Leave Your Spandex @t the Door: Mike Carey's X-Men

Welcome to the 4th instalment of Leave Your Spandex @t the Door v. 2!

I hope noone was paying attention when I said I would be keeping a regular schedule this year and putting a column out every fortnight. Who would trust a Greek anyway? Last week’s biggest breaking comics news story was undoubtedly the new X-Men writer: Mike Carey.

When I first heard the news of Milligan getting off the X-Men book I was immediately prepared to hate whoever got to replace him. What I hadn’t thought of though was the possibility that my favourite writer in comics would be replaced by my close second favourite writer. How sweet is this!

Mike Carey got his big break in American comics when he was was given the writer position on Vertigo’s Sandman Presents: Lucifer 3-issue mini series which in turn lead to the long-running Lucifer ongoing series that wraps up this year with its 75th issue. Mike has recently finished a landmark 3-year run on Hellblazer and has also written the cult-favourite My Faith in Frankie mini-series. During the past two years he’s been slowly infiltrating the ranks of Marvel comics, starting with the Ultimate Elektra mini-series, and moving on to the fun-filled Spellbinders mini-series, a short stint on Ultimate Fantastic Four with Jae Lee and most recently the Ultimate X-Men/Fantastic Four two-parter.
It seems Mike Carey has been slowly climbing the ranks of Marvel’s elite and trusted writers, only to suddenly find himself right at the top, at perhaps the most coveted writing assignment in comics! Mike’s run begins with X-Men #188. But let’s hear it from the man himself:

Manolis Vamvounis: Welcome back Mike and congratulations! Mike Carey’s X-men: Is it a high-octane adventure or intricate character study in a soap opera?

Mike CareyWell I’m definitely aiming for an epic scale, an epic tone, so I think opera is maybe an appropriate word. But not soap opera. I think the only way to write the X-Men successfully is to go into overdrive, go into 6th gear. You have to ramp up the action, and the consequences of the action, to a very high level in order to succeed. You want to emphasize that aspect. You can’t tell little domestic or parochial stories about these characters. They’re too big for that.

Mike Carey: Just for one year. I have about 13 or 14 issues in detailed outline. And yes, there are interconnections and developments which tie these storylines together, but beyond that I’ve only got very broad ideas.

Mike Carey: It carries straight on. There will be some fallout as you would expect from the Blood of Apocalypse”¦ It’s a very momentous event within the x-universe. When I take up we’re still feeling the repercussions from these events.

Mike Carey:No, it doesn’t. In fact, it starts with almost no team at all. The team is reduced to a couple of demoralised survivors: Iceman and Rogue. All of the other characters have gone off in other directions for various reasons, about which I can’t say anything very much. We start with those few characters who are still left on their feet and we chronicle the process by which a new team is built around those characters. And it’s not an automatic process. It’s not Professor X or Cyclops or whoever coming along and saying “this will be your new team now”. It’s a more haphazard process than that – and it’s more of a response to events.

Mike CareyWe move around a lot. Some of it takes place in the mansion. There are going to be some very dramatic events in the mansions itself. We will also be visiting locations in Mexico and the US/Mexican border and then later on in Nebraska. There is a lot of jumping around, because we’re setting stuff up for the year. There will essentially be three main storylines covered in the course of the year and in a way we’re involved in the setup of all three straight out of the gate.

Mike Carey I have a naïve faith in spandex. I like superhero stories I like the way they work. When they are done well they can be spectacular, and moving, and even disturbing and thought-provoking. People like Alan Moore and Brian Bendis and Grant Morrison and Joss Whedon have proved that you can tell grand, moving and disturbing stories about spandex.

Mike Carey: They cannot be just a covert taskforce. That’s the default option, isn’t it? And it’s the least interesting aspect of what the team are and what they do. Over the years they’ve become something more complex and more involving than that. These characters have a kind of everyman status because they’re trying to impose themselves on a situation which constantly pushes them into certain roles, marginalises them, and takes away their autonomy. More than any other superhero book, the X-men dramatises the conflict between coercion and individual freedom. It’s the pressure of social definition on the individual and the extent to which the individual can free himself or herself from that definition, refuse to be defined by society, refuse to accept the limits set upon them by society. The covert taskforce is not a definition of the X-Men that appeals to me, but they’re not victims or martyrs either. Like all of us, they’re people who are trying to mark out a space for themselves, to define themselves by their actions and to win the right from society to be themselves. And like all of us they have to fight against considerable resistance to achieve that.

Mike Carey: I‘ve had various degrees of loyalty. I haven’t of course read every single issue of every single x-book. With Uncanny X-Men I came on board with issue 108 and then backtracked and read all the issues back through to 94. And then I stayed with the book until sometime in the mid 200s – around about the time of the Mutant Massacre storyline. So through those years I was reading every single issue of Uncanny, I read X-Factor when it started and so on and I read all the mini series that came out around then like Magik, Kitty Pryde/Wolverine and so on. Then I drifted away a little bit. I would still pick up the books occasionally and still try to keep track of what was happening, but I can’t say that I read every single x-book that was published in the 80s and 90s. I broadly kept up with developments – picked up the big story arcs that were getting reviewed and talked about, picked up trades as they appeared. That kind of thing.

Mike Carey: It’s hard to decide! I think there’s a lot to be said for the initial line-up in Giant Sized X-Men 1, the one that Claremont and Cockrum first put together. That was a wonderful line-up and in a way it set the foundation for everything that came after. I love the characters that Joss is using in Astonishing. I think one of the best things that Grant did on his run was to bring Emma Frost into the mix. That’s a terrific roster.

Mike Carey Yes, inevitably! They’re all living in the same house after all. We will definitely see Emma, we’ll see Cyclops, we’ll see the Beast, they’ll be sort of hovering around in the background in the first issues. Later on we’ll see some of the new X-Men characters who Kyle and Yost are using. Since I brought Sabretooth in my team line-up it seems logical that he and X-23 are going to bump into each other. Not to mention him and wolverine. Although I don’t think we are going to go down the expected route here.

Mike CareyWell, Rogue and Iceman are there in the first place because they are the veterans; they are the only characters remaining from the previous team. They’re also there because I really like both characters and I really wanted to keep them on. I love Rogue. I like the fact that she has this very wild and passionate and impulsive nature, but because of the way her powers work she always has to strive to rein herself in. I think that tension is a very interesting thing about her. Iceman has been through some very interesting changes of late and he’s at a crucial point in his development – suddenly wide open to experiences that have been denied to him for a long time. I want to follow that up, and I also want to follow some hints about his powers that were given out a very long time ago.

Cannonball: Cannonball is there initially because he is the opposite of Rogue, because he is somebody who is very entirely emotionally stable, who has massive leadership experience, and a sort of enormous sense of responsibility. He’s kind of there to counterbalance her. But that’s not how things will necessarily play out.

Cable is our heavy-hitter. He’s a world class telepath and telekinetic. In some ways the most powerful member of the team, and certainly the one most scarred by experience.

Sabretooth is the big physical presence, the big strong man as it were.

Mystique is the master strategist. She’s got all these connections and resources because of her previous links to the government. She’s also there because of the dynamic tension that she has through her previous relationships with Rogue and Sabretooth. It’s a very explosive combination from that point of view. I think I like Mystique because she is the supreme manipulator. She really is a foxy canny sort of character who will use whatever tools are best to get the job done – even if those tools include people she loves.

Mike Carey Probably the main point to make here is that these two have been through hell together and they know each other very well now. There’s never – or at least not within recent memory – been a very great bond of friendship or trust between them, but they’re going to be thrown back on each other if only because they’re all that’s left of the old team and each functions as a link to that team and that time for the other.

Mike Carey: That’s a relationship that is full of poignancy and one we will be definitely exploring and moving forward. These are two characters that used to be incredibly close; to all intents and purposes, mother and daughter. Now they’ve pulled so far away from each other that it seems they can’t ever bridge the gap. The scars that are there for both characters”¦ But especially for Rogue. This woman that she used to regard as her mother has in many ways betrayed her and let her down. From Mystique’s point of view the betrayal is the other way. She has given a lot, invested a lot emotionally in Rogue, and now Rogue has no time for her, cold shoulders her, locks her out. In a way there’s equal pain on both sides. We sympathise more with Rogue’s take on the relationship, but they are both wounded by that. And as we know Mystique is not accepting that the relationship is necessarily over, she wants to get back onto a basis of trust and intimacy with Rogue. She is not giving up on her attempt to control Rogue’s life.

Mike Carey: Again, there’s a lot of very painful backstory there. I think Mystique may very well be one of very few people who Sabretooth would actually feel a certain amount of fear for, because she’s been inside his emotional guard to such a large extent. I think one of the nice ways about how the team dynamic will play is that Mystique can push Sabretooth in a number of ways. One thing she can do is act as a kind of check or restraint on him – not physicallty, but just because she knows him so well and because she’s always ruthless in using what she knows to gain advantage.

Mike Carey: The important thing with Cable and Cannonball is to move beyond the expected character beat. As we know Cable almost adopted Cannonball. He had a relationship with him which was in many ways similar to a father-son relationship and he’s worked over the years to kind of help cannonball mature, to move him onwards, both in the use his powers and in broader ways: Leadership skills, personal development and so on. And yet, he periodically dropped out, disappeared, left to deal with crises of his own – a pattern that was repeated again in last yea’s Nicieza/Liefeld X-Force miniseries. There’s been some pain, there’s been a constant stop-start in the relationship, a repeating pattern of Cable helping and supporting Sam, and then disappearing at a crucial moment. I don’t want just to restate that, I don’t want just to let them take up from somewhere they already were and fall back into old patterns – particularly since Nicieza seemed to suggest that Sam had reached a sort of understanding and acceptance of the past in their most recent encounter. I think when they meet now they meet as equals and they know each other well enough to become – initially, at least – a kind of stable backbone for the team.

Mike Carey: I’m not going to answer this question, but I will say that it is a problem that is acknowledged very early on. There is one character who is designated as team leader and there are several other characters who to some extent will either feel that they are supposed to be in that position, or will act as if they are already in that position. There will be tension and some problems with regard to the line of command, which will eventually be resolved around about the end of the 6th issue. I’m not talking about anything as crude as a leadership contest, but there will be problems and there will be a resolution.

Mike Carey: That’s two separate questions, isn’t it really? Is his presence necessary for the X-Men? Quite possibly not! It’s kind of an open question, if he were to reappear whether that would be a good thing or a bad thing. Certainly from a narrative point of view, we need him, the readers need him. We want to see what happened to him and we want to see how his relationship with the various x-teams plays out.

Mike Carey: I can only talk about my own book, obviously. Rogue’s conversion from villain to hero happened a long time ago: long enough that for most people her dubious origins are barely a memory. But I think it’s one of the things that make her such a great character, that she has this past that she is still to some extent living down. Mystique and Sabretooth, to different degrees and in different ways are fascinating as characters who can’t
do what Rogue has done. They can’t ultimately step across from villain to hero. They‘ve done too many not just questionable but unforgivable things. Mystique has recently been grudgingly and reluctantly accepted by the x-men. They have decided to give her a chance to prove herself, to prove that she can change. Sabretooth is never going to be accepted in that way. He can’t change, there’s no possibility of that. I don’t think Sabretooth can be anything other than what he is and therefore he presents different problems and different storytelling opportunities. In all of these cases, putting a character like Magneto or Sabretooth or Mystique into the context of an x-team is like throwing a live hand grenade into the middle of a living room; it’s a way of creating spectacular tension and I guess reopening this whole question of the x-men’s role and the extent to which their activities are officially sanctioned and officially accepted.

Mike Carey: (laughs) Yes, I do like writing bastards. But let’s not make the mistake of seeing Sabretooth as being the same kind of character as Constantine or Lucifer. He’s not a bastard in that way, he is a monster. He’s psychopathic, he’s cannibalistic, he’s somebody who glories in his bestial animal nature, and he is someone who is ultimately irredeemable. Whereas Lucifer and Constantine are characters who you can understand and to a large extent sympathise with, even when they’re doing questionable things. I don’t think there will ever be the possibility of sympathising with Sabretooth. There is the possibility of understanding him up to a point, but it’s not the kind of understanding that leads to fellow feeling. He will remain a monster.

Mike Carey: I think he’s most interesting as a kind of warped or tortured messiah figure. As someone who has grand plans and hugely good intentions, but at the same time to some extent has feet of clay and repeatedly fails in his aspirations. There’s a wonderful moment in Fabian Nicieza’s Cable & Deadpool when Cable is trying to disarm the nations of the earth and he’s attacked by a strike team which includes Domino – his former lover. She gets to deliver this line where she basically says, “What you’re trying to do is great, but you’ve screwed up everything and everyone you ever touched in your life”. And he can’t deny it. He just says “well, you know, you’ve got to keep trying”. It’s a very poignant moment. Because he is a figure of great power – as we’ve seen at certain points of his life, almost limitless power – and yet he’s also somebody who to some extent has not been able to get any traction. He’s so often seen the things he built fall down and that gives him a certain vulnerability. You don’t just see him as this kind of super-soldier. I guess, when I see Cable, I still see the child Nathan within the man.

Mike Carey: I would like him to. I think he is often written to have a kind of youthful and impulsive outlook on life, but yeah, he’s not and he shouldn’t be just a joke character. It’s the same problem – or a different but parallel problem – with Cannonball. There was a time when Cannonball, having been carefully matured by a number of writers, suddenly became this kind of young untried hero-in-waiting again. I don’t want Iceman to be a joke character, I think he’s in some ways the biggest challenge in terms of deciding a role for him and an identity for him while making sure he has a character arc, that he moves forward. I absolutely agree he has to be more than a frat boy character.

Mike Carey: We’re doing both. The first and second story arcs, which are linked, both have a number of new characters: new villains, new antagonists for the team. Later on in the year we will be resurrecting some older foes. I’d like to strike a balance here. There is a supporting character who we will meet very early on in my run that is in a way very old. She’s been around for ages but we are redefining her and using her in an interesting and different way.

Mike Carey: I think one of the beauties of writing the x-books is that the core cast for one book will be the supporting cast for another book. So we will be using the characters from Uncanny and Astonishing, to various degrees at different times as supporting characters. Particularly I’ve already mentioned Emma Frost and the Beast. We see these characters very early on in my run. We also see some of the younger people who are in training at the mansion – the New X-Men. But there will be some new supporting characters I will be bringing in and some old characters popping back in after long absences. I don’t think there’s any real danger that those characters will steal the spotlight, because in a way with a team book, and with a team that’s already filled with so many vivid larger-than-life characters, the spotlight is already a bit crowded (laughs).

Mike Carey: I should be careful what I say here because there are some developments between now and issue 188 that I don’t want to inadvertently give away. I think Peter in his last few issues is going to be casting at least a sidelight at that aspect of Rogue’s life. But it’s true that I find that aspect of Rogue’s nature fascinating and it is also true that if I do touch on it, it’s going to be more than restating the old “oh I love you but I can never touch you” kind of thing. I’d like to move on from there. It’s time Rogue got some”¦ satisfaction in her life! Apart from that, other kinds of romantic developments: yes, there will be some. I’ve got a very odd erotic experience set up for Cannonball – by which I don’t mean I’m going to give him some novel kind of sexual obsession.

Mike Carey: I do, intermittently. I go long periods without checking reviews and then I’ll drop in and find out what people are saying about me. I can say that I will be a bit careful about popping in on message boards when I’m writing the X-Men because there is so much online activity. You can get sucked into it and find you don’t have any time to actually work because there is so much going on, and I wouldn’t want that to happen. There’s also the danger that maybe you can get sort of misleading impressions by looking at things said online because although the online community for the x-men is very big and very active, you’re not necessarily always getting a representative sample of opinion. So yeah – I do read reviews but I try not to do it very often.

Mike Carey: I think, to some extent I’d suggest that the book will be different because it will be about these people. It’s a very odd and very distinctive mix of characters and the flavour of the book will to some extent be defined by those characters and by the interactions between them. Beyond that”¦ one of the things I want to do is to put the dangerous edge back into the book. Which is not to say that it has become predictable, it’s just that I think that I’m happiest with the x-men when they’re out on the edge a little bit, and that’s where I’ll be aiming to put them.