The Deadbolt had the good fortune to catch up with The Stranded editor Stuart Moore (Marvel Knights, the new Avengers and Transformers, Stargate Atlantis comics) and writer Mike Carey on a recent conference call to get the goods on what fans can expect from the recent January 23 five-issue release, the future of The Stranded, and how the new SCI FI - Virgin Comics joint venture could be a rewarding launching pad for so much more.

Stuart Moore and Mike Carey on comparing The Stranded to a pitch of two other established properties:

STUART MOORE: We didn’t really approach it that way. We sort of -- I mean our quick line for it is, "What if your entire world, everything you knew, all your memories was a lie?" And that everything - you’re actually from another place entirely, and you discover that you’re - you have powers that you didn’t even know you had. So I think it’s got a few echoes of some popular series like Heroes. But it’s really its own thing I think.

MIKE CAREY: I was going to mention the connection to Heroes in that these people are just sort of discovering that they’ve got superhuman abilities. But it’s also got some echoes kind of like paranoid sci-fi thrillers of the ‘50s. And that’s: you have these aliens who’ve been embedded in human communities and human families, although they’re not, they’re not sort of primarily a threat to those communities. But it’s like the alien among those -- they’re all sort of seen and that resonates through the series.

Moore and Carey on some of the other artists lined-up for cover art aside from Mark Silvestri:

CAREY: We’ve got some lovely covers coming from Chris Moeller.

MOORE: Yes. Chris did some of the covers for -- he did some for Lucifer, and he’s done his own series called Iron Empires and a lot of gaming work. He’s terrific. I’ve worked with him before. There’s also an alternate cover on the edition cover on the first issue by Greg Horn, which is quite stunning.

Moore and Carey on the inspiration and style of the artwork for The Stranded:

MOORE: Well, we actually went through a bit of a development period with the artwork, because we had - well we had an artist on the very beginning who didn’t wind up working out. But the other who we wound up with is terrific. And what we’ve tried to do more, again in Siddharth Kotian, who’s done other work with Virgin. We’ve pretty much just gotten out of his way and let him go once he got started. There are a lot of details that need to be addressed in this book. It has a lot of special effects. It has a lot of -- and we want to make sure... that everything’s clear enough. Sid has been great with all the characters and the settings. So it’s mostly been a matter of making sure that if we need a character to - if we need a particular special effect for when Janus [the villain] kills people, we get that right. If we need a character to have a tattoo to distinguish her from an identical twin character, we get all that together I think. Mike, do you have any other thoughts on that?

CAREY: No. I would agree with you mostly... we tell him roughly what effect we want. And we left him to find the way to produce that effect. There’s a fight sequence in the first issue where Tamree is fighting a bunch of these very, very strange robot creatures called (Knolls). And he just basically took my panel descriptions at the starting point. But what he came up with was actually very different and much more kinetic and much more exciting than what I’d actually scripted. He’s very good at the sort of conveying the intensity of the physical action when it happens.

MOORE: I would say the overall look is very -- it’s very realistic by comic book standards. But it falls -- and it nicely falls a little -- it’s less exaggerated or -- yes, exaggerated is really the word. It’s less exaggerated than most superhero work. So it’s a little more relatable and a little more down to earth while still very exciting.

Carey on the genesis of the characters and whether they were based on real people:

"The only character who was kind of based on somebody is Tamree, the telepath who is the lynchpin of the team. I really strongly had Clea DuVall in mind for her and I don’t know why, apart from the fact that I’ve loved everything Clea DuVall has done over the past few years. She was great in Carnivále. She was great in Heroes. I think she’s a - she has a really strong face. I was sort of seeing her visually in my mind when I wrote Tamree. And I think she’s also sort of great for the other - the characters she incarnates, [are] sort of very different from each other and all very convincing and compelling. For the other characters, no not so much. They were sort of just a notion not based on any one person real or actor or actress."

Mike Carey on working with Virgin Comics and what appealed to him:

"Well, I was invited to submit ideas when Virgin and SCI FI announced this team up. They approached a number of creators and invited them to submit. And I was fortunate enough to be one of them. My connection with Virgin actually arose because one of their commissioning editors. MacKenzie Cadenhead is a woman I worked with extensively at Marvel when she was an editor there and we got on really well. Some of my earliest Marvel work -- Ultimate Elektra and Daredevil and Spellbinders -- was with MacKenzie. And we just sort of -- we developed a really good working relationship. So when she moved to Virgin and she asked me if I would be interested in doing some work there, and I said yes and the rest is history. It’s a wonderful company to work for."

Stuart Moore on working with Mike Carey and whether they specifically look for concepts to develop for TV and multi-media:

"Mike is one of the most talented and accommodating writers I’ve worked with, in that when I come to him with a suggestion or when SCI FI comes to him with a suggestion, it tends to spark ideas in him. And he just comes up with something often that no one had thought of before that works better than what we had. So that’s been just a very gratifying and wonderful process all along. As far as how the projects are chosen, we’ve gone through a lot of proposals for this line. And SCI FI tends to have certain preferences of their own which change and which they keep us up to date on. No book gets produced here unless Virgin and SCI FI agree on it.

"And you’ll notice we haven’t rushed out a lot of titles. We’re being very, very selective with this line. We’ve got one other one I think we’re negotiating now, nothing else we can announce yet. But we’ve basically approved a grand total of two projects. And The Stranded was by far the standout of the first round of pitches. It was everyone’s favorite and it was an easy one. So SCI FI looks for certain things. We obviously look for books - for projects that we think will make a good comic book. And then we all sort of come together and pick the [best ones] -- and the projects that fit everyone’s criteria are the ones we end up doing. And like I said, The Stranded just jumped out from everyone right at the beginning. It was everything we wanted to do."

Getting "Stranded" with Stuart Moore and Mike Carey Page 2