ON THE LEDGE With Mike Carey and Peter Gross
Wed, 12/14/2011 - 9:00am |PG: It's no easy task getting each issue of THE UNWRITTEN out on time. You would not believe how quickly four weeks flies by when you're making a comic. So it makes no sense whatsoever that Mike and I decided to go bi-weekly for 5 months and put out 10 issues instead of the normal 5. And yet, given the way THE UNWRITTEN has developed it makes perfect sense... MC: It was a habit we got into back when we were working on LUCIFER. At the end of every arc we'd do a one-off, not as a diversion or change of pace, but as a way of cutting across the flow of the narrative and illuminating some detail—a character beat, a reveal, a repercussion—that we wanted to bring out. But THE UNWRITTEN is a story about stories, so we took that idea a lot further in issues like How the Whale Became, the Mister Bun stories, and the choose-your-own-adventure. PG: It wasn’t really planned to do this, it just sort of evolved. One of us would often say to the other that we wished we could just do four or five one-offs in a row, but we knew that taking that big a break from the main story would be detrimental to its pace. I think I was the one who jokingly suggested that we just do a whole bunch of one-offs and do them on the side, in addition to the main story... MC: And that's what we did, in the end. We put together a proposal for a series of one-off stories that would weave in and out of the main arc, answering long-standing questions, revealing parts of character origins, and so on. We pitched it to our editors and got a green light on the same day. PG: And I think these .5 issues succeed beyond what we hoped. They've become another tool to tell a great epic story. Instead of slowing things down to explore these rich background tales, we're able to keep the pace going in the main story but deepen and widen the scope with the in-between issues. We love the way it turned out and hopefully, you will too. MC: Peter says we're doing comics the way musicians do jazz. I see it as more of a classical fugue. Either way, it's all about different voices telling the same story. Kind of like this On the Ledge.
