We're less than a week away from the release of The Lycan's second issue and we recently caught up with Mike Carey to talk all about the werewolf comic book series, including working with Thomas Jane, Carey's fascination with lycanthropy, and we also asked about Carey's Ghostbox. And, as a special treat for Daily Dead readers, we have a 6-page preview from The Lycan #2 that you can read right now!
The Lycan is a comic book series that you initially wrote the scripts for 15 years ago and, after the project got restarted with a new artist, it's releasing this year. How excited were you to see the new artwork and to know that the series is now being read by horror fans from around the world?
Mike Carey: It’s been pretty amazing, I have to say. I’d more or less given up hoping that The Lycan would ever see the light of day. Then last year some of Diego’s pages dropped into my Inbox and I was absolutely blown away. The project had suddenly come back to life after a long period of being completely dormant. It was kind of an amazing moment.
There are basically two ways that we layer in the historical feel in The Lycan. I try to do it through the dialogue, borrowing liberally from eighteenth and nineteenth century literature (and if I’m honest some stuff from earlier that I just used because it sounded chewy and satisfying). Diego does it through the texture and detailing of the art, and I think he’s done a spectacular job.
How did you initially get involved with this project and can you speak to your collaboration with Thomas Jane?
Mike Carey: So this is going back a long way obviously – to 2010. I’d finished my run on Hellblazer by then, but I was still in touch with Tim Bradstreet who was the cover artist on the book, and Tim introduced me to Thomas. By then Thomas and David Kelly had already worked out the entire structure for The Lycan. They wanted a writer to take that outline and turn it into a script. I’d never worked that way before, from someone else’s outline, but it looked like a very cool story and I’d always had a yearning to write full-on Gothic horror, so I said yes.
While crafting this story, do you recall a lot of historical or werewolf research? Was there anything in particular that was inspiring while writing the script?
Mike Carey: I didn’t do much historical research at all. My brother Dave is a historian and the Napoleonic era is one of his special interests, so I had a reasonable sense of what was going on in Britain around the turn of the nineteenth century – enough to give a framework for the story. We weren’t going to be referring to actual events very much, so it was more about being aware of the context.
I was much more concerned with the language. I wanted the dialogue to sound authentic, but without making it be a barrier for the reader, so I read a lot of eighteenth century and early nineteenth century novels and journals and sort of soaked up the rhythms and cadences of the language. Then I wrote the scripts with all that stuff percolating in my mind. What we ended up with isn’t what you’d call historically accurate, but I think it does the job – which is to suggest early nineteenth century without forcing the reader to go to a glossary.
Growing up or over the years, do you have a favorite werewolf movie? What drew you to this movie and literary creature?
Mike Carey: Probably my favourite werewolf movie is Colm McCarthy’s Outcast – which came out around the time when I was writing the scripts. McCarthy’s were-man, or were-boy, transforms into something that’s not very wolf-like at all. It’s hairless, leprous white and horribly malproportioned. The movie basically uses lycanthropy as a metaphor for the ways our bodies change in puberty and all the emotions of fear and shame that tend to hit us at the same time.
One of the things that’s always kind of fascinated me about were-beast myths is how they change from culture to culture. It’s most often wolves in middle Europe because wolves were a wild animal that people had regular and very fraught dealings with. But in African folklore there are were-hyenas, in a lot of island communities you get were-seals, Japan has its Kitsune and so on. The core idea is just that humans let out some aspect of their primal nature and it takes animal form – but with a lot of variation as to which animal and how far it’s willed or wanted. It can be a curse or a blessing, a superpower or a liability. That gives you a lot to explore as a storyteller.
We've also been telling our readers about your new comic book series, Ghostbox. The story has such a unique and compelling premise. How did this project come together and why was this a story you were so excited to tell?
Mike Carey: Ghostbox is another book that’s had a long gestation – and it’s very much a labour of love. Pablo Raimondi and I came up with the core idea a good long while ago. A box full of ghosts, a living sister and a dead one, a cabal of shape-changing monsters that eat human spirits, and a big mystery about what the box really is and how it came to exist. We had a lot of the story architecture worked out, character designs and so on, but we needed to find the book a good home. Back in the day we would have gone to Vertigo, whose demise I still mourn every day. But it turned out we found a welcome home at Comixology.
And that’s turned out to be a great home for the book! They’ve been hugely supportive, the editorial and publicity teams are amazing, and they’ve given us pretty much absolute creative freedom. Freedom with logistics too, in terms of the length of each issue and the delivery schedule. We couldn’t have asked for a better launch platform.
Pablo and I have always loved cosmic horror, and it’s great to see it being explored from so many different angles right now, from wickedly playful reinventions like N.K.Jemisin’s The City We Became to radical critiques like Victor LaValle’s Ballad of Black Tom. We wanted to put our own spin on some of those themes and some of that iconography. Our elder gods come from a different stable, I guess, but we’ve still got vast abysses of time and space and a creation myth that’s chock-full of outrageous monsters – some of whom we’ve yet to meet. It’s a big canvas!
For aspiring writers out there, what do you feel is key to writing a good horror story?
Mike Carey: I think horror is granular. It’s like comedy in that it’s much more present in the detail than in the big idea. You need moments that hit hard enough to derail the reader’s thought processes for a moment or two. Often that’s about choosing the right word or the right visual – something that just makes the audience sit up and go “did that just happen?” There’s a scene in Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing where a character wishes for the power to transform into a bird – and she gets her wish. The whole thing happens off-panel, so it’s carried in dialogue, and it’s one of the most chilling things I’ve ever read.
Another example would be the climax of Stephen King’s The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, where Trisha either does or doesn’t have an encounter with a demonic entity. King deliberately shifts to a third-party perspective – someone who’s watching from a distance and doesn’t know what they’re looking at, so the reader is left in the same uncertainty. It’s all the more terrifying because we can’t resolve it.
What can you tell us about your workspace? What's something you have or need to get into a creative headspace?
Mike Carey: I tote my laptop everywhere I go, so my workspace is wherever I happen to be. At home I slouch on the sofa with the laptop on my knees, but these days I do a lot of my writing at the local library in a study carrel that’s boxy and tiny and shut off from the world. I think it’s the walk rather than the environment that gets me into the mood for writing. It’s a mile and half each way, so it’s not that long a walk, but it’s enough to leave me feeling woken up and energized. On the days when I work from home I get maybe half as much done.
I used to hold to that adage about making sure you write every day, whether you’re feeling it or not, but these days I let the lulls and the highs come and go and I don’t try to force it. I’ve realized over the years that – for me at least – the days when nothing much is happening are part of the process. There’s a sub-routine in my mind that’s still working, and it lets me know when it’s ready to get going again.
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To purchase The Lycan #2 and learn more, visit: https://www.amazon.com/Lycan-Comixology-Originals-2-ebook/dp/B0DB1G91CG/
THE LYCAN: "Year of Our Lord 1777: A hardened band of international big game hunters returning from Africa are shipwrecked off a small British island.
In exchange for new supplies and the repairing of their good ship The Calydonian, Lord Ludgate engages the men for a task they are particularly well suited for: find the Berserking Beasts that have been eating his subjects, including a group of young Benedictine Nuns, and destroy them.
Young novice Lily Holl battles her unholy desire for Hugh, while Coffin and first mate Said venture beyond the castle walls, without permission from Lord Ludgate.
Pompey tells the tale of how Coffin saved a young girl in his youth, while his village in Massachusetts was destroyed by Beasts."
After spending more than 10 years as a consultant in the tech and entertainment industry, Jonathan James launched Daily Dead in 2010 to share his interest in horror and sci-fi. Since then, it has grown into an online magazine with a staff of writers that provide daily news, reviews, interviews, and special features.
As the Editor-in-Chief of Daily Dead, Jonathan is responsible for bringing the latest horror news to millions of readers from around the world. He is also consulted with as an expert on zombies in entertainment and pop culture, providing analyses of the zombie sub-genre to newspapers, radio stations, and convention attendees.
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