Stuart Moore: To Dare For Moore

By Regie Rigby

Stuart Moore has been in the industry for some time, working over the years for Marvel, DC, Vertigo and others. When he announced that he would be leaving Vertigo to take on some new projects, we were naturally keen to find out more.

This Interview originally began way back in August, shortly after Moore announced a number of new projects with the publisher Penny Farthing, and long time collaborator Peter Gross. But things soon took an unexpected turn.

Joe Quesada left Marvel Knights to take on the role of Editor-in-Chief at Marvel. Things got exciting, and Moore mailed me to say that he would have to put the interview on hiatus for a while. Shortly after that rumors began to circulate that Moore would be filling Quesada's old seat at Marvel Knights. The rumors were soon confirmed, so when we restarted the interview Marvel Knights was the first thing on my mind…

Regie Rigby: You had a lot of plans in the pipeline when you got the call to do Marvel Knights. How hard a decision was it to say "Yes"?

Stuart Moore: It was actually pretty easy. It's a plum job, a successful, high-quality imprint at a tough time in the comics industry, working with and for good people. That's rare to find anywhere in publishing. And most of my other plans aren't dead - just slowed down.

RR: Zendra? How is all this new responsibility with the Marvel Knights going to affect your other projects?

SM: The Marvel Knights gig is four days a week, for me, and it's structured to allow me to do outside work. But it'll definitely slow me down on other matters, because there are only so many hours in the day and I have to manage to watch Felicity every week.

RR: How exactly do you see your role at Marvel Knights developing?

SM: Knights is a great imprint; it's not broke, so I don't have to fix it. Joe Quesada and Bill Jemas have certain plans that they want continued, and my job is a mixture of turning those ideas into good comics and bringing in my own new projects. The talent pool is terrific.

RR: What plans do you have for the imprint?

SM: The plans are still evolving. The flagship title is DAREDEVIL, which obviously we have to get back on schedule. Joe was smart enough to take himself off the art chores when he took the editor-in-chief job, so that will definitely help. The next story arc is by Brian Bendis and David Mack, and it's absolutely beautiful - a very touching story, lovely art, and a nice change of pace.

There's going to be more Punisher, and beyond that we're discussing a huge number of projects, some of which will be published under the Knights imprint and some of which may come out under a more adult banner. Bill and Joe have been amazingly enthusiastic, encouraging, and quick to make decisions, which I particularly appreciate.

RR: Which is your favorite Marvel Knights character?

SM: I don't know if he's my favorite, but I have a soft spot for Dr. Strange. There are no current plans for him - we've all agreed to wait till just the right creative team comes along.

RR: Which character would you most like to bring into the Marvel Knights fold?

SM: I love Man-Thing. He's a real challenge to use properly, because he's more of a force of nature than a character.

RR: And do you thing Joe Q will let you?

SM: He'd better - I still have the negatives!

RR: Zendra, with Penny Farthing, is billed as your "first major comics writing project", and you have described it as "a really a big, splashy summer movie with, hopefully, a solid dose of intelligence behind it." Can you tell us a little more?

SM: Zendra takes place in the far future, when the human race has been wiped out and the Three Galaxies - our own and the two Magellanic Clouds - are ruled by an uneasy balance of power. One scientist has managed to find the ruined planet Earth and gather enough genetic material to grow a human, Halle - our protagonist. But an ancient warrior, Abathor, who helped exterminate all humans centuries ago, wants Halle for his own purposes. Meanwhile, she's trying to fulfil ancient prophecies about the rebirth of her race, and at the same time find the hidden world of Zendra, where the human race is being nurtured and re-grown.

Abathor and his pirate crew are the most fun part, for me. The crew is a mixed bag of prisoners from races conquered by Abathor's people, and they don't really want to be there - plus they know Abathor will probably just kill them all when he's done with them. So there are plots and counter-plots, and hopefully some twists people won't expect. And a strange thing happened as I wrote the book: Abathor started getting funnier. He doesn't quite wear Groucho glasses and a fake nose by the end - he's definitely a menacing figure - but he has his moments of irony.

RR: You've been an editor for some time most recently at Vertigo and now at Marvel Knights, do you find that you wear your "editor's hat" when you read through your own work?

SM: Not initially. After I write a script, I try to leave it alone for a few days and then come back to it and revise things. That lets me give it just enough of a fresh eye to really see little details that don't work, which is one of the jobs of an editor. But really, when you write something, you're much closer to it. I've always said that ideally, an editor's job is to be the "ideal reader" for a work - if something isn't working, the editor should react to it the way a reader would ("that's wrong") but also have the insight to figure out why and either make suggestions, or at least steer the writer in the right direction. That's why a good editor is so valuable; often the writer just doesn't have that perspective on his own work.

RR: Do you in fact have an editor on Zendra?, and if so does your editing experience influence your professional relationship?

SM: Yes, my editor on Zendra is a very helpful and enthusiastic woman named Angel Menchaca, and their art director, Teal Chimblo, is also very much involved with the book day to day. I try not to step on people's toes, but really, everyone at Penny Farthing has been very helpful and solicited my input on a variety of issues. It's been a great working relationship.

RR: Penny Farthing is I guess a much smaller outfit than DC Vertigo or Marvel Knights. Is it a much different working environment at the smaller company?

SM: Well, Vertigo itself is a pretty small department, but yes, there are differences. DC's a great place in a lot of ways, but it's a nice change to be working with a smaller company that doesn't feel quite so much under the gun to live up to past sales levels. The pressure at DC these days is very strange - except for certain areas like the very successful trade paperback program, everyone's basically trying to do exactly what they've always done, but come up with comics that will sell better. That's kind of a losing game; you've got to try different things.

Penny Farthing's priorities are somewhat different - they're not hoping to make a lot of money on the comics. And they're just newer and less jaded. It's a nice combination.

RR: Bearing in mind that you had been with DC for so long, what made you decide to take an "out of house" project like Zendra? Did Penny Farthing approach you, or did you just feel that you might have more freedom in a new company?

SM: Zendra was originally conceived by the two primary artists on the book, Martin Montiel and J.C. Buelna. I had already been talking with Ken White, who runs Penny Farthing and is very involved with the books, about some other matters, and he wound up bringing me in to flesh out the story and write the scripts. The basic plot was handed to me, but there was a lot of working out and scene-staging to be done - and one crucial character who I invented almost from scratch. Thankfully, the plot was very solid, which meant I could flesh out characters, add subplots, and make sure the details held together, rather than plugging holes at every stage.

It's quite likely that the next project I do with Penny Farthing will be my own creation - we're negotiating for something right now.

RR: I'm assuming that you can't give me any more details on that project?

SM: Not yet, I'm afraid.

RR: I'd like to move on to other projects now, particularly your Brainriot partnership with Peter Gross. I guess the first thing I have to ask is "where did the name come from"?

SM: It's gone through a number of changes, and it's kind of on the back burner right now, since Peter has so much work and I have my new position at Marvel Knights.

RR: You have worked with Peter Gross for some time now. He worked with you at Vertigo, and I understand that he is also involved with Zendra. Did you meet at Vertigo, or have you known each other for years?

SM: I first worked with Peter at DC on Doctor Fate, before the Vertigo imprint started, and then for years on Books Of Magic. We got to be friends, though we've spent very little time physically together - he lives in Minneapolis and I live in New York. We share a lot of common sensibilities, and I like the fact that he's a careful and thoughtful organizer. He's a terrific artist, and he's really good at running a studio, at using different assistants for their particular strengths.

I pushed for Peter to take over writing Books Of Magic when John Rieber left, because I knew he could do it. He's got a great sense of story and character. He's also been a small publisher.

RR: If I could go "back to basics" a little now, I've been wondering how the experience of writing a script compares to editing a script? I'm speaking from a position of almost total ignorance now, but I suspect both roles are a creative process?

SM: I know a lot of comics writers who write in very different ways. I tend to approach different kinds of scenes differently: for an action scene, I usually work out the staging first, but if a scene's mostly dialogue, I'll write that before figuring out the bits of visual business. When I have a sequence where a lot has to be covered in dialogue, and the pacing is important, I find it helps to sit down and just write it all, then go back and add panel divisions and visual descriptions. But you have to keep in mind the pacing, and how the page works as a unit, and whether you're asking the artist to do too many impossible things in too small a space.

I don't think of script editing as a tremendously creative process unless you're seriously rewriting (or ghost-writing for an unreliable writer, which I have done). It's very rewarding, though, to find just the one thing that isn't working in someone's script and suggest the key change that will fix the problem. And matching up that arcane combination of writer, artist(s), colorist, and letterer can be very satisfying when it works out well.

RR: Further to that - How much influence does an editor have on a piece of work? Can an editor, for example, salvage a bad script and make it a great work, (or I suppose wreck a great script and make it unreadable?)

SM: A good editor can salvage a bad script and make it a competent work; I don't believe he can make it a great work. My definition of "great" tends to include heavy doses of inspiration and personal vision, and if the editor is the one providing those, then everybody has the wrong job. But in popular fiction, the comics have to come out every month, and there's nothing wrong with - sometimes - cleaning up a mutt enough to enter in the dog show, even if he's not going to win first prize.

Yes, a bad editor can definitely destroy a good script - I've seen it happen too many times. So can a bad artist, or an artist or editor who are working at cross-purposes with the writer. That's the kind of situation everybody should avoid at all costs - it's endlessly frustrating, and you wind up with a real dog's breakfast of a finished comic, if it gets that far.

RR: You've written a Seven of Nine story recently for DC, did you pick the character, or did they ask you to do it?

SM: Jeff Mariotte told me they were doing an anthology, and I pitched a VOYAGER story, which they liked.

RR: I get the impression you like Seven of Nine a lot - would you like to be writing the regular comic, or the actual show, for that matter?

SM: When I issued a press release about my upcoming work, I joked a little about Seven of Nine because she's the fetish sex-queen of the show. I don't have any particular connection to the character, though I do think both the writers and the actress have done a much stronger job with it than I would have expected. The story was fun to write.

RR: You've hinted at an upcoming project for Penny Farthing, which obviously you can't go into now - do you have anything else in the works?

SM: Well, my new Marvel gig is keeping me fairly busy. Other than that, I'm playing around with a few Flash internet-animation projects, and there are pieces of Peter Gross and my Brainriot plan floating around out there that may turn into hideous amounts of work somewhere down the line.

RR: Finally, what's the question that nobody ever asks you in interviews that you really wish they would?

SM: What the hell is wrong with George W. Bush and James Baker, anyway?

RR: No use asking me - I'm British! Stuart Moore, thanks for talking to us, and good luck at Marvel Knights.

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