Now Moore Than Ever, Part 1

By: Stephanie C. Crawford
Date: Wednesday, February 13, 2002

Terry Moore, first and foremost, is a storyteller. The medium may differ, but telling stories has always been a big part of Moore's life. Interested in comics in childhood, Moore soon moved on to bigger things, pursuing a career in film editing. It was his son, finally, that brought Moore back to pencil and inks.

"My little boy was just starting to read, and he wasn't showing any interest in reading, so I took him to a comic book store," says Moore. "I noticed quickly that there was more to comics than heroes and funny animals. There were a lot of slice of life comics, a lot of alternative comics, and a lot of other interesting things, so I began to take interest in comics again, started looking at them again, something I hadn't done since I was 14."

After reading the alternative comics of the early '90s, Moore began to envision comics as a place to bring his story ideas to light.

"In comics, you can manufacture your stories, and if you self-publish, you don't have to talk other people into it and get backing and funding. It doesn't take a long time. For instance, once I put the story on paper, I turn it in to the printer, and within 2 weeks, it's in the reader's hands. It's a very fast way to make stories, and I like that. That's what attracted me to the business really."

Moore's flagship creation, STRANGERS IN PARADISE, is the story of a girl who is in love with her best girlfriend, the boy who is in love with her, the crime syndicate that the boy's dead sister ran... well, let's just say it's a lot more to do with real-life relationships than spandex and superpowers. Moore, critically acclaimed for his startlingly realistic and well-rounded (no, not just physically) female leads and their social interactions, chose to portray them and their lives for a very simple reason.

"I wanted to write about female characters for a very heterosexual reason - I'm interested in women. I'm not all that interested in spending my life creating guy characters, studying them, or presenting them in such great detail. I'm not that interested in the guy thing - I have to live that. I'm a lot more interested in what women have to go through on the planet... 'They' say 'write what you know...' well, I can't claim to know this, but I'm definitely writing about what I'm interested in."

The leads, Katchoo, Francine and David, may seem like strange bedfellows, but this was always part of Moore's plan.

"Really what I tried to do in assembling the STRANGERS IN PARADISE cast was select a group of characters that would have a lot of friction between them, and I deliberately put them all together in the same story, stood back, and watched the fireworks. I admit, I'm a big people person. I like to watch people, I like to look, I like to talk, and I know lots of different kinds of people. I'm not the kind of person that's very set in his ways and doesn't like to be around people that don't agree with him. I'm just the opposite, really. My characters are composites of people that have caught my eye, and I just put together a lot of different traits and came up with strong examples of several different kinds of people that I thought might be interesting if you mixed them all up in one cast."

Moore professes to being more of a writer than an artist, producing much more written work than actual comic art.

"I have a lot of written themes that don't even get used," says Moore. "I have a deskful of those, but I pretty much do the art one for one so I don't end up wasting time. But I have a lot of written material that hasn't been used, or it was changed, or it just isn't time yet for it. The art is harder for me, time consuming. The writing is easy. I'm a very prolific writer."

As far as publishing his book, Moore is a firm believer in self-publishing as the fastest, most efficient medium to reach his audience.

"It's still the simplest base model way to do the business. If I used a publisher, I'd have to talk them into things, get their input, be subject to their schedule problems, their priorities, and I'd have to split the money with them. When I started STRANGERS, I already had a good career, and I wasn't looking for a hobby or a vanity project. I wanted a career in comic books. I wanted to make a living at it, and self-publishing was the only way I could do that, and that's how it's worked out for me. I've made a living at STRANGERS ever since. Self-publishing is hard in that you have to do all of the practical things yourself, but it's the best way for me on this particular title. I wouldn't do it for everything, but it's worked out well for STRANGERS because it's enabled me to keep it as a creative project instead of working by committee and hammering it to death and taking all its sharp edges off with group decisions."

Despite his strong belief in self-publishing, Moore did give a large studio a try, temporarily moving the series from its home at his own Abstract Studio to Image Comics.

"[Jim Lee] called me and told me he was going to start something unusual, a creator-owned division that would have big studio support but creator-owned benefits, and at the time, that was very attractive to me," says Moore. "As a self-publisher, I had reached a limit of how many stores would carry my book, and [Lee] was in every store in the world, so with his name on STRANGERS, I was hoping to break the glass ceiling of self-publishing saturation, and he helped me do that. He put me in every store in the world. When I left Image, I lost some of those stores, but I maintained a good many of them, and I think that's one of the reasons STRANGERS is still around today."

Next time, Terry Moore talks SIP movies, BUFFY, and STAR WARS.