The Comics Journal: Interviews

Terry Moore
Interviewed by Charles Brownstein,
excerpted from The Comics Journal #193

With the publication of the first Strangers In Paradise mini-series, Terry Moore became one of the most widely praised cartoonists in alternative comics. By almost all accounts his quirky book about the love triangle of two Texas women and the naive, perhaps overly sensitive man should never have stood a chance in the still superhero dominated comics market of the mid 1990s.

Some very prominent comics readers -- creators Dave Sim, Neil Gaiman, and Jeff Smith, among others disagreed. They argued that the love triangle was exactly what readers wanted in the superhero saturated market. As the 1990s start to draw to a close it appears that those early supporters were right. Moore's Strangers In Paradise has maintained a strong enough cult audience to catch the eye of Image Comics partner Jim Lee who began publishing the book under his new Homage imprint this past October.

On two occasions, Terry Moore sat down with Feature Magazine editor and publisher Charles Brownstein to discuss his personal beliefs and experiences and their influence on the creative and business sides of Strangers In Paradise. The first portion of this interview was conducted shortly after the announcement of his move to Homage in late April of 1996 at WonderCon in Oakland, California. The second half took place over a phone conversation in early December 1996 on the eve of the shipping of the second Homage issue of Strangers In Paradise.

Origins and Influences

CHARLES BROWNSTEIN: Why don't we start with a bit about your background. In the past you've said that you've had three careers, what were they?

TERRY MOORE: I started off as a musician. I started playing in clubs when I was underaged, too young to be in the bars where I was working. I did that for about ten years then switched over to television editing and did that for the last ten years. Then I switched to comics.

BROWNSTEIN: Did you ever have any contact with the record industry?

MOORE: No we never got that far, but we were one of the hot local band type things. I mean, we worked. It was a living.

BROWNSTEIN: After you switched into the television editing, what kinds of politics did you find in that particular industry? In what capacity did you work there?

MOORE: I was an online editor, a CMX editor. They're the guys who actually put the shows together with [a] computer controlling the broadcast machines, like 1 inch or 2. I did that for a long time. It's real high pressure, working with the advertising agencies. I switched over when multimedia began. I switched over to an avid random access editor and was editing the multimedia.

BROWNSTEIN: What kinds of politics and practices did you find in these two businesses? How were they similar to one another and then how are they similar to what you've found in comics?

MOORE: I don't know. The music and the television businesses have nothing in common. The only thing that they both have in common is that they're both filled with assholes. The music industry's driven on the creative product, so the point is can you find these people who are able to sit in a room by themselves and come up with these ideas and this new vision and translate it into the medium? That's obviously what comics is all about. The thing that I was able to pick up from the editing was timing and storytelling. Storytelling in a third medium. So I'm think that both of them have helped me. I'm glad I'm out of those businesses, but I'm glad I had the experience. The editing was a huge education for me as far as storytelling, timing, dynamics, things like that.

BROWNSTEIN: How did you find that those things transferred themselves to comics because obviously you're talking about one medium that is based on movement and another that works with static images? How did you find that they played off of one another?

MOORE: Editing is a lot more like comics than you think, I mean editing film. The editor tends to, although he is dealing with moving choreography, look at these things as if they were nothing but a series of still frames and you're picking highlighted moments out of still frames. Pinnacles of the moment. In television and film editing what you 're doing is finding the peak moment of the scene and you assemble it so that whatever happened before or after the peak moment was simply the set-up or the segueway to the next peak moment. Really all you're doing is thinking of your movie as a series of peak scenes connected by segueways. In comics what you're showing, or what I think I'm showing, is still frames of those peak scenes. So I'm still showing Strangers In Paradise as a movie and what we're doing is looking at the peak moment from each scene.

BROWNSTEIN: So you're distilling the process even further.

MOORE: That's right. Strangers In Paradise is a movie. Say issue ten, it's twenty pages with maybe seventy-four panels total in that comic. So what we're saying is for this section of the movie there were seventy-four key scenes and here they were in this order.

BROWNSTEIN: Can you say they're peak scenes, because you do have segue in there. You have dialogue segue, you have segue between actions. Can you say that there's seventy four peak scenes, because if there's all peak scenes and no segue, I would imagine you'd lose some ability for storytelling.

MOORE: [Pause] No, it is peak scenes because say the peak scene is one scene [maybe we should say one segment so as not to confuse the reader] on the couch that lasts for three pages and say you're looking at three minutes of dialogue. Well, we only saw maybe nineteen frames to show that three minutes, so you're looking at nineteen key moments in that three minute scene. It's not just one scene for the couch period, there were nineteen key moments in that three minute period on that couch in that conversation. Or you just take one twenty second conversation off that three minute moment on the couch and you're just showing nineteen frames to represent it. It's that supercondensation. You're condensing it down to "Here is basically what they said on this couch and here is the big moment where it was said." That's how I think of it.

BROWNSTEIN: Were you doing any comics work or any other artistic work while you were in the other businesses?

MOORE: Yeah. I've said this before, I was training to be an animator with Disney and I went through the Disney school of apprenticeship with one of the alumni original guys. That training has helped me out a lot, that more than maybe anything else. I ended up not doing it because I wanted to go edit. That was a big help and I've been drawing all my life.

BROWNSTEIN: In the appendix to the first Strangers in Paradise collection, you showed some strips you had done and you said you were trying to break into strip art. What drew you into that field and when did you become drawn to it and try to break in?

MOORE: Ever since I was a little kid, I've always loved the newspaper strips. I've loved reading them and I thought that the guys who did them were just the coolest guys in the world. Alex Raymond, and even Mort Walker, Charles Schulz and those guys, I just thought that they had a charmed life. I thought it was just the best thing in the world to do. So I kept drawing everything from strips to sequential page art. In high school we were doing both. We didn't think of categories, we just drew whatever to make each other laugh, me and my friends. At one point I decided I wanted to be a newspaper strip cartoonist, so I just started talking to the syndicates and pushing my [strips].

BROWNSTEIN: Did you find any real difference between strip art and the sequential page art of comics?

MOORE: Yeah. Yeah, I did and the difference is how severely you editorialize yourself, because in strip art you have basically six inches to get your point across [chuckles]. In a book you have twenty pages or twenty four pages or whatever. I struggled with the strip art and I learned how to think in six inches across, however you want to divvy that up. I started learning how to do that and I found that if you get it right it can be funny, but it's really not a lot of fun to do. A lot of my ideas didn't fit in there because I wanted to do more than set up sound bytes and punchlines and things like that, I wanted to depict moments. I decided that comics were better for me because I was able to take twenty two pages and take my time and set up a moment. Again that moment in the living room on the couch.

A violent moment is nothing without a quiet set up or the proper set up and questions and the things that change people's lives. You've gotta see the set-up to it. That's when I switched over to comics basically. Then when I got into comics I thought I had all the room in the world and I found that you expand to fit whatever your boundaries are. I thought, "Gee, twenty-two pages is nowhere near long enough. I'm chopping all these scenes down like crazy." The difference is in how you editorialize yourself.

BROWNSTEIN: "Chopping down scenes like crazy", like how?

MOORE: A good example of that is in Strangers In Paradise #9. There are four or five major scenes in the book. One of them is done in prose form, it's the scene with two guys sitting at the bar talking about a common girlfriend. I had to have that scene in that issue and everything that happened in that scene that I envisioned had to be depicted. If I had drawn that out it would have been an entire issue by itself. So I decided to write it out in prose form. In prose form I did a twenty two page comic in five pages. I never could have done that and gotten those same scene dynamics and the emotion that's displayed, and the innuendo and the subtleties and the character depictions that are all over there. I could never have done that breezing through a couple of splash pages and kind of winging it hoping people got the idea. That's the editorialization of yourself in each issue. How many scenes do you want to have in here? How much time do you have to spend on this scene to get the point across. When you sit down to do a comic you have in our mind how you want to impact the reader. There's the set up involved and then there's the moment and you've got to depict it truthfully, then the aftermath. Sometimes a comic can have several major scenes in one issue and it becomes a real problem putting them all in, doing them justice, letting them all play correctly.

Here and Now

BROWNSTEIN: Do you think that the move to Homage has affected your creative work in any way?

MOORE: Yeah it has. It hasn't affected me censorship-wise because I am my worst censor. I've never done anything they've told me I can't do. I haven't lost any freedom in the creative side, but I have felt a whole lot more pressure to come up with the prettiest book possible and the best story possible. More pressure than I felt than when I was self publishing. When I was self publishing nobody was depending on me. I'm doing it by myself and if I feel real rebellious one month and I do a book with a lot of bite to it, that's fine. I didn't hurt anybody. When you're doing it through a publisher...I have so many new accounts now, people are trying it and the book has to make it on its own now in all these new stores. I feel a lot more pressure that the story had better be good and the art had better be the best I can do. The book has got to be better now than it was last issue. You're only as good as the book that's out right now. I put out number one and here we are four weeks later and it doesn't matter. The only thing that matters is number two which ships next Friday. How good is it? As soon as number three comes out number two doesn't matter at all. Nobody cares. You can't make your reputation off of what you've done, it's what you're working on now. So the fact that the Abstract Studio series went well is cool, but it's history. It won't get me any free lunches in 1997 [chuckles]. So I have to come up with something brand new and it had better be good. I'm really aware of that. I can't cruise.

BROWNSTEIN: So how has your approach changed to alleviate that pressure and deliver what you see as stronger stories?

MOORE: I don't know, I'm still working through that. The thing about the schedule is that I have no time to sit back and reflect. So if I have a problem or if I'm dealing with pressure I have to work through it as I'm working. Sometimes that shows up on the page. A lot of times that shows up on the page. The letters I print in the letter column are so positive and supporting because I don't want to put a bunch of negative stuff in my own book. I don't see any reason to print hateful and angry and vigilant letters in my own book.

BROWNSTEIN: Do you get those letters?

MOORE: I do from time to time, but almost all the letters I get are a good example of what you get in the letter column. But one of the problems with having letter columns like that is a lot of people think I'm running a huge ego thing. That my ego must just be horrible and I must walk around all day long thinking about all these people who are adoring Strangers In Paradise. The truth of the matter is that I really don't. Every time I sit down to do a page I feel like a no talent hack. I feel like I can't draw, I can't write and it's tough doing the story sometimes. It's hard to get up enough confidence to think that you're doing anything worthwhile. When I get letters in the mailbox or e-mail and read them I think, "God, that's so cool," but I can't relate to it. It's like they're writing to my brother or something. I can't personalize it. When I sit down at the table and start drawing it's [like] your whole emotions are right there in the pencil. If you have doubts, or you're angry, or you're bitter because you're not getting the story you want, those kind of things I let show up on the page. I tend to draw and write about people whose lives are a lot more together than mine. They have better egos than I have, they have more self-confidence than I have. So maybe I write and draw about those guys because, I don't know, I'm curious, I'm interested in how people can live like that [laughs]. How do they have the confidence to get up every day and think they can do it?

BROWNSTEIN: With the first new issue the tone of the book seems to have changed. You seem to be trying to make it a lot lighter. Earlier you mentioned that as a self publisher it didn't matter if you had an issue with a lot of bite in it, so what are you looking for in the new series? Are you looking at less bite, are you looking at trying to do a humor book? What new direction are you taking here?

MOORE: In the first three or four issues I have prolonged scenes that are meant to be funny. I hope they're funny, I was laughing my head off when I did them. So for several issues in a row I'm working very hard to develop some funny scenes. I'm doing that on purpose because one of the common writer traps is to write drama. The easiest thing in the world to do is write drama. When people run out of ideas what they usually start doing is screwing around with their characters, screwing their lives up, and write drama. It takes less thought and less effort, it's easier to do and pull off. You think you're being biting when you're writing, but there's a point where you're just falling into a trap. I think the hardest thing to write is comedy.

Can you imagine writing a scene in a living room between two people and depending on dialogue that makes you laugh and it makes somebody in California laugh, and it makes somebody in the Bronx laugh, and somebody in the Netherlands laugh, and somebody in Australia laugh. If somebody told you to sit down and write something like that and you had to make those people laugh, wouldn't that be daunting? But if somebody said, "I want you to sit down and write a real dark scene." Crime or family abuse or whatever, it's easier for you to figure out how to write that, isn't it. It's easier for us to figure out how to write a hold-up scene or a scene where somebody beats somebody. I don't know why, maybe it's because we see so much more of that in the media, on television and movies. I just got through doing a bunch of that and I didn't want to get tagged as being one of those books that's single faceted. So I wanted to go back a little bit to where I started from and just show that life can be funny. Just a simple thing of waking up, and having a cup of coffee, and asking your roommate a question, and it goes from there, can you get five minutes of good funny dialogue out of that? That's a good writing challenge and that's what I wanted to do with myself this time. So coming out of the gate that's what I'm doing right now on the new series, but I am going somewhere with it. I'm not just doing a sit-com. I'm just taking my time to set it up. Usually people will have a story arc and they'll set it up in the first issue and then they're off and running. I'm pacing myself slower than that. I'm taking however many issues I want at the beginning and just slowly setting it all up. I think the more detail you use to set these things up, the more people get involved and can relate to it so it'll be more effective down the road when we get to the emotional parts. In general that's what I'm doing right now.

BROWNSTEIN: What kind of response did you get from readers and retailers on the first issue of Strangers In Paradise and how did the Jim Lee segment figure into that response?

MOORE: The response has been great. I've had a lot of new reader response. I haven't heard from any new retailers that I know of. It'll take longer to earn their respect. But I'm having a lot of new reader response saying that they just now found the book and are doing the back issue search. So that's going well. It's going exactly as I hoped. The response to Jim's work on the dream sequence has been very appropriate. Everybody was very entertained by it and liked it. There were some hardcore Strangers In Paradise who had reservations about pages not being done by me, but I think they're being kind of fuddy duddy about that. I think that the idea was to have a hero dream sequence, do a hero satire and I've been wanting to do that for the last year. I could have easily done that in issue five of my self published series. I knew I wanted somebody else to draw it and I knew I wanted one of the top guys to do it. So when we went to Homage I had that idea laying around like a half finished song and there's Jim Lee sitting across the coffee table from me saying, "What can I do help?" Bright me, intelligent me, put two and two together and said, "Hey, I've got this idea, would you be willing to help me do this?" He was very kind to say yes. It was gorgeous and I loved seeing his version of it.