{"id":15,"date":"2026-11-03T05:03:43","date_gmt":"2026-11-03T05:03:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/phililove99.net\/?p=15"},"modified":"2026-11-03T05:03:43","modified_gmt":"2026-11-03T05:03:43","slug":"philsugar-melding-fiction-reality-the-world-of-mike-carey","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/phililove99.net\/?p=15","title":{"rendered":"PhilSugar | Melding Fiction & Reality: The World of Mike Carey"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Gregory Frye.
\n\u201cStories are the only thing worth dying for,\u201d
\nMike Carey
\nsays, quoting the words of
\nCount Ambrosio
\n, one of the villains in his new
\nVertigo
\nmonthly comic book series
\nThe Unwritten
\n, co-created with artist
\nPeter Gross
\n.
\nThe line comes with the mention of the Greeks who fought at Troy, women burned as witches, the Rosenbergs, religious martyrs, and the millions who have fallen in every war since the beginning of time.
\n\u201c[This notion] comes from a very strong feeling which I\u2019ve always had \u2013 and just gets stronger as I get older \u2013 that we don\u2019t live in the real world,\u201d Carey says. \u201cWe think we do, but we live in narratives. We live in ideas about the world. The stories that we tell ourselves are the furniture of our lives, the furniture of our thoughts, the factors of our decisions.\u201d
\nWe can\u2019t say a story is just a story, Carey maintains, mentioning Count Ambrosio\u2019s reference to fallen soldiers and religious martyrs. \u201cThose people all died for stories. They died for either a narrative they believed in, or a narrative that somebody else believed in and imposed on them.\u201d
\nCarey tells me all of this from the hole that is his writing space, a converted garden shed \u2013 with no heating or cooling \u2013 where he sits at the keyboard most of any given day, surrounded by stacks and towers of books, comics, newspapers and magazines.
\nStorytelling has always been a part of Carey\u2019s life. He initially got into prose as a hobby, telling stories to his little brother as a child, writing comics in his early teens even.
\n\u201cI guess it\u2019s fair to say that as a child I lived inside my own head for a very large percentage of the time, and that\u2019s never stopped, really.\u201d
\nThis inability to stop writing has led Carey into what many would consider a dream career. He tried his hand at comics journalism, which led to publishing comic strips, a few one-shots, and then his first major break, which came about ten years ago when Vertigo agreed to do a monthly series of
\nLucifer
\n. The success of the series led to other comic writing gigs, including a lengthy run on the everlasting
\nHellblazer
\nseries.
\nNow Carey\u2019s plate is always full, full of telling stories. In addition to his
\nFelix Castor
\nnovels, a series of books about a freelance exorcist who is also an atheist, Carey does work for Marvel comics on
\nX-Men: Legacy
\n, and he also has a new screenplay in production and is working on a couple of video games.
\nThe Unwritten
\n: fiction and reality
\nWith all of the published works under his belt, many people are suggesting that
\nThe Unwritten
\nis Carey\u2019s and co-creator Gross\u2019 best work to date. The monthly series earned three
\nEisner
\nnominations in 2009 and has garnished a lot of attention from in and outside the comic world.
\nThe basic premise is a story discreet sugar arrangement<\/a> about a man named
\nTom Taylor
\nwho is famous all over the world because his father has written a series of books about
\nTommy Taylor the Boy Wizard
\n, the character being sugar baby allowance scam<\/a> based off his own son.
\nResentfully, Tom grows up to service his father\u2019s legend, doing signings and conventions, famous only because of another person\u2019s work. It gets worse when somebody points out the documentation relating to Tom\u2019s life is mostly forged or unavailable, and therefore it turns out he may actually be his father\u2019s fictional creation made flesh.
\nThe comic also brings other pieces of literature to verified sugar daddies Philippines<\/a> life including
\nFrankenstein
\nand
\nJud Suss
\n, where the characters find themselves in Nazi Germany.
\nMoby Dick
\nwill also soon make an appearance.
\nThe theme of exploring the connection between fiction and reality arose during a conversation between Carey and Gross, which ultimately sparked the conception for
\nThe Unwritten
\n.
\n\u201cThere is currently this feeling now in psychiatry that the self is narrative,\u201d Carey says. \u201cWhen you start looking for what used to be called the seat of the soul \u2013 the part of you that is you, that is the observer behind your eyes \u2013 the current thinking is it\u2019s just the story that you tell yourself as it joins up the things that you\u2019ve done and the things that happen to you. Your sense of that history, of that story, is yourself. It\u2019s the closest thing you have to a soul. These are things that Peter Gross and I have been talking about for a long time, and it was Peter who had the idea to take a character and tell their story in real life and in a narrative in which they\u2019re a fictional character.\u201d
\nCreating a premise where fiction and reality undergo crossovers allows for some impossible things to sugar dating match rate<\/a> happen but doesn\u2019t necessarily give way to a world without rules. \u201cThe danger is if you completely take the lid off \u2013 if you say that reality is story and story is reality \u2013 you can end up with a situation where nothing matters because anything can be undone, anything you do on the page can, if you choose, have zero consequences.\u201d
\nTo illustrate his point, Carey gives a modern example of the television series
\nHeroes
\n. While he enjoyed the first season, he was \u201cshaken loose\u201d during the second season when they started using the blood of Claire, a cheerleader with rapid healing powers, to bring dead characters back to life. Going from a traumatic, tear-jerking death to the character being alive again just didn\u2019t work for Carey.
\n\u201cAll the pressure, all the tension, all the how to screen a sugar daddy<\/a> sense of narrative weight and momentum just dissipated for me, and we don\u2019t want that to happen in
\nThe Unwritten
\n. This is very much a story about the impact of fiction on reality, and it does seem to be a story where elements from fiction become real, but there are strict parameters within which that\u2019s possible. There\u2019s ultimately a logical explanation for everything that happens.\u201d
\n\u201cYou don\u2019t want to use the metaphysical fiction aspect as a get out of jail free card to absolve your responsibility for narrative developments. You have to play things so they still have meaning.\u201d
\nWhen it comes to choosing which pieces of literature to crossover into the world of
\nThe Unwritten
\n, Carey and Gross employ a two-piece criteria. Firstly it must be a work they enjoy, but they also want to use literary works that can sometimes have metaphoric or symbolic reference to Tom\u2019s situation.
\nFor example when Frankenstein makes an appearance, he tells Tom they have something in common in that they were both made by creators other than God, and that creator doesn\u2019t care for them all that much.
\nUltimately, Carey and Gross have a definite ending in mind for
\nThe Unwritten
\n. They hope to take the series on a five or six year run and really give BGC sugar dating<\/a> it a chance to breathe, grow and go all the places it needs to go.
\nSuccess & creativity
\nThe quality of Carey\u2019s work has brought him a lot of writing projects, and he\u2019s been working \u201cflat-out\u201d for the past two or three years, juggling all that he can handle.
\n\u201cProvided you don\u2019t push it too far, the upside to that is if you\u2019re working really hard on a lot of different projects, there\u2019s a sense where you get a big creative momentum behind you. You go into fifth gear, your mind is working overtime, you\u2019re generating ideas \u2026 obviously the danger is that if you work at the pace for too long, you can burn yourself out, and you wouldn\u2019t necessarily know you burned yourself out,\u201d Carey says.
\nHe has noticed that some writers, at certain points in their careers, start reusing the same set of tropes or the same set of story arcs. \u201c[The writer] is probably the last person to see that. Other people see it before you do. It\u2019s a great terror for me, the idea of plagiarizing myself like that.\u201d
\nThe contrast, however, that comes between working on novels and comic book manuscripts keeps Carey fresh at the keyboard every day.
\n\u201cFor writing novels, my favorite part is just the freedom,\u201d he says, mentioning that comics are more restricted in canvas-size, a page-length typically set by the publisher. Some publishers will sometimes let you squeeze in an extra page, but it usually means subtracting a page from a future issue.
\n\u201cWith a novel, you define the format, you define the structure and the length and the pacing of all the beats. That freedom is very attractive.\u201d
\nBut working on comics also has its set of attractions. \u201cA lot of the excitement with comics is working in a collaborative medium, working as a team of creators to bring the vision to life on the page and seeing your words turned into pictures by people like Peter Gross,
\nMike Perkins
\n, or
\nChris Bachalo
\n, that\u2019s tremendously exciting.\u201d
\nLike most successful writers, Carey would probably keep on writing even if his work wasn\u2019t being published. \u201cArtistic creation is really the externalization of something you\u2019re already really pumped up about, something that fills you to the point where it comes out. Your ability to control that process is questionable perhaps.\u201d
\nAlthough, now that he\u2019s made a name for himself, Carey has to negotiate an economic imperative into his world of words because in the comic industry, to build a reputation of saying \u201cno\u201d is often considered bad luck.
\nHe recalls quitting his teaching job ten years ago. \u201cI suddenly realized like a Warner\u2019s cartoon character, sugar daddy na verified<\/a> I had run off the edge of a cliff. As long as I didn\u2019t look down and kept running, then I wouldn\u2019t fall. And I\u2019ve kept running in a sense.\u201d
\nOf course, Carey\u2019s success has also brought quite an audience-base. His experience with comic fans has been mostly positive and he loves interacting with them at conventions. There\u2019s a fantastic atmosphere at cons that dissolves whatever barrier between the creator and the fans, he says.
\nWith his more mainstream projects, like
\nX-Men: Legacy
\n, Carey is very aware of a sense of responsibility he as a writer has when it comes to the characters.
\nWhile a writer, if lucky, will be working on these books for around three years or so, a lot of these readers have been with find sugar babies Cebu<\/a> the characters for most of their adult lives, for decades, he says. \u201cThey have more emotional capital invested in those characters than you have, even if you\u2019re a fan. There are some people out there who are more attached to the characters than you are.\u201d
\nThe writer has a responsibility to the continuity of these characters, Carey says. \u201cYou have to find a sponsor Philippines<\/a> be careful about making radical changes just for the sake of it. The changes have to be justified in the context of the line as a whole.\u201d
\nExperience
\nCarey has been cultivating his craft for a long time. As mentioned earlier, this didn\u2019t necessarily come by choice. Carey admits that even when he\u2019s not working, he can feel the pull of the keyboard.
\n\u201cI think what you get with experience is a sense of your own limitations and a sense of your own process.\u201d
\nSo now, for comic book writing, he knows exactly how long it will take him to plan and write a script, thus allowing to him allocate his time sensibly.
\n\u201cYou just have to be careful not to write the same thing endlessly. You have to find news ways of challenging and surprising yourself. The last thing you want is to become sugar baby bio examples<\/a> a player piano, just repeating the same few tropes endlessly.\u201d
\nYou can find Carey sitting in his converted garden shed almost any given day, continually challenging himself while tap-tapping away at his keyboard, surrounded by a castle of pages and words, having the time of his life.
\n\u201cThere\u2019s nothing more thrilling for me than writing stories, and it\u2019s the most exciting thing in the world to see your words become part of the furniture of somebody else\u2019s mind. That\u2019s the payoff.\u201d
\nABOUT THE INTERVIEWER
\nGregory Frye
\nis a journalist and struggling novelist who teaches English in Athens, Greece. His short story,
\nMr. Electric
\n, received honorable mention in the 78th Annual Writer\u2019s Digest Writing Competition. That story and other literary\/cultural oddities can be found at his new site:
\ndoginthesand.wordpress.com
\n.<\/p>\n

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By Gregory Frye. \u201cStories are the only thing worth dying for,\u201d Mike Carey says, quoting the words of Count Ambrosio , one of the villains in his new Vertigo monthly comic book series The Unwritten , co-created with artist Peter Gross . The line comes with the mention of the Greeks who fought at Troy, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/phililove99.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/phililove99.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/phililove99.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/phililove99.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/phililove99.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=15"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/phililove99.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18,"href":"https:\/\/phililove99.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15\/revisions\/18"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/phililove99.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=15"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/phililove99.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=15"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/phililove99.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=15"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}