Comics

Interview: Michael Carroll brings back The Mayflies for 2000 AD Regened Prog 2246

26th August 2021

It’s Regened time again Earthlets, as The Mighty One hands over the reins of the Galaxy’s Greatest to his lil’ nephew, Joko Jargo, to give readers, old and young, a different kind of 2000 AD experience, the wonders of the all-ages Regened Prog!

Inside 2000 AD Regened Prog 2246, there’s plenty to get your teeth into, including new Cadet Dredd by Liam Johnson and Duane Redhead, new Chopper from David Barnett and Nick Roche, a new Future Shock from Karl Stock and cover artist Steve Roberts, and a brand-new strip from the Survival Geeks team of Gordon Rennie, Emma Beeby, and Neil Googe called ‘Splorers. But you also get, you lucky lucky Earthlets, the second installment of the Ghafflebette Rogue Trooper universe series Mayflies from Michael Carroll and Simon Coleby, with colours from Dylan Teague and letters from Simon Bowland bringing us the The Way Forward…

So, time to catch up with Mike to talk more of the Rogue Trooper universe and where Mayflies fits into it all… Simon was going to be joining us, but sends his apologies along with some of his artwork – Tharg has him chained to the drawing board getting the latest series of Jaegir ready for launch (happening in Prog 2247!)

Hi Mike, nice to chat again – hope you’re all nice and safe and all vaxxed up?

Michael Carroll: Yep, I’ve been fully vaccinated for two months now. No side effects or side effects, aside from the inability to spot when I’m repeating myself or saying the same thing again but in a different way!

Mayflies debuted in 2000 AD Regened Prog 2220, with Precious Cargo, and is due to get its second outing in Regened Prog 2246, with the new story The Way Forward.

That first story set out the bones of Mayflies, a group of Souther GI Troopers due to be thrust into service for the never-ending Nort-Souther war. But, thanks to a Nort infiltration mission, they’ve been released from their gestation pods too early – leaving us with a group of teen GI Troopers, all with specialist skills and training implanted in their brains.

At the end of that first episode, these Mayflies; Rose, Zuli, Wrecks, Artie, Otto, and Slink, had freed themselves from their gestation pods, grabbed a ship, and were heading out to… well, their future I suppose.

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Okay then, Michael, where do you take the Mayflies in The Way Forward?

MC: This episode is set a few weeks after Precious Cargo. I initially toyed with the idea of opening the tale immediately after that story, with the Mayflies’ stolen shuttle under attack from the Norts, but while that might have made for an exciting adventure it didn’t really grab me, plus it didn’t give the characters much of a chance to stretch their limbs. We need to see them doing their own thing, interacting with other people, using their skills.

In the movie version we’ll have the room to actually show the escape scene – the shuttle dodging and zipping around the battle wreckage as the Nort fighters swarm after it – but here we only have ten pages to play with, so I decided instead to jump to the characters reaching their destination: in the opening panel we see that the shuttle has suffered a lot of damage so we can assume that the Norts did pursue them, but they managed to get away. Just barely, of course: escape should never be easy for the heroes!

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Presumably, we’ll be exploring more of the characters and differences of the group?

MC: Yeah, there’s a little more of that. Again, because we only have ten pages, we can only get a hint of each character. Early on I thought it might be interesting to have someone other than Rose as the narrator this time, and maybe I could switch to a different one with each new episode. That would definitely help to give us some more insight into the characters. Unfortunately I just couldn’t make it work. Not for this particular adventure, anyway. It just feels right to have Rose tell the story… But I’m not ruling out the idea of switching narrators in the future.

Given both the gap in time between episodes and the nature of exploring a group within a short number of pages, are you constructing each episode as its own short tale and then connecting each through themes and the like?

MC: That’s it exactly. With such a long gap between episodes we have to reintroduce the scenario and each of the main characters, so that cuts off several avenues of possibility, story-wise. That’s not a complaint, though! In story-telling, restrictions force you to come up with ideas that you might not otherwise have thought of. Or you could see it like this: sometimes if you have the freedom to go anywhere and do anything, you end up going nowhere and doing nothing.

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We spoke last time about the potential for stories in the Rogue Trooper universe being huge, and that first story being, as Simon put it, ‘the first look at something.’

Now, I would assume that there’s always an eye to the possible future with Regened strips, so do you have a route mapped out for taking Mayflies into 2000 AD for a longer run, in the same way as we saw with both Full Tilt Boogie and Department K. Or is it something you would rather see continuing at its own pace in Regened?

MC: To my shame, I have to admit that I’ve not yet read Full Tilt Boogie or Department K.

Bad Mr Carroll, bad Mr Carroll!

MC: This is mostly because the Progs don’t arrive here in Dublin on any kind of regular basis. Used to be that they would arrive every Monday morning on the week of publication, but in the past few years they’ve been showing up weeks or even months late. So I’ve taken to just letting them build up into a hefty stack and then I blitz through them in one go.

But I do have an overall plan for Mayflies if it were to get a regular series or its own spin-off comic. I’d need to discuss it with Tharg and Simon, of course, to see where they’d like to take the story. Plus we’d need to renegotiate the contracts with the characters’ agents, and we have to bear in mind that they’re all clones so technically they’re children and as such can only work a limited number of hours per week.

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With the success of Jaegir and now Mayflies, I think it’s safe to say the future of the Rogue Trooper universe is something that’s got a lot of room for new and exciting stories. We touched on this last time, but what is it about Rogue’s universe that’s just so inviting to people?

MC: I think that one of the appealing aspects of the original Rogue Trooper was that it was a war story where no side was clearly “the goodies” or “the baddies.” Rogue has effectively deserted his own side and was following very much his own path – I reckon there’s a good clue in the name – so in that regard he was an antihero, and as such he fit perfectly into 2000 AD.

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With Mayflies’ first episode, you didn’t shy away from the war story element of the tale. Obviously, it fitted into the all-ages nature of the Regened brief, but there was that sense of hitting a balance between the all-ages aspect of things and the truth of the war setting. I imagine that’s something you’re continuing to explore, although I can’t imagine we’re going to be seeing a Mayflies/Jaegir crossover at any point!

MC: That would be fun to explore, but no, there are no plans for that. Jaegir is so different in tone to Mayflies that any attempt to crossover just wouldn’t really work. By its nature Mayflies has something of a wide-eyed innocence to it whereas Jaegir has the opposite: a narrow-eyed scepticism. They’re two sides of the same coin, of course, but unless we’re talking about some weird kind of moebius coin, those sides are very unlikely to ever meet.

However, I would love to do a crossover with The V.C.s! Maybe it’s all the same war, just in different parts of the galaxy, and The Norts and the Geeks have been working together… they’ve sided with the Int. Stel. Fed. to gain control of the intergalactic trucking routes so they can cut off supplies to the Cetaceans as they prepare for their final assault on Tarantula.

Ooooh, now I didn’t see that coming! The V.C.s and Mayflies together!

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With the Regened strips over the last couple of years, I think it’s fair to say that there’s been a settling down of things, artists and writers getting to grips with the all-ages aspect of it all and realising that there’s a huge amount that can be done in Regened that is 80-90% everything that can be done in any 2000 AD strip – just with slightly less obvious blood and mature themes. I think we’ve seen that with your Cadet Dredd strip, Mike, and certainly with Mayflies, Department K, and Full Tilt Boogie.

Obviously, we’d all love to see the all-ages Regened go monthly or (dream a dream) weekly, but given the current difficulties in publishing, it just doesn’t seem likely. But do you think there’s something to be said for Regened to have that positive influence, a transformative influence for the future on 2000 AD itself, mixing things up, letting creatives go in different directions and keep things fresh?

MC: Complacency is potentially dangerous in any entertainment medium because it’s a path to laziness and stagnation. So, yeah, you’ve gotta mix things up now and then. Try something new, shift the perspectives, maybe even revisit older, discarded approaches. That also applies to the creators: you can’t get stronger if you don’t flex your muscles.

We should never be afraid to try something new just because we’re comfortable and safe. We’ve got to at least test the boundaries of the comfort zone to see how rigid they are… and to be certain that those boundaries actually exist outside of our own fears and expectations.

That’s why Regened is a brilliant idea. 2000 AD will always need new blood with regard to its readers and its creators, and Regened gives us that. A standalone monthly Regened comic is very tempting, and it could really work given the right contents, but right now it’s fitting in very nicely with the regular progs.

I know that some die-hard readers argue that the Regened issues are “not the same” and they’re right about that. If they were the same, there wouldn’t be any point in doing them. As I said, you’ve got to flex if you want to get stronger, and I’ve no doubt that Regened has been an innovative and hugely important new aspect to the comic.

Mark my words: in decades to come, there will be highly successful and influential comics creators whose first-ever progs were Regened issues.

And finally, as always… what’s coming up next from you?

MC: Dreadnoughts book 2 is in progress, as is the third book of Proteus Vex, and I’ve got another Dredd two-parter on the way.

Mayflies: The Way Forward can be found inside the Thrill-Powered pages of 2000 AD Regened Prog 2246, out in comic shops, newsagents, and from the 2000 AD web shop from August 25!

Be sure to check out the interview with Mike and Simon about the debut of Mayflies back in Prog 2220!

Thank you so much to Mike for taking time out to answer the questions – we really appreciate it and hope you, dear reader, feel the same.