And here’s the big finish -- the last of Mike and Peter’s three-part trip down their Vertigo memory lane – from the pitches that didn’t stick when they tried to work together again after Lucifer to celebrating The Unwritten – the second volume having debuted on the New York Times Best-Seller’s list last week!

MIKE CAREY

Crossing Midnight # 1 – 19 (2006)

After Lucifer, Peter and I really wanted to work together again on another monthly. We pitched a whole bunch of ideas at Vertigo, but nothing seemed to stick – even though once or twice we got a lonnnnnng way down the road before it all came unstuck.

Inevitably, we were drawn into other projects, and we had to shelve the idea of another collaboration. For me, one of the most important of these “other projects” was Crossing Midnight. I have twin sons whose birth weights were radically different. I know that sounds a little weird, but Davey had what’s called an alveolar attachment to the womb, which meant that he was getting far less nourishment than his brother, especially in the last month or so of the pregnancy.

I guess that started me thinking about destiny (normally a concept I’m allergic to) in relation to birth, and particularly how tiny differences at birth – for twins, who seem to have an identical start in the world – can shape your life. That and my obsession with the Studio Ghibli animes and Junji Ito horror mangas somehow coalesced in my mind and became Crossing Midnight.

Sadly, the series never really found its audience, and it was cancelled after only nineteen issues. But publisher Paul Levitz gave us a stay of execution so we could finish out the story: I’m really grateful to him for that.

God Save the Queen (2007)

This was another crossed-in-the-mail sort of situation. I’d written the final script for God Save the Queen before I started work on Crossing Midnight, but it was released several months into the run. Its kind of weird how that sort of thing happens. It’s a little like the way that light from distant stars takes many years to get to us, so we’re always seeing snapshots of their past. Sometimes people will say to me, “Man, you must be busy, with all this stuff coming out” – but really it means I was busy about a year ago.

I think God Save the Queen knocks seven bells out of The Furies, considered as a stand-alone Sandman Presents story. Pretty much all the Faerie characters from The Sandman appear in it – Nuala, Cluracan, Titania and Oberon, Puck et al – but you don’t need to know who any of them are in order to understand (and, I hope, enjoy) the story. In fact, you don’t need to have read The Sandman at all, which is why, at some point in the production process, the Sandman Presents blazon was removed.

Since my heroine is a North London girl named Linda, and my wife, Linda, hails from North London, I’ve sometimes been accused of sneaking a bit of family biography into this OGN. I really didn’t. This fictional Linda is nothing like my own Linda – and for the record, Ava is nothing like my mother-in-law. My mother-in-law is named Barbara, and I don’t think she’s ever raised a longbow to me in anger.

Regifters (2007)

This was just a blast to do. I knew about the Minx imprint from its earliest planning stages, and contributed my own feeble suggestions when Shelly was trying to make a final decision about the name of the line and its logo. And it was always in the back of my mind to submit a pitch, even though I’m not (and have never been) a teenaged girl. People are people and stories are stories: That’s all there is to it.

In those days, Shelly and I had a game we sometimes played, where she’d shoot a word at me and I’d try to come up with a story based on that word. Re-gifting was one of those words, and the story just sprang into my head fully formed. Actually, that’s not true at all: The McGuffin of the gift that’s passed on and on and on until it comes back to the first person who gave it – that was what came to me. It’s kind of a riff on Chaucer’s “Franklin’s Tale,” which is built on a chain of obligations – one character having to keep a vow to another, who is bound to a third, and so on, with each of them facing a terrible dilemma which then works its way down the chain.

In Regifters there’s a chain of gift-giving and a chain of unrequited love. Both chains kind of come full circle in the end, one in a fairly predictable way, the other (I hope) coming as more of a surprise.

Sonny Liew and Marc Hempel on art – the My Faith in Frankie team riding again, and a lot of room to manoeuvre (160-some pages). We had the time of our lives.

Confessions of a Blabbermouth (2007)

Confessions of a Blabbermouth was yet another book that grew out of a suggestion from Shelly Bond – in this case, “Why don’t you and your daughter, Lou, co-write a comic book?” When we were all done laughing at that preposterous idea, we sat down and started to talk about possible scenarios. We decided early on that it should be a story that capitalised on the fact that we had such an ill-yoked pair of writers – a middle-aged guy and a teenaged girl. So we wrote a story about the clash of wills between our teenaged protagonist and her new (intending) step-dad.

Just as Sonny’s and Marc’s art is inseparable from Frankie and Regifters, Aaron’s is from Blabbermouth. He turned our every idea, good bad or indifferent, into pure gold. It’s actually a very dark story, by the time all the dust has settled, but he leavened that with such a wealth of visual humour and loving detail that the pain was only ever subliminal.

And I got to write a comic book with my daughter. How cool is that?

Faker (2008)

I’d only ever worked with Jock on one issue of Hellblazer. Getting to do Faker with him was a huge pleasure. We wanted this to be sort of a cocktail of horror sub-genres – paranoid, splatter and psychological. We also set ourselves the task of creating the least likeable heroine we could think of and then making the reader care about her. Opinions differ about whether we succeeded there, but Jessie is definitely one of the more vivid characters I’ve created.

As part of the pitch, I asked Shelly to watch Roger Avary’s movie of Bret Easton Ellis’s novel The Rules of Attraction. She watched it, called me and said “like that, huh?” “Yeah,” I said, “like that.” And she said “Okay.” Wish I could have done a montage as cool as Sean Bateman’s European vacation, though.

Actually, this run-through of my Vertigo career has something of that hectic, surreal feel to it. 

The Unwritten (2009)

And here we are, ten years later. What a long, strange strip it’s been.

The Unwritten is the book we SHOULD have pitched three years ago when we were trying to set up our next big thing after Lucifer – but maybe it worked out better this way. There’s a sense in which everything you write becomes part of your momentum and your vector: You’re the sum of a whole lot of things, and (I’m not just saying this) for a writer that includes the stories you’ve already told.

PETER GROSS

The Dreaming #55 – full art (2000)

I can’t quite remember if this happened before or during Lucifer, and I think it was only 3 pages of art but it was for a Bill Willingham story. I had met Bill years before at a small comic’s show in Tennessee and was really happy to see him starting to work at Vertigo. Who knew that he was going to become a superstar there with Fables and that I would be jealous for years that Bucky landed the permanent art duties on the series!

Lucifer # 5 - 75 – full art (2000 – 2006)

As I was nearing the end of my run on Books of Magic, I had decided that I wasn’t really interested in writing and drawing on non-creator owned work. I was happy to write something--or I was happy to draw it, but doing both seemed like to big a part of my soul to give up if I couldn’t be in total control of its fate. And since at the time I didn’t have a creator owned series to pitch, I was interested when Shelly Bond called me up to see if I’d be interested in Lucifer. I told Shelly to send me some scripts, and I was pretty blown away by what Mike Carey had written. So I did a series of Lucifer character drawings to see if I had a feel for it and none of what I did then ended up being the way my Lucifer ended up looking. I think I went for a sexy Brad Pitt sort of vibe on these first drawings. Definitely too much boy and not enough man in them.

So I jumped in on issue 5, a big arc about Lucifer visiting the realm of the Japanese gods, and it was pretty epic. Lots of challenging things to draw and subtle characterization. We got nominated for an Eisner for Best New Series, and Best Story of the Year, and a partnership was born. For whatever reason, Mike and I meshed really well, and I always love working with him. And I’ll give you a paraphrased example of what it was like working with Mike on Lucifer...He’d give me a panel description like this: “Close-up of Lucifer: He’s angry, bitter, and somewhat amused, but he doesn’t let any of that show...”

Try drawing that.

But it worked, and we kept wanting to work together...

Untitled – writing (in 9-11: Volume Two, 2002)

After 9-11, DC decided to do a benefit book on the subject, but really, I think it was a way for everyone involved in the book to process their feelings about that day. Paul Levitz was nice enough to ask me to write a piece for it and Darick Robertson did a great job illustrating it. So add Darick to the list of great artists I got to write stories for. (It still amazes me that other artists have drawn things I’ve written because I never really thought of that as a goal when I chose comics as my vocation!)

Fables # - 77 – 82 - full art (2008)

So in my Secret Vertigo history I had a lost year when I worked on a project that collapsed when the writer quit well into the thing, and I also had a lot of hand trouble that needed minor surgery to fix. And at the end of that period as we were also starting up The Unwritten, I finally got a chance to draw some Fables! I did a series of backup stories about Mowgli, and I had a great time. And it’s all the more interesting because I had no idea I’d be revisiting Kipling a few months later for a story in The Unwritten!

Bill (and Shelly and Angela) do a great job of making everyone who works on (and reads) Fables feel like part of a big family, and I’m trying to emulate that on The Unwritten!

The Unwritten – full art and co-story (2009)

No offense to anything else I worked on but it’s really nice that the last milestone on here for me is also the best. The Unwritten is an amazing book! And if you all knew how much work and thought and care goes into it you’d all love it even more. I’ve never worked on anything that has this much great story to tell, and I have an absolute appreciation for what an amazing thing it is. The hardest part is going to be keeping to the high standard I think we’ve set. But with the addition of Pornsak editing, Yuko on covers, Chris Chuckry and Jeanne McGee on colors and Todd Klein on letters, I think we should be able to manage.

I think The Unwritten is an example of the best sort of collaboration that can happen in comics. Mike and I dig so deep into our subject that we find areas to explore that I don’t think we’d get to on our own--it becomes a much richer experience because of the partnership. That doesn’t always happen when you work together on a book--and coming up with the story together can try the patience of many a writer. If Mike and I have a falling out somewhere during the run of The Unwritten, it’s going to get ugly quick, but until then I’m going to enjoy the ride!

The second volume of THE UNWRITTEN, Inside Man comes out today everywhere books are sold and since THE UNWRITTEN is about the story behind stories, I thought it’d be fun to celebrate Volume 2 by going through the secret origin of Mike Carey and Peter Gross’ history at Vertigo; a kinda 3-part series about and how they went from individually breaking in to writing a New York Times Bestseller. What they came back with, though, far outshadows that, and for anyone looking to break into Vertigo –for anyone looking to break into comics in general – these are great examples to learn from.

MIKE CAREY

1. Sandman Presents: Lucifer - The Morningstar Option #1-3 (prequel to Lucifer) (1999)

I’d been banging on the door at Vertigo for about two years at this point. I had a lot of stuff coming out for smaller American publishers – Malibu first, then Caliber – and everything I wrote I would send in to Alisa Kwitney (who was then editing The Sandman), along with a begging letter containing some variation on the theme, “gee, I sure would like to work for you.”

Then one day I got a call from Alisa, in which she invited me to pitch for the new Sandman Presents title. It had to be a Lucifer story, and the pitch had to be completed and sent through in about 48 hours. The solicits were ready to go out, I think, and then at the eleventh hour somebody very senior had decided not to go with the story that they had. So everything was back in the melting pot, and they needed a workable script fast.

My first outing at Vertigo – and it teamed me up with Scott Hampton! It was a huge thrill, and a steep learning curve, because I’d only ever once worked with a painter before – Ken Meyer Jr – and Ken was far too nice to slap me down if I asked for something unreasonable.

2. The Sandman Presents: Petrefax #1-4 (2000)

Just before Alisa left Vertigo, she commissioned a second Sandman Presents miniseries from me, which Joan Hilty took over as editor. I had really ambitious plans here. I wanted to write an eighteenth century picaresque novel in comic book form, with bawdy comedy, high adventure, ridiculous coincidences, the works. The journeyman undertaker, Petrefax – from the Worlds End arc of The Sandman – seemed to be the perfect protagonist for a story like that, in that he’s a romantic figure, an innocent abroad, and a great narrative voice.

As things turned out, this was one of the most purely enjoyable books I’ve ever worked on. We packed more twists, reveals and reversals into a four-issue miniseries than you could shake a stick at, and accomplished most of what we’d set out to do. Sadly, a sub-plot involving a nymphomaniac landlady (modeled on Yootha Joyce’s character from Man About the House) had to be cut for reasons of space, but that was my only cause for regret.

Second outing at Vertigo – art by Steve Leialoha. Somebody up there seemed to like me.

3. "The Wedding Breakfast" (in Flinch #16, 2001)

This is a weird parenthesis – and it comes before Lucifer, even though it was published six months or so after Lucifer#1.

On the basis of having written The Morningstar Option (aka Sandman Presents Lucifer) and having pitched the Petrefax mini, I did two things in the summer of 1999 by way of furthering my connections to the Vertigo imprint. One was to write a short story for the Flinch anthology, which Alisa Kwitney was editing, and the other was to travel out to that year’s San Diego Comic-con.

At San Diego I approached the DC booth, bearing my sparse and tattered credentials, and asked editor Shelly Roeberg (now Shelly Bond) if she’d meet with me and talk possible projects. She agreed to meet, and invited me to cold-pitch some ideas to her, but… you know how sometimes you just feel like you’re off your game, and nothing you do is going to come out right? It was like that. I was over-awed, far from home, and it felt like anything that came out of my mouth was going to sound like garbage.

So having gotten Shelly to give up an hour of her valuable time for me, I only talked generalities with her instead of actually pitching anything substantial. But I did say “Look, I know you’re taking over the editing reins on the Flinch anthology when Alisa leaves. There’s a script of mine in there – “The Wedding Breakfast.” If you like it, then let me know, and I’ll pitch you some stuff in the same sort of vein.”

She did like it, and she found the perfect artist for it (Craig Hamilton). It was the beginning of a beautiful friendship. Shelly’s still one of my favourite editors to work with, and she’s shaped my writing in more ways than I can count.

4. Lucifer #1-75 (2000-2006)

By this time, I’d met Karen Berger (Vertigo group editor and progenitor) at a convention in London, and we’d had a memorable conversation about breaking into comics. When I told her I was waiting for my big break to come along, she said, “There’s no such thing – it’s a whole lot of little breaks.” She was right, and actually that perfectly describes my career up to 1999.

But the Lucifer monthly was a break on a different scale from anything that had happened to me up to then. It was my first monthly book, and it’s really impossible to over-estimate the importance of that. Having to meet that monthly deadline and to work within the rhythms of an ongoing book is a great proving ground for a writer: it was certainly a huge turning point for me.

No, let’s be honest: it was THE turning point. Through Lucifer I forged friendships and professional relationships that changed the course of my whole life. Shelly Bond. Peter Gross. Chris Moeller. Dean Ormston. Todd Klein. The list goes on. If every action births a universe, then the universes where I didn’t write Lucifer probably all have much less happy and fulfilled Mike Careys in them. Boy, I’m glad I don’t have to live there!

The amazing thing, when I look back on it, is that it ended up being such a personal book. Peter and I never talked about it much up front, but gradually we morphed the cosmic story of the Adversary and his war against God into a family drama about sons seeking to free themselves from their fathers’ influence. Lucifer is one of the scariest monsters I ever created, but I think it’s still easy to identify with him because I wrote him as Everyman: mutatis mutandis, the stuff he’s struggling with is stuff that we all have to go through.

PETER GROSS

1. Swamp Thing # 102 inking (1990)

Swamp Thing #102 was the 2nd thing I ever inked for DC and the first for what would later be Vertigo. It was also the first job I ever did with editor Stuart Moore who became one of my best friends in the comic biz. I had been doing a self-published series called Empire Lanes that got me some attention in comics and had even led to a lunch with Karen Berger at a Chicago Comic convention where she asked me to submit some ideas to DC.

The thing I remember most about that inking job was that the penciller called me up to complain about the way I inked him. But Stuart was okay with it, and life went on. I think I even got to pitch a Swamp Thing story out of it--one that I can’t even remember the details of anymore.

2. Shade the Changing Man # 36 (1993)

I was sitting in my studio working one day, I think that it was a slow time because Doctor Fate, which I had been penciling and inking had been cancelled (because it dropped below 40,000 copies per issue--those were the days!) and the phone rang. It was Shelly Roeberg (before she became Shelly Bond). Shelly had briefly been my editor at Comico on Empire Lanes. I hadn't talked to Shelly in a few years and as far as I knew she had completely left the world of comics. "So guess where I am?" she said. I'm sure I replied with something witty but I don't remember what it was, and that's not the point of this story. She continued, " I'm in Karen Berger's office in New York. How would you like to draw a fill-in issue of Shade the Changing Man?"

That fill-in was my first Vertigo work, appearing about 4 months into the imprint, and it's been pretty much steady Vertigo work ever since. I’m pretty sure I've done more art for the imprint than any other artist, and I might even be the only artist or writer who has produced work during every year of Vertigo's existence (can that be true?)

The other thing that I remember that issue of Shade for is that it was the last time I inked on acetate (a clear film media). Because part of the issue was drawn on paper by Chris Bachalo and part on acetate by me, it was all set up and photostatted to the same exposure, so my pages ended up reproducing pretty terribly. I decided if I couldn't control the scanning I’d better switch to paper, and it's been paper ever since!

3. Arcana Annual # 1 full art (1994)

Stuart Moore hired me to draw the Tim Hunter part of The Children’s Crusade, the first and, to my memory, only Vertigo-wide crossover event. The Arcana Annual was going to lead to the launch of a Tim Hunter series intended to be called Arcana ( rather than the much more obvious Neil Gaiman derived “Books of Magic.” (What were they thinking calling it Arcana anyway?)

I remember this book most for two things: first that it was a lot of pages and I was only going to pencil it or at least wasn't meant to ink the whole thing but as we were looking for an inker I kept inking away and by the time we got to where someone we wanted was free I had basically finished the whole thing.

Secondly, I remember that Stuart asked me if I was interested in working on the Tim Hunter series that was going to launch soon after, and I passed. I was working on Hellstorm at Marvel and thought I was finally going to make my mark there, and I thought the Tim Hunter series was going to bomb. The annual was a lot of pages where not a whole lot of stuff happened and it was written by someone who was not Neil Gaiman, so I thought it had no chance.

Cue my next vertigo milestone; inking Books of Magic...

4. Books of Magic # 1- inking (1994)

I was happily working over at Marvel after finishing the Arcane Annual and I got a call from Vertigo editorial (it must have been Stuart but I'm not totally sure) asking if I might be able to do some inking for Books of Magic. The first issue, drawn by relative newcomer Gary Amaro had come in and the powers-that-be weren't totally happy with the way the inked art looked. So they asked me to re-ink the issue from photocopies of the original pencils. I thought sure, I could handle that (and not take any blame for the failure I knew the series was going to be). To my surprise, the story by John Ney Rieber was great, as were Gary's pencils on the book. So I inked that issue and signed on as the regular inker on the book.

5. Books of Magic # 4 - 75 - (1994-2000)

So it turns out that relative newcomers to comics often discover that they aren't as fast as they need to be and about the fourth issue of BoM, Gary Amaro had fallen behind on his deadlines. They had me pencil 1/2 of the issue in addition to inking. It was the issue with Death appearing, maybe the first official non-Neil scripted appearance of Death and the first time I got to work on the character. You'd be amazed to find out how many convention sketches I’ve done of Death since then! What a great character. BoM was also nominated for the best new series of the year--a tradition I'd be lucky enough to repeat on all my Vertigo series yet to come!

Next week, both the guys hit Vertigo milestones: Peter becomes one of the first artists to write and draw an ongoing series for Vertigo, while Mike takes on a Vertigo icon.

A lot happens in THE UNWRITTEN #16 and I’m not just saying that. It’s true. When Tom and Wilson Taylor come face-to-face, secrets are revealed, friends and enemies unmask, and chickens come home to roost. Well, maybe not chickens in the bird sense. Coinciding with all that, the launch party for the 14th Tommy Taylor novel is about to take place. But what’s the name of the book again?

Now for a look inside:

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Over the years the Vertigo imprint has produced smart, shocking and critically acclaimed series such as The Sandman, Preacher, Y: The Last Man, Hellblazer and Fables, to name a few. Now, Vertigo’s latest ongoings are poised to join those legendary ranks. Join the creators of The Unwritten, American Vampire, Sweet Tooth and iZombie as they discuss what’s going on and what’s to come in their unforgettable series.

6:15-7:15 Vertigo: The New Classics
Get a peek at these future classics with your host, Senior VP—Executive Editor Karen Berger, plus Rafael Albuquerque (American Vampire), Peter Gross (The Unwritten), Jeff Lemire (Sweet Tooth), Chris Roberson (iZombie), Scott Snyder (American Vampire) and others. Room 6A