This continuation from part one wraps up an interview with Mike Carey, author of The Devil You Know.
Carey is best known for writing the X-Men and Ultimate Fantastic Four comic books and has been a major name in comic book circles for more than ten years. I came to know him via the publication in the U.S. of his first novel.
Scott Butki: If you were allowed to go back and return to high school but with any special powers you choose would you do it and which superpowers would you choose?
Mike Carey: I think I'd pass. Special powers would be cool, but having to relive my high school years? That doesn't appeal much. If I did, then I'd probably go for invisibility. The power not to be bugged is a great and precious thing.
Where would you suggest someone, as an adult like my friend I alluded to in part one, start with her explorations into graphic novels? Do you encounter the stereotype I referred to, that comic books are for kids, not adults (or at least not those of the non-geeky type)?
It's difficult because you're always going to get a kind of verfremdungs effect when you encounter comics for the first time. I could reel off a list of my own favorites and say "try these," but unless you're coming in from the right angle you can just find comics storytelling too strange and alienating the first time you encounter it.
One possible way in is through the sort of hybrid books where you get a sequential visual narrative but with accompanying text rather than in-panel dialogue. The Chaykin adaptation of Bester's The Stars My Destination, published by Byron Preiss back in the eighties, is one that I enjoyed a lot. It also makes a certain amount of sense to stick to genres that you already know and like. So, for example, don't read a horror comic unless you enjoy horror prose.
If you do enjoy horror prose, then read Junji Ito's Uzumaki, which is one of the best horror narratives of the twentieth century in any medium - right up there with Lovecraft's Shadow Out of Time and Kubrick's The Shining. Beyond that, I'd say pick up a good anthology like one of the comic book editions of McSweeneys or Image's Flight. That way you can dip into a lot of different styles and approaches and see if any of them work for you...
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