Talking with Mike Carey

I posted an interview with top writer Mike Carey over on the FPI blog today. Mike has written for a wide range of comics, from independent small presses (including the charity comics Just 1 Page I mentioned here a while back), 2000AD and now the major publishers of DC, where he had a great run on Hellblazer, adapted Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere and wrote the Eisner-nominated series Lucifer, which followed the First of the Fallen after he quite Hell in the Sandman exploring concepts of free will and determinism while for Marvel he's been allowed to play with the Fantastic Four, Ultimate Elektra, X-Men and more.

Not content with this and a large slate of upcoming work Mike has launched his first two prose novels, Devil You Know and Vicious Circle, which follow Felix Castor, a freelance exorcist in a London which is almost the one we know except the dead are returning in ever increasing numbers. Styled like supernatural Noirs (Hellblazer meets Raymond Chandler perhaps) the cases being invesigated in both books are quite engrossing, but there is also a building of detail and a sense on building story arc running through them, which Mike confirmed in the interview. They're quite excellent and I highly recommend them; don't just take my word for it, award-winning novelist (and fellow comics scribe) Richard Morgan has praised Devil You Know, which doesn't surprise me since I know Mike's Lucifer series features on Richard's top ten favourite graphic novels (so there's another recommendation for you). You can read the full interview over on the FPI blog.