Mike Carey

Mike Carey (born 1959), also known by his pen name M. R. Carey, is a British writer of comic books, novels and films, whose credits include the long-running The Sandman spin-off series Lucifer, a three-year stint on Hellblazer, as well as his creator-owned titles Crossing Midnight and The Unwritten for DC Comics' Vertigo imprint, a lengthy run on Marvel's X-Men, the 2014 novel The Girl with All the Gifts and its 2016 film adaptation.

Carey was born in Liverpool, England, in 1959. He describes his young self as "one of those ominously quiet kids... [who] lived so much inside my own head I only had vestigial limbs". As a child, he maintained an interest in comics, writing and drawing primitive stories to entertain his younger brother. He studied English at St Peter's College, Oxford and, upon graduation, became a teacher. He taught for 15 years before moving on to writing comics.

After a series of one-off jobs for independent comics companies, including a biographical Ozzy Osbourne comic and a fantasy tale starring the band Pantera, Carey became a contributor to the British comics anthology 2000 AD, where he co-created the original series Thirteen and Carver Hale, and wrote two series for The Sandman Presents line published by DC Comics' Vertigo imprint, Lucifer and Petrefax. Lucifer was subsequently extended into an ongoing series, which Carey wrote for its entire 75-issue run. Further work for Vertigo includes a 40-issue run on the imprint's flagship title Hellblazer as well as the spin-off graphic novel All His Engines, several creator-owned endeavors, such as the six-part mini-series Faker with art by Jock and the ongoing series Crossing Midnight with artist Jim Fern,[10] and two more The Sandman spin-offs in the form of graphic novels, The Sandman Presents: The Furies and God Save the Queen, both created with artist John Bolton. In 2009, Carey launched his longest creator-owned series to date, The Unwritten, co-created with the Lucifer collaborator Peter Gross and featuring covers by Yuko Shimizu.[11][12]

Other work for DC Comics includes the long-delayed reboot of Wildstorm's Wetworks[13][14] and two graphic novels for the Minx imprint aimed at the teenage female audience, one of which was co-written by Carey with his daughter Louise.[15] In 2003, Carey was announced as the new writer of the Firestorm ongoing series,[16] however, he left the project few months after the announcement as the editors wanted to take it in a different direction.[17] The series was launched in 2004 with Dan Jolley as the writer.

In 2006, Carey took over the writing duties of Marvel's X-Men series, which was soon rebranded into X-Men: Legacy.[18] He saw the title through a number of inter-title crossovers between the various X-Men books such as "Endangered Species", "Messiah Complex", "Original Sin" (a crossover between X-Men: Legacy and Wolverine: Origins that was tentatively titled "Dark Deception")[19][20] and "Age of X".[21] Carey wrote X-Men: Legacy for six years[22] and contributed a number of X-Men stories to other publications, such as two tie-ins to the "Secret Invasion" crossover storyline, the four-issue mini-series Secret Invasion: X-Men and an eight-page story in the one-shot anthology Secret Invasion: Who Do You Trust? featuring Abigail Brand of S.W.O.R.D.,[23][24] a retelling of Beast's origin story as part of the X-Men: Origins line[25] and an Iceman serial in the X-Men: Manifest Destiny anthology series.[20][26] Other work for Marvel includes the comic book adaptation of Orson Scott Card's Ender's Shadow.[27]

Carey's first novel, The Devil You Know, was released in the UK by Orbit books in April 2006, and as a hardcover in the US in July 2007. Its sequel, Vicious Circle, was published in October 2006, and the following three novels in the series, Dead Men's Boots, Thicker Than Water, and The Naming of the Beasts, followed in September 2007, March 2009 and September 2009, respectively. What would have been Carey's first feature film, the erotic ghost story Frost Flowers, was reported to be in pre-production in June 2006, with filming to begin that September under the direction of Andrea Vecchiato.[14] Carey was also reported to work on the TV adaptation of his comic book series The Stranded, a co-production between Virgin Comics and the Syfy network.[28] Also for Virgin, Carey took part in the short-lived Coalition Comix project created in association with MySpace, where users could suggest ideas for a comic which then would be used during its production.[29][30]

In 2014, Carey published another novel, The Girl with All the Gifts. That same year, the screenplay of the same name, written by Carey concurrently with the novel, appeared on the Brit List.[31] Filming began in May 2015, with Colm McCarthy directing and Gemma Arterton, Paddy Considine, Glenn Close and Sennia Nanua starring.[32] The story, depicting a dystopian future where most of humanity is wiped out by a fungal infection, focuses on the struggle of a scientist, a teacher and two soldiers who embark on a journey of survival with a special young girl named Melanie.[33]