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.

 

LUCIFER VOL. 2 TPB: CHILDREN AND MONSTERS

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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