An Interview With Mike Carey, Author of The Devil You Know - Part One - Page 4

What do you like better – writing novels or comic books? Which is more difficult? 

The two processes are very different. One of the biggest differences is in terms of the way the work impacts on your life on a day-to-day basis. It comes down to pacing again – or maybe I mean scheduling. In comics you work to very short deadlines. You plot months in advance, so you know where you’re going, but you’re writing the story in short segments that have to be completed within a finite and tightly defined time frame.  So you write the script, you send it in, you get the edit notes and do a rewrite, and then off it goes to the artist. If you’re in the middle of the next issue or a few issues down the line and you suddenly think “Oh wait, I should have introduced this character earlier” or “I should have prepared the ground for this!” it’s too late and you can’t change your mind. The freedom to change your mind is very limited.

A novel is something that grows gradually. You live with it for six months, or maybe longer, and at any point within that time you have the option of changing your mind about very substantial things. If you get to chapter 22 and you want to go back and change something in chapter five you can do that because chapter five is still there – it hasn’t gone anywhere and nobody else has seen it yet. Nobody else is waiting for it to arrive so they can start doing pencils or lettering or whatever. So you have this vertical freedom which I really enjoyed a lot.

But comics have their advantages too. Scene-setting is effortless -- for the writer, anyway -- because so much can be conveyed in the visuals. And since you’re telling the story essentially in two modalities, you can make words play off images to produce some very cool effects.

It’s horses for courses, at the end of the day. Some stories work best in comic form, others play beautifully as novels – and some translate readily into any medium. 

You're at least the fourth cartoonist I've interviewed recently, which is interesting since, with a few exceptions, I haven't read a comic book or graphic novel beyond those reviewed and since Doonesbury in a few years. I reviewed books by Larry Gonick (the Cartoon Guide History of… ) and Lloyd Dangle (Troubletown) and Brad Meltzer (who is starting to writing some of the Buffy comics.) Do you know of any of these guys? Any thoughts on them?  

Article Author: Scott Butki

Scott Butki was a newspaper reporter for more than 10 years before making a career change into education.

He is an in-house media critic, a recovering Tetris addict and a proud uncle.

Visit Scott Butki's author page — Scott Butki's Blog