra pressures the media-machine around the movie
Constantine are bringing? I hear issue 200 is a bit of a peach
that way. What happened? And considering the sizable differences
between the movie and the comic book, is it wise to bridge
the gap for the consumer?
MIKE: I dunno what's being said about Hellblazer #200,
but believe me there's no pressure at all as far as I'm concerned.
Nobody has said word one to me about the movie, at least not
in a professional context, and the continuity of the book
remains exactly as it was. I expect there'll be some kind
of a comic book adaptation of the movie at some point, because
it seems like an obvious move, but I'm not likely to be associated
with it.
#200
*is* going to be kind of a big extravaganza. Double-length,
we hope, and with a number of artists working on different
sections of a complicated story. It's going to put John in
a very unusual situation, that he's very badly equipped to
handle, and it's going to be pivotal in terms of the larger
story arcs I'm developing. It will resolve everything that's
been happening to John since the climax of the Shadow Dog
story in #193, and it will also set up a new crisis which
will loom large in the year that follows.
Without
giving too much away, I *am* involved in a Hellblazer project
outside of normal continuity which will be announced soon.
But the connection to the movie is very, very tangential -
as tangential as "it will come out somewhere around the same
time". It will still feature the John Constantine from the
comic series rather than the one from the movie, and there'll
be no ret-conning, finagling or dumbing down.
RICHARD:
I think I had some nightmarish vision of Hellblazer #200 being
the one for those who saw the movie and are looking for a
comic. You know, the one where John gets some kind of glamour
spell and resembles Mr Reeves for an issue. So, no danger
of a Crisis Of Infinite Cigarette Stubs then?
MIKE: No, but I think I just swallowed mine. Holy Jesus,
I'd have to get out of town pretty quick after pulling something
like that!
RICHARD:
Like the West Coast perhaps? The Wildstorm work should break
any current typecasting you have. Wetworks. See, now I read
Wetworks when it first came out. when it came out. Now it's
all only-mature-readers-may-enter. How does a concept initially
intended for a juvenile/adolescent audience suit such an approach?
And since you've got original series creator Whilce Portacio
on art, does this throw up any moral problems? Clearly Whilce
doesn't have too much of a problem with what you're bringing
to the title, but has he been at all precious about his babies?
MIKE: No, not in the slightest. He does have his favourites,
as you'd expect, and he's keen for them to come in at some
point, but he's not twisting my arm about how we use them
or - which I thought would probably be the biggest sticking
point - about the voices I'm giving them. So far we've worked
together really comfortably and productively: Whilce has got
lots of great ideas both for visuals and for storytelling,
but he's not crowding me or pulling rank at all - even though
in the circumstances I think he'd be entitled to do that.
Basically
we're taking advantage of the MATURE READERS label in two
ways - to use more of the horror genre palette, and to be
more up front about relationships. That doesn't mean splatter
or gratuitous sex, it just means not being unnecessarily coy.
I think it's a liberating thing, not an invitation to crowd
all kinds of dodgy or exploitative stuff onto the page.
If you
think about it, Wetworks grabbed this odd sort of space in
between superhero and horror books, which is full of possibilities
but has its own tensions and contradictions. I think we'll
just have a little more flexibility this time around with
how we move within that space.
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