By Kiel Phegley
Mike Carey runs all over the X-Men map from month to month.
Beyond delving into the lives of several mainstay X-Men characters in everything from the recent X-MEN ORIGINS: BEAST one-shot to the current cast of thousands SECRET INVASION: X-MEN limited series, Carey plots the future course of Professor Charles Xavier in the monthly X-MEN LEGACY title which also include fan favorites from Gambit to Magneto.
On October 8, Carey digs deeper into the X-Mythos than ever before when he teams up with writer Daniel Way to launch a new crossover between LEGACY and WOLVERINE: ORIGINS with X-MEN: ORIGINAL SIN #1. Shedding light on the shared past of Wolverine and Professor X, the "Original Sin" storyline aims to provide a key turning point for both ongoing series, and in anticipation, we caught Carey for a lengthy chat on why he loves the past, present and future of the X-Men including word on his favorite mutants and what makes Wolverine relevant today.
Marvel.com: You've done a number of different X-men stories from one-offs to limited series to your ongoing work and big crossovers. "Original Sin" falls somewhere in between as it's an important event story-wise kept between two books. How has it been different creating this with Daniel Way?
Mike Carey: Well, I think in a way—and this is the cool side of it—it arises from the things that were happening in the two books already. It defines itself in terms of how far it extends and which characters it draws in because in LEGACY obviously you have the recurring beat of Professor X retreading old ground, trying to pay old debts and find out A) what he's done in the past and B) come to terms with it. And in WOLVERINE: ORIGINS, you have Wolverine similarly researching his past and increasingly with [his recently-discovered son] Daken trying not to compound old mistakes and to make sure bad situations don't become any worse. Those are convergent paths really, and there's an inevitable logic that brings Wolverine to Professor Xavier and then to the way that they respond to the situation that Daken is in. So from that point of view, I think it was quite easy because it's character driven, and it's driven by the point of view of the trajectories the books were already on.
Marvel.com: You've been moving Professor X from one situation involving past associates to another, most recently delving into his damaged relationship with Cyclops. But now that you're getting your hands on Wolverine, you get a character whose complicated relationship with his own past is about as perfect as can be found for those themes. What's it been like folding him into your story a bit?
Mike Carey: I'd already written him a bit in [the WOLVERINE: FIREBREAK one-shot], but I think he's a very cool, very iconic character, and it's a nice team-up because Professor X is the most cerebral and least physical core member of the X-Men cast while Wolverine is probably the most physical. So they come from opposite ends of the arena, and seeing them team up offered some interesting character beats for both of them.
I think Wolverine is probably one of the strongest characters that the Marvel Universe has. Some people claim he's had too much exposure recently. I can see what they mean by that, but so long as you keep him within the kind of stories that are suited to his character, then he's just as enjoyable, exciting and compelling a character as he was 20 years go.
Marvel.com: It feels like the current X-Men writers have lighted upon a way to come onto the characters with a new direction. I don't know if you were at the last "let's all have fun with an earthquake" summit out West…
Mike Carey: Yes, I was. [
Laughs]
Marvel.com: Those seem to be pretty laid back and fun retreats…
Mike Carey: Yeah. It's quite amazing, really. I guess it's a testimony to what the X-Office is doing right that everybody comes out of those meetings feeling excited and energized and keen to take their own chunk of the story forward. I've been at about four or five of these summits now, and they've been overwhelmingly positive experiences. "Messiah CompleX," of course, came out of one such meeting in New York, and at this recent one we were talking about the next year or so on the X-books and how we could set up exciting and interesting points of contact and continuity between the books. The earthquake came at a moment when we were talking about the long term resolution of a plotline which has already begun, and someone had come up with a really great idea, and then the ground shook. There was a momentary silence, and then Matt Fraction said, "Man, I knew we were good, but I didn't think we were that good." [
Laughs]
Marvel.com: I'd talked to Daniel about a month ago on "Original Sin," but when the pair of you teamed up to discuss this story, how did you light upon the idea to center this story on the background to the two characters' first meeting in GIANT-SIZE X-MEN #1?
Mike Carey: I have to be careful what I say because we've got some quite astonishing revelations to the background of that first meeting, but again, it was a question of taking to a logical extreme the things that were already happening in the two books. Professor X in LEGACY is now in the position that Wolverine was in for most of his time as an X-Man, having these fragmentary glimpses of his past and not necessarily knowing how the different fragments fit together. When he comes to Wolverine, ironically, it's Wolverine who has the key and can tell him the meaning behind some of the things that have happened. So it's a question of retelling that story but putting it into a context that makes sense but could be told until now.
Marvel.com: You're also working to move your own series plotlines forward on top of building this new story. Daniel will work with Daken and where he goes next, but will you pick up the threads of what's been happening with the Hellfire Club right away?
Mike Carey: There's a lot of stuff that keeps right on going through this story, very organically, I think. We've seen some very turbulent scenes at the Hellfire Club. We've seen a power vacuum there where people are jockeying for position, and suddenly they're in a state where it's near civil war. Some of what happens in "Original Sin" arises out of that and gives the payoff to that. It's actually a much bigger story than just the back story of how Professor X and Wolverine first met and why things played out the way they did.
I guess you could say that there's an internal conflict and an external one. The external one has to do with the machinations of the Hellfire Club. The internal one is that Wolverine wants Professor X to do something which he is intensely reluctant to do. He basically wants him to do something specific with Daken's memories. Professor X is now realizing that in the past, he's done a great deal of harm through interventions like that, and so recently he's become reluctant to climb on that horse and take that path again.
Marvel.com: You've really spread out across the X-line between SECRET INVASION: X-MEN and the Bobby Drake story in MANIFEST DESTINY and LEGACY, and it seems you've really connected with the characters by telling stories where their past actions come to bear on their present in a big way. That's not something that everyone exploits, and I was wondering if you chose that route because it worked well with the team's soap opera history or because you're generally interested in those kinds of stories?
Mike Carey: I guess it's a combination of the two. It definitely has something to do with the fact that I go back a long way with these characters. I had the original books—the first run of the X-Men—as a very little kid and was then brought back into comics by the early [Chris] Claremont/[Dave]Cockrum run. So a lot of this stuff doesn't seem as far back to me as a lot of modern readers, and it does come naturally for that reason to put the present actions of these characters into the context of the past and where they're coming from. But I guess it's also true that it's kind of an obsession of mine in a broader sense. I do like psychological thrillers and psychological complexity and exploring characters' motivations. I like coming at traditional stories from different angles and playing with what audiences already know. LEGACY is a really fun book to write from that point of view.
I think it is possible to be paralyzed by the sheer scale of the X-Men back story. You're talking about thousands and thousands of issues if you look at all the tie ins and previous series. It is an enormous task to try and harness that and pick and choose from there to create a framework for the present story. But it's amazing how much internal consistency there is, and it's not as tough or intimidating as it seems at the outset.
Marvel.com: You've used a lot of X-Men characters in your books, but between Professor X, Cyclops, Bobby and even Beast in the ORIGINS issue you did for him, you seem to have an affinity for the original X-Men. Do you tend to start from them and then spin out into involving other characters like Rogue and Gambit?
Mike Carey: It's not [the entire] original core cast. I'm prepared to admit I don't have much of a feel for Angel or an interest in him as a character. Bobby is interesting because in spite of what I said earlier, Bobby sometimes seems to follow a character arc which is cyclical and self-contradictory. He's become a veteran, and then he drops back to being the wise-cracking locker room joker character again. That was something I wasn't happy with, and I tried when I made him one of my core cast in X-MEN to emphasize the fact that because he was there from the start and because he is effectively an Omega-level mutant, he is part of the backbone and core of the team. He has as much to offer as anybody in terms of strategic skill and raw power. I wanted to go back to what I thought were the best aspects of the character.
I don't know what it is that makes me love certain X-Men characters and not others—[I love] Cyclops, Rogue, Beast, Iceman and Emma now more and more. They're all characters I really enjoy coming back to and like writing. I think that was the main criteria by which I chose the extremely unusual X-Men team I wrote. I just thought, "Who could I write convincingly?"
Marvel.com: Do you ever surprise yourself with some of the character bits you discover to use? Specifically for me, I was thinking of Nightcrawler in SECRET INVASION: X-MEN where this Skrull globe was making him think of Stefan Szardos, and I was like, "Ste-who Whatdos?"
Mike Carey: [
Laughs] Sometimes it is a surprise. That casual reference to Stefan Szardos and Nightcrawler's childhood—I couldn't resist putting it in even though there wasn't room to develop it and give the whole of the origin story again. But I figured I'd put it in there and let the long time readers get it, and everybody else would gloss over it. An example of a story that surprised me is the LEGACY one-off that follows "Original Sin." It's a story in which Professor X goes to see Juggernaut, and a lot of it plays out as just a conversation between the two of them in a bar, but with some really scary and unsettling stuff going on around them. When I first approached that story, I thought I knew how it'd turn out, but then I had this idea of "Actually, Juggernaut would probably do this, but then where would the story go?" And the story ended up very different from what I pitched because when I started writing the character, he probably wouldn't go along with Professor Xavier's program. He'd react in a particular way, and there'd be a crisis that had to be dealt with.
To check out the work of Mike Carey, visit Marvel Digital Comics Unlimited today!
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