Leaving a Legacy with Mike Carey

It’s the end of an era. Mike Carey has been the voice of first, the X-Men series and eventually the Rogue-focused X-Men: Legacy series since 2006, and as someone who has worshipped Rogue since she was 5 years old, I can confidently say that he’s done us proud. Alas, it’s time to pass the torch, but I was lucky enough to speak with Carey about his long-term love for Rogue, how their relationship came to be and where he’s headed.

Carmen Axle: Were you a fan of Rogue and the X-Men before you began to write for X-Men?

Mike Carey: Yes, I was. My relationship with comics as a reader goes back a very long way. I read the original run when I was a kid in the English reprint editions and then very, very early in the Chris Claremont revival I caught on to what was happening and it was actually the Claremont/Cockrum runs that got me back into the comics after a period when I wasn’t reading them much at all. And I carried on reading through about issue 300 or so of the original book. Certainly long enough for New Mutants to launch and then for X-Factor to launch.

After the mutant massacre I stopped being a regular reader, but I dropped back in every so often and picked up a run here and a run there or a trade and kept abreast of what was going on.

I know it eventually became a repeated trope, and I’ve done it myself, to have former villains be reclaimed and be rehabilitated and become X-men – but Rogue was, if not the first, one of the first to make that transition and it was surprising and it was exciting to have her cross the lines from the Brotherhood to the X-Men and then to have to work that out with both her new teammates and with her mother, Mystique.

All of those beats were very cool and I loved those stories when I first read them. I always thought Rogue was one of the most interesting characters in the line up.

CA: How did you come to be the voice of the X-Men series and eventually the X-Men: Legacy title?

MC: What happened there was that there was a period in my career where I was exclusive with DC, but that really meant exclusive with Vertigo, because I wasn’t getting any DCU work. I was trying out for stuff in the DCU – I pitched for Firestorm on one of the occasions when that title was revived. I wrote a little bit of Superman, a little bit of Batman, but none of the stuff I wrote ever saw the light of day for all sorts of reasons, and I was starting to feel a bit discouraged.

Then I met Axel Alonso at San Diego and he said if you ever find yourself free and you want to do some superhero work, come to us and we’ll see what we’ve got available and I’m sure we can work something out.

So when my exclusive ran out, that’s what I did and initially I did some Ultimate Universe work – Ultimate Elektra and Daredevil – and a two-issue fill in on Ultimate Fantastic Four.

And then I got a call from Michael Marts inviting me to try out for X-Men. I actually thought it was a joke. I thought it was a friend of mine pretending to be Michael Marts and came very close to telling him to go away in a rather vulgar way, but fortunately I didn’t. Because it was the real deal and they actually wanted me to try out.

I think the X-office particularly, and Marvel more generally, have a history of taking a punt on writers who’ve done other kinds of genre work, not superhero stuff, that the editors like or are impressed with. They gave Peter Milligan that slot back in the day and I think their offer to me was sort of in the same spirit – let’s see what you can do with a superhero team.

In the end the audition took the form of me choosing a team and saying these are the characters I would write about and this is what I would do with them and, as you know, Rogue was the leader of that team. She was always in the spotlight right from the start.

CA: So that was your decision to have her be the leader of the team?

MC: That was totally my decision, yeah. Ed Brubaker had just started on Uncanny at that time.  Mike told me the team that Ed was going to use from Uncanny and he said that doesn’t mean they’re off-limits – you can still use them as characters, but they can’t be on your team obviously.  But you can have pretty much anybody else, just so long as you convince us that you know what you’re doing.

And it was a pretty oddball team that I put together in many respects, but it was my decision to put Rogue and the center of that and make Iceman and Cannonball be kind of her deputies, her strong right and left hands.

CA: When you first started writing for Rogue in particular, did you use the old comics to guide you on her personality, or did you decide to just put your own spin on it?

MC: A little bit of both. The first thing I did when they told me ‘yep, you’ve got the gig,’ was to go back and fill in a lot of gaps. To reread a lot of old issues and read issues that I hadn’t read the first time around, or where I couldn’t get a hold of the actual issues, reading the summaries on UncannyXmen.net.

So I did kind of immerse myself in the history of the character and yes, that was part of a process of feeling my way into the personalities and the relationships and firming up ideas for what I wanted to do. I felt like I already had a strong sense of who Rogue was.

It’s possible to argue back and forth for a long time about whether my Rogue is or isn’t the same as Claremont’s Rogue. I think the unconventionality of her thinking, the idea that she’s somebody who’s rebellious and unpredictable – I think that is there in that Claremont Rogue and it was something that I chose to play up strongly in my Rogue.

CA: What about the character of Rogue has kept you interested for so long? Obviously you gravitate towards strong female characters.

MC: Yes, yes I really do. I love writing strong women. I love writing slightly barking mad women as well. Not saying that Rogue is that – I don’t think she is.

CA: Maybe Frenzy a little bit?

MC: [laughs] Yeah, maybe Frenzy, Lady Mastermind.  Ariel, even, to some extent.  There have been a lot of slightly scary, slightly off balanced women in my stories. But, I love strong, assertive women. I love independent women, and I seem to write female-heavy teams. I’m not sure what that says about me, but it’s a situation that I feel comfortable with.

So, what is it that keeps me coming back to Rogue? I don’t know really. I normally say when I’m asked that question that it’s the combination of passion and restraint. The fact that she is this incredibly headstrong and passionate character who’s had to learn to rein herself in because of the way her power works. That contrast is part of what makes her irresistible. I think that is part of the truth, but at rock bottom I think as a writer you just have a sense of comfort and familiarity with certain characters and certain voices and you just feel right when you’re writing them. And other characters just don’t come, or they come with much more effort and you’re never a hundred per cent sure what their deal is. You can’t get into their mind set. I’ve always felt it was very easy to get into Rogue’s mindset, and I really enjoy writing her.

CA:  Going back to what you were saying with Rogue’s powers, now that you’ve finally given her control over her powers, do you find it easier to write for her or more challenging?

MC: Neither – I liked writing her with constraints and I liked writing her without constraints. Had I stayed on the book, there were all sorts of things we had in mind for gradually unrolling the downside to her new situation.

Obviously the upside is that she can choose how deeply she samples now, she can choose whether or not her power activates when she touches someone, she’s got the whole power set that we established for her as the Reaper, or Legacy in Age of X, but there is a downside. There are unexpected complications in her powers that we were going to explore, which I’m sure will come out at some point in Christos Gage’s run on the book.

So, giving her control over her powers creates a new status quo and creates new opportunities for story telling – some of which we’ve gotten into and some of which sadly I didn’t get to get into before I left.

CA: How big of a deal was that to sell the idea of Rogue now having control over her powers? Obviously that’s a huge game-changer in the X-Men world.

MC: It wasn’t hard. It wasn’t like the X-Men editors were dubious about me changing Rogue’s situation. I think they like it when writers mess with the status quo and bring new things to the table. This was obviously something that had been pending for a very, very long time, arguably going back to the moment when she joins the X-Men, because Professor X implicitly promises this to her and then never delivers.

So I pitched it as part of the Professor X era of Legacy. The whole arc of Professor X in those issues is to revisit all the unfinished business from his past. Wouldn’t it be great if it ended with him going back to Rogue and finally keeping his promise to her. And, at the same time, wouldn’t that be great if that was then the hand over from Professor X to Rogue as the protagonist on the book?  And Daniel Ketchum was totally behind me in that. He was really enthusiastic about it.

CA: I want to talk a little bit about Age of X, which was a very cool event. How did that come to be?

MC: That was an amazing – like a snowball rolling down a hill –  situation, because I wanted to come up with an arc to showcase Rogue’s new control over her powers and that would bring in an eclectic supporting cast.  One of the things that I loved doing on Legacy was just picking and choosing characters who I thought I could do interesting things with when I thre them together on the page. 

So I pitched this to Daniel as a generations idea. I said, let’s try to think of a story where all the different generations of X-Men are reconstituted in their original forms. So you have the original line up of New Mutants, the original line up of Generation X, the original X-Men, the second genesis X-Men and so on. Obviously that would mean some duplication, so some characters would have to choose one allegiance or the other, but I said let’s come up with a story that puts all those teams in the field against each other or has them having to split up to deal with a threat.

He liked the idea, but we couldn’t come up with a vehicle and then finally I came up with the vehicle that became Age of X – the idea of Legion accidentally creating this other, self-contained world. And that became more interesting than the premise that led up to it. We liked that mechanism a lot. The more we talked about the story, the bigger it got. Initially I pitched it as a three-issue arc and Daniel said it can’t be a three-issue arc, it’s too big for that.

The timing was just perfect in some ways because Zeb was leaving New Mutants at that time and potentially there was a gap there before a new creative team took over on it, so they gave me three issues of New Mutants, and then they gave me the Alpha issue and it just grew and grew and grew. The support and enthusiasm from the X-office was fantastic. It was just an idea that got bigger and bigger as we played with it.

CA: I know a lot of the fans loved that arc. Is there any chance that we’ll see more of it in the future?

MC: I would love to go back and do a reprise, yeah. We have talked about that as a possibility somewhere down the line. I’m going to pitch an Age of X 2 at some point, definitely.

CA: That’s awesome! Legion is always one bad day away from a mental breakdown anyway, right?

MC: Absolutely! Isn’t he the most terrifying character in the X-Men’s world? I just love the concept and I love the way the concept has been elaborated over the years. The first New Mutants arc that he was in was brilliant – my favourite from the Sienkewicz era.

CA: I want to talk about the Rogue relationships. We’re seeing her now in kind of a love triangle with Gambit and Magneto – I’m sure the fans are just livid one way or the other, but do you take into account what the fans want or do you approach it as how Rogue would actually act in this situation?

MC: I have to work from my sense of the character. I try to be considerate of fans’ feelings and for a long time I was actively engaged in online discussions about this. Not so much on message boards, but on my Facebook page. People would post queries there and I had some long conversations about the triangle before it was explicitly a triangle.

When Magneto was showing his feelings for Rogue and Rogue was keeping him at a distance, it was already controversial. People were coming on to my page and saying ‘what are you doing? Where are you gong with this?’ After a certain point, I had to disengage from that conversation because there were some pretty foul things being said to me and about me and it just became uncomfortable. Because, as you said, there are really strong opinions on both sides. I understand that.

CA: Is this relationship going to be wrapped up before you leave or are you leaving it for Gage?

MC: It’s not going to be wrapped up. It’s going to be revisited, though. There’s a lot of stuff in #259 and #260 where she’s talking to both Gambit and Magneto about the choice that she’s got to make with relation to Schism and the new status quo. But, no, it’s not wrapped up. She does make a decision, but it’s not a decision primarily on romantic grounds.

I think the worst thing in the world right now would be to chicken out and go straight back to the Rogue/Gambit relationship as it was. I still believe that Rogue and Magneto make sense. Some people believe very strongly that it doesn’t make sense. We know that there was a pre-existing attraction between them and we know why that didn’t work out. We also know that Magneto has done some egregious things in the past. I think it needs to play itself out.

One thing we do know about Rogue is that she’s not somebody who lightly enters into relationships or is interested is sexual experimentation for its own sake or having lots of romantic partners for its own sake. So for her to come back to Magneto as she did argues a great strength of feeling on her part and I would not like to see that just be dropped and swept under the carpet.

CA: What can we look forward to with Rogue on Regenesis?

MC: A new team, a new location, and a whole lot of new complications – both personal and professional.

CA: What’s next for you as you move on from X-Men: Legacy and Marvel?

MC: In terms of comics, in the short term not very much. I’m carrying on with The Unwritten – that’s the big comics project in my life at the moment. And it’s just become a lot bigger, because we’re doing this bi-monthly thing, the War of Words, so there’s two issue of The Unwritten every month for the next five months instead of one, which we’re having a lot of fun with.

Apart from that, I did a werewolf story for Thomas Jane’s Raw Studios, which is being drawn up at the moment and will probably be released sometime in 2012. I’m talking to a British editor and publisher about the possibility of a painted series, which will be supernatural horror.

I just finished a novel which I co-wrote with my wife and daughter which is coming out next March, The Steel Seraglio. I have a number of pitches going through at the moment for possible TV projects and a movie screenplay that I wrote which is very close to going out to directors.

CA: So you’re a little busy?

MC: Yeah, it’s stuff like that which has sort of forced me to move away from Legacy, but hopefully not away from the X-Men permanently. The thing is that comic deadlines are always immediate. You’ve got to write a script, get it out, write another script, get it out, and it tends to push other stuff to the background, because with novels, the deadline is always several months away or a half year away.  I was finding that it was difficult to juggle those different time frames.

CA: How involved will you be in passing the reins to the next Legacy writer?

MC: Christos Gage and I talked a lot, just about the things he wanted me to set up, things he wanted me to deal with, things that I thought were still ongoing that he might want to return to. In fact, I’ve already written my final issue and he’s written his first issue, so the baton passing has taken place.

Although the X-Men fans will greatly miss Carey’s take on such a iconic character, we look forward to seeing Gage step up to the plate. X-Men: Legacy #260 will be Carey’s final farewell. We, the fans wish him the best, and will continue to desperately hold out hope for an Age of X sequel.

The Cupcake Rogues

Leaving a Legacy with Mike Carey