Writer and artist Terry Moore became a major name in comics with Strangers in Paradise, the Eisner and GLAAD Award-winning love-triangle epic that Moore self-published through his own Abstract Studios from 1993 to 2007. As Moore prepares to release a definitive, three-volume hardcover SiP omnibus at San Diego Comic Con in July, he continues to establish himself as one of the most versatile publishers and creators in the industry; currently publishing sci-fi romance/thriller Echo, whose second trade book shipped last week, Moore is also under contract with Marvel, and has recently finished runs on both Runaways and Spider-Man Loves Mary Jane with future projects to come.
PW Comics Week talked to Terry Moore about the upcoming Omnibus, Echo, the storytelling challenges of creator-owned work versus work-for-hire, and how changes in the industry are affecting small publishers.
PWCW: In April, you announced that while you were almost finished with a Strangers in Paradise omnibus, you would not be putting it out this year for economic reasons. Less than a month later, you happily announced that you would in fact be releasing the Omnibus at San Diego Comic Con. What made you change your mind?
Terry Moore: Originally, Robyn [Moore, Abstract publisher and Terry's wife] and I thought whether or not the Omnibus could be made depended on Diamond [Comic Distributors]—we'd need to partner with Diamond to ensure some preorders, a certain amount of orders. But as we worked on it more and more, we decided that even if Diamond wasn’t involved at all, we thought we could make a go of it, make it work. It’s different than any regular trade because it’s very expensive to make it. The print run will cost us as much as a house, so it’s a huge business risk to do something like this. But now we feel more confident that at whatever level Diamond wants to be involved, we will still be able to make it a viable project, it will still sell through. [Note: After this interview, Moore posted on his blog that Diamond has ordered 500 copies of the total print run of 1200 to list in their July Previews catalog.]
I’ve vacillated back and forth so many times—my general feeling was that I’m not going to put out another version of this until there’s a big public backlash and it becomes a TV show or something. But that might never happen, and the trade paperbacks went out of print, and we have nothing but the Pocket Books [paperback series] now, and the Pocket Books are meant for the subway, they're little, everything is compressed, they're for reading, it's like a YA title now—and I wanted one lasting, definitive version that was full sized, where I could go in and fix all the mistakes.
PWCW: So what will the Omnibus include, what will be the format and what will it cost?
TM: It's a huge beast of a monster of a book. The volume will be split into two big hardcover books of about 1200 pages each, and then there will be a third hardcover that has every cover in the entire run, and that’s a 140-page book by itself. And all three of these will fit into one big slipcase that ends up being a little over 6 ½ inches wide. It’s big. The pages will be comic book size, 6 something by 10 something. It will sell for $159.95 [Pre-orders are now available at the Strangers In Paradise website.
I’ve gone in and fixed everything that was bugging me and glaring. Like one thing; for the first ten issues, one of the characters, I kept spelling his last name wrong. Freddie Femur was Freddie Femurs with an S. Stupid things. It probably took me the first 20 issues to sober up and pay attention. So I just wanted the definitive version out there. Once we get past this deluxe hard cover thing, which is something really special, after that there will be a soft cover, more affordable, as two big books. I think we should have that out by the holidays.
PWCW: Recently you released Atomic Dreams, the second trade book collection of your second self-published series, Echo. How many issues do you have planned for that series? Will it be another epic, is it all mapped out, is there anything that’s open ended at this point?
TM: It's all mapped out, I’m thinking it’s a 30-issue series. That’s it! I actually thought originally of it as one kind of story to begin with, and then I thought that maybe my protagonist is someone that I maybe didn’t realize, so there may be life of characterizations beyond this series. But that’s how long this particular series will go.
PWCW: One thing that really strikes me about Echo is its pacing—it’s full of all these very small, intimate moments, and yet by the end of an issue, you realize it has also included all these exciting plot turns. Without the pressure of an external publisher telling you what needs to happen when, how do you approach the pacing of the story?
TM: I’m so glad to hear you say that. I’ve always had this fantasy of saying that the next time I go to, say, Rome, every photograph I would take would be an extreme close-up. I would remember my trip only through close-ups.
I really think that I just kind of, as a writer, or a person thinking of storytelling, I always default to the one-on-one moments. I always see stories from that point of view. I think it’s because I have a conviction that I don’t think I can come up with a sequence of events that you haven’t seen before. But none of us know when we wake up in the morning what our best friend is going to say, so that’s sort of what the surprises and the delights are in our daily life. So I think if I can tell a story so that the excitement and the newness is coming from the characters themselves, and I’m not trying to trick you with a new clever series of events. So it’s all about the characters to me, and what they say to each other and how they handle something. That’s the only place I can really surprise myself. I create these characters and I kind of start off by profiling, and then once I start writing, once I get into the moment, new things come up and pop up and I go “whoa, that’s cool!” So if I can entertain myself, hopefully I can entertain the reader.
PWCW: Regarding your work for Marvel, your last issue of Runaways, #9, recently came out—what were your favorite parts of writing that series, and what did you find most challenging?
TM: It really felt like I was on [original Runaways creator] Brian K. Vaughan's turf the whole time. It really felt like I was in his house, driving his car, using his dishes, and I had to be careful. Don’t leave a mess. And I was also aware that I was inheriting a readership, and my sole responsibility was don’t screw anything up. I really felt like I was on probation. But once I sat down to write the characters, I was able to plug in like a new member of the team and make myself at home, and see it from my point of view, and I just went with that. I mean you have to have some sort of independent feeling in order to be able to take a job like that, so I just drew on that. And the characters were really well defined, so again it was really just how would Molly or Nico react to that, etc. And really, I like writing ensemble casts, I love it when I can get five, six, seven people on stage, talking back and forth, get all those personalities, so I found that a real joy. Even the character I didn’t think I was going to like, Chase, I found a way to really like him, by expanding on a side of him that I found useful to the world.
One thing I noticed about Runaways is if you hold it and just flip through it, like a flip book, there’s a lot of scenes, a lot of action, a lot of change. And so, I was worried about that, I thought 'man Brian works at a fast pace.' But I was looking at someone’s collection recently of my run, and I flipped through it, and it had a lot of variety, a lot of scenes, and I thought “good, it looks like a Runaways book.”
PWCW: Where are things with Spider Man Loves Mary Jane right now?
TM: I did five issues, and that’s all they wanted out of that. Wouldn’t it be great if we did another five-issue arc that was Spider-Man loves Gwen Stacy, and it was the same story but from Gwen’s perspective? I'd do whatever I could—[That series] has a very clear mission, which is to bring in young readers. And I have a niece who’s Mary Jane Watson’s age, and another niece who’s 13, and I wrote it for them, I kept thinking about them. We need more books like that.
PWCW: Turning to your business as a self-publisher—one of the most significant pieces of news for small publishers this year has obviously been Diamond’s new minimums, how is this going to affect you? Is it going to change how you do anything, or how you balance your projects?
TM: It affects me in terms of reprints and reoffers. Because I’m only putting out one new issue [of Echo] every six weeks, I manage to get in every catalog, but in order to keep selling the perennials, like the Strangers in Paradise Pocket Books and [the other trade book collections], we were doing re-listings. And those are lower-order things. And the minimum really prevents me from doing that routinely. And you know, this is my third industry, my third career in my life, and in the other two, I saw tough times arrive, and I saw the industrial giants start to trample on the top and the bottom. And once you start flicking away the top and the bottom, it’s amazing how unattractive the middle becomes, without that full range. It’s kind of like listening to a song and taking off the highs and the lows of the song, suddenly it becomes kind of flat. It really is, in the physics of business, a really bad idea to eliminate the low-end stuff. I’m not being vocal about it in public really, but I worry about that decision and how that will affect Diamond, because I need Diamond, they’re my number one business partner, and I can only think of a handful of guys who will be fine if Diamond collapsed tomorrow, I can only think of a few creators who would get away with that. We really need them to succeed and be healthy.
PWCW: What were your previous two careers?
TM: Before I was doing this for 10 years I was a video editor—and that was a lucrative business until the Mac desktop publishing came out. And then before that I was in rock and roll bands. When my wife and I were first married, she married a musician; I worked in clubs for 12 years. And that was a huge business back in the 80s and then suddenly the industry started collapsing.
PWCW: Besides the collections we’ve already talked about, is there anything new coming up for you that you can announce? Any plans to do any more work for hire?
TM: I’m still under contract with Marvel; I still need to do some books to finish out my exclusive. Nothing public to say about the Marvel stuff yet, but we get along really well, and I’ve really enjoyed working with them and I’m looking forward to what comes next. And when I finish that, I have a bunch of things either in the drawer or on the back burner, ready to go. My goal now, having finished SiP, is that I have such a backlog of stories. And time is marching on, so I will always be trying to do more than one thing. That’s one of the reasons that Echo has a definite ending, because I have another series that’s just chomping at the bit, and I thought of another one yesterday that seemed delightful to me. I really wish I had a clone.
