How would you describe yourself to a man on the street?
I’d probably say – in Andy Diggle’s resonant phrase – that I’m a guy who makes stuff up for money. You have to be blunt, really: it’s such an amazing way of making a living, the last thing you want to do is to get precious about it.
What kind of kid were you at school?
The quiet, nerdy one – incredibly conformist, incredibly self-absorbed. I lived inside my own head so much, it’s amazing that the rest of my body didn’t atrophy and drop off.
A lot of your work is in the horror/fantasy genre. What draws you to that?
I’ve always loved every kind of deviation from straight realism – whether it’s escapist or absolutely the opposite. For many years I didn’t enjoy straight drama or non-genre fiction at all: all I read for pleasure was SF and horror. I got over that phase, but I still find realism a very difficult mode to work in. When I think about stories, I think about stories that strike off from the real and then ricochet back in again from an angle you weren’t expecting.
How would you describe Felix Castor to a prospective Reader?
Castor is an exorcist in the same way that Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe are private eyes – for a few quid a day plus expenses. He’s got the ability to bind and dispel ghosts, and he uses that skill to make a living. A pretty precarious living for most of the time, too. There’s a lot of call for exorcists in Castor’s London because the dead have started to rise in large numbers, in a variety of very anti-social forms – both in the spirit and in the body. People who can do what Castor does are suddenly in demand, but it’s ugly and it’s dirty and most people with any sense would rather be doing something else. Castor is doing something else when we first meet him, but he gets sucked back into that world again very much against his better judgment.
Having recently finished Hellblazer there are some obvious similarities between Castor and Constantine - what’s different about them?
Yeah, they do have some things in common. The worlds they move in are similar, and they have overlapping skill sets. In both cases, too, they’re men who will make hard choices without hesitation, but will then find the weight of those decisions pressing down on them afterwards – men who can do what needs to be done, but can’t turn their consciences off.
Their motivations are different, though. John does what he does for a lot of reasons, but one of them is certainly for the intrinsic pleasure of it – he’s a bit of a magic junkie, in some ways. Castor is in it for the money, because it’s his single saleable skill, and then increasingly he’s in it because he contracts obligations to people that he can’t get out of.
Is the move into prose writing a sign that you’ve ‘outgrown’ comics, or do you plan to work in both media?
Definitely the latter. I hope I never outgrow comics: they’ve always been a big part of my life, and there are a couple of dozen that are among my favourite books ever. No, writing novels was something I always wanted to do, but not as a move away from comics. It’s like writing screenplays – you find out a lot about storytelling by trying out different media.
The first book is out shortly, with the sequel in October. How many Castor books do you have planned?
The contract with Orbit is for three books, but the plan at the moment is to go on a fair way beyond that. The third one is planned in a lot of detail. After that, I’ve got some good ideas for the fourth book, based on some research that my wife did for the London Metropolitan Archive last year, and I’ve got a very firm picture of how the climax to the sixth book will play out. Assuming I get that far, it would be a major revelation and a major tying up of plot threads. That might well be where the series would end, but we’ll just have to see. At the moment I keep having new ideas for Castor stories and for aspects of Castor’s world that we haven’t yet seen.
The beauty of the Castor series is that it’s a stupendously open concept. You have a world where there are ghosts, zombies, were-creatures and demons – and several different forms of possession – and there’s a single mechanism that explains everything that’s happening. Once you get that (and people will get it very quickly) you can take it in a lot of different directions. Similarly, the way we’ve defined the talent of exorcism lends itself to exploration in a lot of different ways. The hard part at the moment is reining myself in.
You’re just about to finish your run on Lucifer, how do you feel now it’s over?
A little bit bereaved, but most of all very proud and happy. We got to tell the story we wanted to tell in its entirety, over seven years – that’s something of an achievement. It’s amazing to look back on the whole thing now, and to reflect on how close it came to being derailed with issue three, when we lost our art team at the end of the first story arc. Lucifer was a personal turning point for me, and it’s led to a lot of other things. I’ll always be grateful that I got the chance to do it, and I’ll always be proud of how it turned out.
Are you tempted to just do a one off return?
Yeah, but not with Lucifer in it. I’d love to come back and do another Gaudium and Spera story.
You’re working with the fantastic Jock on a series called Faker – what’s it about?
It’s about identity. What happens when you lose it, and what happens when yours crashes into other people’s. It’s a horror story – in some ways the nastiest horror story I’ve written – and it’s an ensemble piece. It stands or falls by how convincingly the characters interact, so having Jock on art feels like having the wind at my back.
The opening set-up is that you have a bunch of students at an American university, and one of them starts to experience odd things – people forgetting who he is, or denying that certain things involving him ever happened. Then he starts to remember things as happening to him when in fact they happened to one or other of his friends. He knows he’s not crazy, so he starts looking for other explanations, and when he finds out the truth, he wishes he’d left well enough alone.
With Neverwhere and Lucifer ending is that it for you at Vertigo?
No, it’s out with the old and in with the new. I’ve got Faker coming out later this year, obviously – and also I’ve got another Vertigo monthly starting, maybe as early as late Summer. Only a working title as yet, Crossing Midnight, which is likely to change, and Jim Fern will be doing the art.
Beyond that, there are a number of one-off projects that I wrote last year, which should surface later this year – a Sandman Presents OGN with John Bolton, and a martial arts rom-com with the My Faith in Frankie team of Sonny Liew and Marc Hempel…
Again, I’d never want to part company with Vertigo. I’ve got very strong attachments there, and I’ve done some of my best work there.
How are you going to follow up Mark Millar’s run on Ultimate Fantastic Four? How long do you intend to stay on the book?
Well, I’d like it to be for a good long time, but you can never tell in this business. We’ll see how readers like my first arc.
I’d like to keep some of the same flavour that Mark has brought to the book, because I think it’s really hit the heights with his run. He’s doing what the Ultimate line was meant to do – taking elements from the classic sixties stories and fusing them into compelling new narratives that work for long-time fans and new readers alike. Lots of surprises, lots of mind-bending concepts put to use in unexpected and exciting ways.
In our first arc, Pasqual and I have the FF running into a small corner of a big, big war which spans a number of different realities. They meet soldiers from both sides, some of whom will be familiar figures from regular Marvel continuity in new guises, and they get drawn into the conflict against their will. In fact, in a disconcerting way, it turns out that one of the Four may always have been involved and never known it. As with N-Zone, the action starts and finishes on Earth but goes to some pretty amazing places in between – and we’ve got a cast of thousands, all of whom Pasqual is lovingly rendering.
After that we’ve got a story in mind which will introduce a new enemy and bring back an old friend in a way that will hopefully surprise people. It’s less “cosmic” in scope and tone, more Earthbound if you like, but still has a range of settings and puts the FF in a situation where their powers aren’t going to be of very much use to them – where the threat isn’t one you can fight against directly.
As always with the FF, the emotional beats, the development of the central relationships, is key – and we’ve got some big things to reveal there too.
Your X-Men team can at best be described as messed up. Was getting some bastards onto the team important to you?
Oh yeah. Well, having the team be dysfunctional was important to me. A lot seemed to follow from that initial decision. I just felt that it would be interesting to have an internal team dynamic that was always on the verge of imploding and falling apart – and Mystique was already available as a team member because of Peter Milligan’s use of her in the tail end of his run on the book. Adding Sabretooth seemed to make sense because of his history with Mystique and because he fitted in very well with what I was trying to do – and then, since this was clearly shaping up to be an odd, edgy sort of ensemble, we decided that Cable might feel at home in it.
I guess the rationale behind all of this is out of catastrophe theory. Here we’ve got people dealing with the most appalling, stressful, terrifying situations on a day-to-day level, and their private lives are also in turmoil. I wanted it to be the very opposite of comfortable. I wanted there to be a strong sense of the stress lines within the team, the lines along which it could shatter.
Can any of them be redeemed? Even Cable has at times operated as a terrorist so only Iceman counts as normal and he’s an accountant.
He’s a reformed accountant, which I think proves there’s hope for all of us. Rogue, I think, despite her impulsive and risk-taking nature, has become a very able and committed X-Man, and although she’s not in a good place psychologically when we join her, she (along with Iceman and Cannonball) make up the stable backbone of the team. Cable, as you say, is impatient with rules and limits and believes in doing whatever’s necessary to get the job done: it’s not a case of redemption there, it’s a question of how you manage him in a team that’s meant to stay within the law. Mystique – watch this space. She’s cold and pragmatic, and apart from her feelings for Rogue (and Destiny, going back a way) she doesn’t form strong attachments. Mystique consults her own interests, and you can trust her so long as those interests overlap with yours.
Sabretooth can’t be redeemed and can barely be contained. That’s almost the definition of his character, and as you’d guess, the problems that arise out of including him on the team are not ones that are going to just go away.
Ed Brubaker’s team is heading into space – where is your bunch of misfits going?
Oh, you know – the mid-Atlantic, South America, alternate dimensions. Those sort of neighbourhoods. There is also an interlude in outer space, but we’re just passing through so don’t put the kettle on or anything.
Looking back, what do you think of Vampirella: Revelations, now that it’s done? How fun was it to write?
It was a lot of fun to write, and I’m very pleased with it. We had a tough brief, in some ways – reconciling all the various origin stories, redefining the character for a new audience as the regular book re-launches, and shaking things up so that her quest against the vampire nations was given a fresh gloss.
I think we succeeded in all those things – and we also built in the big confrontation between Vampirella and her mother, solved the mystery of who her father is, or at least (being coy) how she came to be born, and gave what I thought was a very intriguing glimpse of how her mind works.
Also, Mike Lilly and Bob Almond came up with a vision of Hell that was uniquely memorable and visually compelling. It was great fun working with them.
You’ve recently been co writing with Mike Oeming on Red Sonja. How was it working with a writing partner?
A little strange, but it worked because Mike is such a nice guy and we hit it off so well personally. Co-writing is actually much harder work than writing alone, which makes it ironic that it pays so much less. But it was a rewarding thing to have done, and I enjoyed seeing how someone else – someone as sharp and imaginative as Oeming – goes about the business of crafting a story.
I’ve got one other co-written book on the slipway at the moment, which I’m hoping will soon get its launch. That’s a very different proposition, though, because the other writer is my daughter, Louise.
Whose idea was it to kill all those cute little kiddies/demon spawn in the last issue of the Red Sonja arc ?
Umm… let’s say it was Mike’s idea. That’s ambiguous enough.
Do you feel you’re in any way obsessed with demons? Does your previous life as a teacher have anything to do with that?
Obsessed? No no no. I see them everywhere because everywhere is where they happen to be.
Teaching still shapes my nightmares, I guess, but not in that way. I have dreams where I turn up in front of a class and I suddenly realize I don’t know what I’m meant to be talking about. Or I’m running around a building looking for the room where I’m meant to be, and it’s twenty minutes after the lesson was supposed to start. These things sink into your mind and bed themselves in at a very deep level.
Any other new projects you can tell us about?
I think we’ve covered them all in the previous questions. Except for Ultimate Vision, which is a miniseries picking up after Warren Ellis’s Ultimate Extinction. That’s due out this Summer, with Brandon Peterson on art, so it’s going to look gorgeous.
How do you deal with the internet and the comics community residing on it? You’ve spent a fair bit of time with the Lucifer and Hellblazer fan communities for example.
Yeah, and I enjoyed that. Now, though, I tend to be a bit more cautious. You can get drawn into online debates in ways that are… destabilizing, let’s say, to your writing and your mood. It also eats your time. I did a chat room thing a week or so back on one of the big comics websites, and that was fun, and I still pop in on Straight to Hell every so often. Apart from that, I just post on my own blog and answer comments there.
If you could have a drink (or many) with someone you’ve written, who would it be?
Hmm. Probably Jill Presto. I think she’d be a riot when she was drunk.
What are you reading these days?
China Mieville’s extraordinary Bas-Lag novels – in fact, anything he writes is fine with me. Terry Pratchett, Ted Chiang’s short stories, and I’m just about to read Sunshine by Robin McKinley.
What’s the geekiest thing you have in the house?
My collection of Todd McFarlane toys, which is extensive.
What book sitting on your shelf would you love to make into a movie?
Perdido Street Station, by the aforementioned China Mieville.
Mark Peyton – has a MA in History and Research from the University of Hull specialising in the Hundred Years War. In a complete departure from that he now runs communications and membership for a UK based Trade Union as well as being a part time writer/journalist.
He is a founding member of Millarworld acting as a moderator and as an editor for Fractal Matter.