Saving the Queen

This story originally appeared in PW Comics Week on May 1, 2007 Sign up now!

by Wil Moss, PW Comics Week -- Publishers Weekly, 5/1/2007

Mike Carey first made a name for himself writing Lucifer, a Vertigo comic book series that followed the ruler of Hell after he abdicated his throne. Once again he is telling a story about a ruler in a mythical realm in God Save the Queen, a new graphic novel where the mad Queen Mab has taken over the realm of Faerie from Titania and only a North London girl named Linda can save the day.

Illustrated by John Bolton and due out from Vertigo this month, God Save the Queen blends contemporary London, the teenage drug scene and near-forgotten fantasy characters to create a vibrant and engaging coming-of-age tale.

God Save the Queen is only one of Carey's many projects. He's currently writing X-Men and Ultimate Fantastic Four for Marvel, Crossing Midnight and Faker for Vertigo and Nicolas Cage's Enigma for Virgin Comics. This summer will see the American release of his first novel, The Devil You Know, with several more on the way. Plus he's got a couple of graphic novels in the pipeline for DC's new Minx imprint: Re-Gifters in June and Confessions of a Blabbermouth in the fall.

PWCW: What was your initial inspiration for God Save the Queen?

MC: Two separate inspirations—I'm not sure at what point they became combined. The idea that Mab and Titania were two different people rather than two different names for the same person and that there had been a coup d'état within the realm of Faerie was one that I'd probably had way back when I was reading Romeo and Juliet for the first time in high school. When you get to the Queen Mab speech in Romeo and Juliet, Mab is presented as this sort of terrifying, half-insane figure, very different from the Titania of Midsummer Night's Dream.

The coming-of-age story, Linda's story, is something else. It's partly autobiographical, it's partly based on things that actually happened to somebody I know. It's partly playing off faces and people that I know in North London. At any rate, it's a coming-of-age story in a classic mold—that idea came later.

PWCW: Tell us about the difference between writing this book, a self-contained graphic novel, and writing X-Men, a part of a large line of books?

MC: It's difficult to compare because you're not comparing like with like, but I love the graphic novel format, because when you've got 110 pages, and it's all one story, then you can get rhythms going that you can't get in a monthly book. With Hellblazer and Lucifer and X-Men, I'm not writing self-contained stories, I'm writing stories that go on for month after month and they eventually collect into a story that could be larger than God Save the Queen. But because God Save the Queen doesn't have to play to the episodic format, it doesn't have to have chapters, it doesn't have to have cliffhangers every 22 pages. There are things that you can do with that bigger canvas that you can't do in any other format. The story takes on a different kind of life and structure, and I love that.

PWCW: I saw on your Web site that you're a parent. How did that factor into this story, where Linda's mother and absent father play such an important role?

MC: On one level, the whole of Lucifer was an epic about family relationships—I played the relationship between Lucifer and God very much as a father-son relationship. It does seem to be something that I'm fascinated by, parent-child relationships and how they can go wrong. My parents were amazing and didn't put a foot wrong, really. When you become a parent yourself, you become morbidly aware of all the things you can do to screw your kids up. This heavy weight of responsibility lies on your smallest actions.

PWCW: Tell me about the Minx book you're co-writing with your daughter, Confessions of a Blabbermouth.

MC: Again it's about dysfunctional parent-child relationships. It was an idea that Louise, my daughter, and I brainstormed together. Minx editor Shelly Bond had invited us to pitch a book because I had shown her an unfinished novel that Lou was writing by herself. Shelly was really impressed with it and thought Lou had a very mature voice for a 14-year-old. She said, "Why don't you pitch something together?" So we put our heads together and this is what we came up with.

PWCW: What has the experience of working with her been like?

MC: It's been great. It wasn't easy. It was very challenging in a lot of ways. Not least because Lou's life is fuller and more complicated even than mine is. Finding a time when we can actually sit down and work together was a bit of a challenge. But also finding a suitable working relationship was hard—initially I was leaning hard on Lou, being the dominant partner, saying, "You can't do this, you have to do art direction in this style not in that style," and so on. Finally she turns to me and says, "You know, if we can't do this as equal partners, then I'm not interested in doing it at all." Which was a splash of cold-water-in-the-face kind of thing. Eventually we did sort it out and I think we both got an enormous amount out of doing it.

PWCW: With God Saves the Queen, and graphic novels in general, are you aiming this at the bookstore, are you hoping that someone will just come into a Barnes & Noble or a Borders and see this?

MC: With graphic novels, you're aware that the direct market isn't the only market that you're addressing. So, yes, it's for the bookstores as well. It doesn't particularly affect the way I write it. Really, that has more of an impact on the monthly stuff I write now. A book like Lucifer sold reasonably well in monthly episodes, but never, never brilliantly. Really it was supported throughout its runs in the trade paperback sales. If the bookstore market hadn't been there, it might have struggled to reach its ending—it might have been truncated.

PWCW: Likewise, do you think if the bookstore market wasn't there now that you'd do God Save the Queen as a miniseries?

MC: No, it would have always been done in this format. I think there are now monthly books that are supported by the existence of the bookstore market and would not necessarily have found their audience and not necessarily been successful. I think it's true of a number of Vertigo books—Lucifer, Transmetropolitan [by writer Warren Ellis].

PWCW: You have so many projects going, and a lot of them seem to involve a lot of research, like Crossing Midnight. How do you handle the workload?

MC: Some of the stuff coming out now was written a fairly long time ago. Wetworks, for example, is only just seeing the light of day, but I finished writing those scripts early last year—so there's an element of optical illusion. Having said that, I am very busy. I'm doing like four comics and a novel. It's demanding. It's fun. That's my kind of litmus test—if it's still fun, then I'm doing okay. If it starts to feel like a chore, that's the danger sign, I think. If you're not loving what you're doing, then probably you're not doing it right.