They’re so far from home and they won’t be left alone. That’s the case with noted comics writer Mike Carey’s new book, The Stranded, from Virgin/Sci-Fi. Carey, who has written for Marvel’s X-Men and DC’s Hellblazer series, might be familiar with Marvel’s mutants, but what about a group of aliens living among us who don’t even know they are from another world? That’s the premise of The Stranded, the first offering to come from Virgin’s deal with the Sci-Fi Channel cable network. The Stranded isn’t a licensed project but rather an original comics property created in collaboration with the Sci-Fi Channel. “The sci-fi genre—if we take out superheroes, which is really its own genre—has been surprisingly underserved within the comic book industry,” said Sharad Devarajan, CEO of Virgin Comics.
“Clearly this imprint, with the strong marketing and brand power of the Sci-Fi Channel behind it, will hopefully serve as a place to fill that void and allow writers to tell new stories in the genre,” said Devarajan. “It’s also a great entry point for writers in the comics industry who may have aspirations to also write for television.” Besides being the first book to come out of the Virgin/Sci-Fi imprint, The Stranded will also be produced as a TV show by the Sci-Fi Channel. PWCW talked with Carey about his plans for the comics series and the TV show.
PW Comics Week: Did Virgin reach out to you or did you come to Virgin with the pitch for The Stranded?
Mike Carey: It was a combination of the two. Basically, Virgin had already worked out the parameters of the deal with Sci-Fi, and they invited a number of writers to pitch story ideas for the first wave of projects. Because I was already working on Voodoo Child and had a really good working relationship with the Virgin editorial team, I was one of the people they asked to pitch.
So the idea for The Stranded was a new one that I put together specifically for Virgin and for this platform. But some of the ideas in there—particularly the ones about identity and personality—are ones that I've been fascinated by for a long time. I've come to see personality as almost an accidental feature of the terrain: you put the same person in a range of different situations and he'll behave in very different, even contradictory ways. So what's the core of our personalities? What makes us who we are?
PWCW: Since this is also a book about people with special powers "walking among us," do you see it in relationship to your work on X-Men?
MC: There are similarities, yeah—some of which will only show themselves in the longer term. We've usually tended to meet the X-Men at the point where they come in out of the cold; where they realize that there is a home for them, a tribe to which they belong. One of the reasons why the X-Men franchise has been so durable is because of the emotional appeal of that situation. The world hates you, fears you; even your family, the people who used to be your loved ones, hate you, but now you've got a new family and here they are.
The Stranded takes one step back from that, initially. What kick-starts our drama is the moment of alienation: of bereavement, almost, because our characters are having their lives taken away from them and what's being offered to fill that void is frightening and alien. Comfort is still a long way away.
PWCW: What are the specific personalities you deal with in The Stranded? The lead character, Tamree, seems to have a maternal feel about her. She is looking out for the rest of the Stranded, after all. But how would you describe the other characters?
MC: I think Cullen is shaping up to be very interesting. His power is basically to absorb and mimic aspects of the people around him—their memories, their personalities, their patterns of speech, and in the case of other sleepers, their powers. You might think that this constant immersion in other people's minds would weaken his sense of himself, but actually he's the opposite of that—hugely centered in himself, confident to the point of arrogance, brash and abrasive, ruthless and categorical. None of the others like him very much, but it has to be said that he's very useful in a fight—as a built-in wild card, if nothing else.
Sisera is also fascinating. She's a painter and sculptor, and in essence she's a very gentle soul—but she has the most appalling destructive powers. That contradiction really turns her inside out, makes her hate and doubt herself. She also suffers a terrible loss in the first story arc, which is going to reverberate in some unexpected ways.
I think you're right about Tamree—that she has a maternal instinct for the others. But she's very much a warrior matron, not warm and nurturing: she wants the sleepers safe, but some of the things she does to them to keep them safe are pretty awful. What's interesting about her is that she's always been the one who stays awake at the campfire, on guard, while everyone else gets to sleep. She's been terribly isolated, and it's very much a question whether she'll ever be able to open up to anyone else again—whether it's in her to stop being alone.
PWCW: Do you see yourself using the superhero/sci-fi genre to write fiction where the internal aspects of a character are revealed in external, supernatural ways? Something like The Hulk is an example where his superpowers come from Bruce Banner's inner angst. Do you see something like that in the characters in The Stranded?
MC: I think there always has to be an interplay between powers and personality. It's cool—and fascinating—when the influence works both ways, but at the very least powers have to have their impact on how the characters see the world and how they interact with it. It wouldn't be realistic if they didn't.
The one-way model is the one that applies here. The Stranded have had their powers imposed on them without their wishes being consulted: I mean, it's for their own good, to help them to survive in a potentially very hostile and dangerous world, but still the whole thing has been done very heavy-handedly and it does have repercussions for them—some more than others.
PWCW: You said you pitched Virgin these ideas knowing it was for the Virgin/Sci-Fi hybrid. Were you thinking of something specifically TV-friendly?
MC: Yeah, very much so. In terms of structure, there are always going to be a lot of parallels—similar architecture—between a TV series and an ongoing comic book, but in a lot of ways we were taking our inspiration from the great ensemble-cast sci-fi and horror/fantasy series of recent years. We decided early on to play this five-part miniseries as though it was a feature-length pilot episode—self-sufficient and with a proper resolution for the central situation, but very much defining the wider setup and setting out our stall for further stories.
PWCW: The Stranded is a little bit science fiction and a little bit superhero, but reading the final product things fall more into the sci-fi camp, appropriate given one of the companies involved in its publishing. There are alien hardware and robots within the pages, but the people with strange powers are just normal folks in street wear; they aren't donning tight-fitting costumes. How did you and artist Siddarth Kotion (or any other artists) collaborate on the look of the book?
MC: Well, [the TV show] Heroes redefined that whole question of how to handle superpowered beings within a modern TV format. If you get rid of the garish costumes and the melodramatic superhero names, you remove the two biggest obstacles to the suspension of disbelief. We talked a lot early on about the look we wanted for the book, and there was no disagreement on that score. We have to see the Stranded as ordinary people first and foremost, with jobs and families and all the little trials and triumphs that make up our lives. Otherwise, there's no emotional payoff when their lives are disrupted, and they're flung into this crazy, dangerous situation. I guess the decisions here were being taken by me, Sid and editor Stuart Moore, with Virgin and Sci-Fi feeding in ideas and approving our suggestions.
You're right that the overall feel of the book is a sci-fi feel, and we were consciously playing to that. But what people within the comics community forget or tacitly ignore, most of the time, is that superhero stories are really a subgenre of sci-fi. Whether or not they have the furniture, the props and the visual tropes, they're still riffing off sci-fi staples, and the rationale for the superpowers is most often a pseudoscientific one. It's very obvious in books like The Fantastic Four, with the Negative Zone, Galactus, the Kree-Skrull war, the In-humans and so on, less obvious in Batman, and intertwined with elements from other genres, but that doesn't mean it isn't there.
PWCW: With the show being picked up for the Sci-Fi Channel, can you tell us how involved you will be with the TV show? For example, will you be writing for it?
MC: I hope so. I'm on contract with Sci-Fi now, and we're starting to talk about what part I might play in developing the series. It's a wild and exciting time.
PWCW: Will there be any big changes from comic and TV show? We all know that one of the advantages of comics is that they aren't beholden to a special-effects budget.
MC: Oh, yeah, that's a plus, all right. In this case, though, Sci-Fi [Channel executives] have been involved in the comic book at every stage, and we've actually talked at length about some of the visual effects, the look of certain locations, the way the various superpowers work. I think we've been very clear all along about what might and might not translate well to the TV screen, and we've definitely steered toward what works in that context, so there'll be fewer changes in tone and approach than you might expect. Of course, the way the story articulates will inevitably change because different formats have their own ways of handling intercuts, maintaining parallel plot lines, setting up character beats and so on. I'm looking forward to getting down to that nuts and bolts stuff, because it's fascinating to me: it's the guts and internal organs of storytelling.
