downthetubes Interview with Leah Moore and John Reppion August 2009




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downthetubes: You haven't gone the 2000AD route when it comes to breaking into writing professional comics. Instead your respective debuts were in American comics. Why?

John Reppion: That's just the way it worked out really, nothing deeper than that. Leah wrote her first two stories for Wildstorm then we wrote Wild Girl together for them, then we got involved in Albion... it just sort of happened that way. That said, I think a lot more people are doing US or European comics and still doing their 2000AD work as well these days aren't they?

I hope it's not too late for us to have a crack at writing something for the galaxy's greatest comic yet (though we might need some sort of time-altering technology in order to be able to find a spare moment).

Leah Moore: I think we were also both aware that 2000AD is one of the only British comics employers, and therefore can have its pick of British comic writers, so without much work experience behind us, we were a bit shy of knocking Tharg's door down and saying "Borag Thung! Now employ us!" He might not take kindly to that.

downthetubes: How do you feel about your first major outing, Wild Girl, looking back at it? Regrets, we've got a few or phew, we got away with it!!?!!

LM: I'm really glad we did it, especially when we did it, before we had much experience, because it's not how we would write it now. We would be much more self-conscious, and I think it would show in the work. When I re-read Wild Girl I can see the problems with it, but I am always pleasantly surprised by it. I only had 16 pages of comic writing under my belt at the time and John had none whatsoever. To go into our own six-issue mini was a massive jump.

Trying to think in terms of whole issues and story arcs was such a huge thing to attempt, and I think despite a few hiccups along the way we pulled it off. The amazing process of seeing an artist translate our script into artwork was something we had only just tasted really, and it's fiercely addictive.

Working with Shawn McManus and J H Williams III, and seeing what they did with our scripts was the thing that clinched it for us with being comic writers really. If we had had a more negative experience we might not have kept at it.

downthetubes: You've mixed (and matched?) your adventures in fiction and comic strips, with various outings as, in John's case, a journalist and, in Leah's case, an artist. Would either of you ever consider giving up the fiction to concentrate on these other pursuits?

JR: We've been writing comics together for five years now and it's been our only regular source of income during that time. I dabble in article writing, do reviews and stuff now and again, but it's all mostly for free or else for not much money. I wouldn't have a clue how to actually do it as a career. I only ever write about things I'm interested in and I don't think you'd get away with that so much if your were having to churn out so many thousand words on a regular basis. I thought I'd cracked it when I wrote my first book in 2008 but it turns out that's probably not going to make us rich either.

LM: I love doing the amount that I do now to be honest, it's different, and feels less like work than writing does, so it's still something I can do to relax. I think I'd like to get better at drawing which would require me to do more of it, but whether anyone would pay me to do that is another question.

Writing comics is very addictive, and means I don't have to be able to draw all the things I can imagine, just describe them, so comics wins.

Albion #1 cover by Dave Gibbons

downthetubes: Turning to Albion, what are your thoughts on that a couple of years down the line?

LM: Albion was a totally unique project, just because it had such a big gang of us involved on it, but then me and John were doing the scripts, laying out the pages and writing the dialogue. It was a huge responsibility in terms of what everyone might make of it, and writing in dad's name, too.

If a comic has Alan Moore plastered across the front of it in massive letters than the readers are going to expect it to be an Alan Moore book, and possibly when they read it, it wasn't what they were expecting.

Maybe we were a bit naive in thinking it wouldn't be judged alongside his other books, but to be honest, we get loads of people still bringing it along to get signed and saying how much they liked it, so its hard to say what the general reaction was to it in the end. I really love the way it turned out.

It's a weird book, but I enjoy re-reading it, possibly more now than when we were in the thick of it. There are bits of it where I want to tweak the odd panel to make it read better, but then that's true of everything once it's printed, you think "Ack! How did we not spot that?"

JR: It's really interesting to look back on but I still haven't got enough distance to be able to see it without knowing which bits are ‘ours'. It was lots of fun getting to write Robot Archie, Grimly Feendish and all those other characters though.

My favourite part is still probably the single page of Janus Stark we did. Shane [Oakley] got Solano Lopez's style so spot on that people genuinely thought it was a re-print!

downthetubes: What sort of learning curve have you been through as writers in the last few years? How does your writing process work, considering that you collaborate?

JR: We've never written any other way so we don't know any better really. We've learning all the time and each new project teaches you something new whether that's something about the story itself or the business side of being a writer (or half a writer each as we usually tell people we are).

So far as our process goes, it's stupidly longwinded really. Once we have our basic idea for the issue or story we write a list of the page numbers and write a brief description of what happens next to each page. Next Leah draws a rectangle for each one, then we discuss the action in more depth and she draws rough versions of the panels in (she can't understand my drawings so she always does it). Sometimes we add little notes for dialogue ideas, dates, time, etc, but not always.

Once we've got the rough pages we divide them between us and type them up and once that's done one of us goes through and dialogues them. Then the other person goes over the dialogue and makes changes and finally the first person goes back over the dialogue.

This is why we are not the fastest writers in the world. We are very thorough though and nine times out of ten we can hold our roughs up next to the finished page and they actually look the same compositionally.

downthetubes: You've worked in shared universe settings and produced original work. What are the pros and cons of both of these situations?

Albion #2 cover by Dave Gibbons

LM: Albion was technically a crossover, as it had loads of characters from different stories in one big story together, but to be honest it was really a big idea gumbo with all these things swilling about in it, and we just kind of strained the bigger lumps out and wrote it up; so not really a crossover.

Crossovers have a very misleading name actually, as if the two stories are just train tracks or roads that at some point simply converge, and then go on their way peacefully as if nothing has happened. In actual fact the stories often have characters with complex histories, various abilities that have evolved over the course of years, and loads of minor characters who have appeared this many times or that many times, and who may be dead but it was never resolved, and then you get the job of grabbing a couple of these big unwieldy monsters and smashing them together at great speed. The result is called a crossover, and resembles neither of the original concepts, and is not in itself a separate thing. They are without a doubt the hardest thing to write that we have encountered yet, but I may live to write something more fiendish still, so we'll see.

Original work is hard too, but its all your story, so you can make things change if you need to, you can set it all up for yourself, you can decide how complicated it is, or how simple, and then you write it. Its tougher really because you have to sell people your own new idea, but then if people do like it, the praise is all yours, the fame, the glory! Well, not really, but it just feels nice when people say they liked an idea that you made up all on your own.

downthetubes: You continue to work in the small press despite your paid, pro' work? Why? And what are the benefits?

LM: The small press at the moment is really healthy, and the only way to keep it healthy is if everyone still finds time to do a story here and there. If we work with someone and really get on with them, and the stuff we put out together is good quality, there's nothing to stop us taking it further and making money on it further down the line. It looks good in their portfolio, it looks good in ours, and we all get to hype the books we are in without looking too big headed because we share all the praise and/or scorn heaped upon us.

downthetubes: Let's move on to the work you've done for Dynamite Entertainment...

JR: Phew. Well, we initially signed a 12-issue deal with Dynamite not too long after finishing Albion. The 12 issues were actually three, four-issue mini-series: Witchblade: Shades of Gray (a Top Cow crossover featuring our own version of Wilde's Dorian Gray), Raise the Dead (a ‘classic' zombie tale) and The Darkness Vs. Eva: Daughter of Dracula (another Top Cow crossover in which there are vampires and werewolves running round New York).

Working for Dynamite has been great and it's really taught us a lot. Shades of Gray was a real learning experience because suddenly we were plunged into the Top Cow universe and having to deal with two different sets of editors at once. With Albion, even though we were writing pre-existing characters, we could pretty much make them do and say (and even look to a certain extent) how we wanted but suddenly we were bound by all these rules. The Top Cow editors knew Sara Pezzini so well that they could tell you whether or not she would say a certain line or react a certain way so we really had to work hard to get all those things correct.

Once we came to do the second crossover, it felt like we were more familiar with how to handle the whole thing and we actually able to enjoy ourselves a bit more. I'm very proud of The Darkness vs. Eva mini because I think it's the most successful mainstream thing we've done and both the Dynamite and Top Cow fans seemed to really enjoy it. Plus it's always fun to write monsters.

Raise The Deadwas an absolute dream project to work on. I've been a fan of horror and zombies in particular since my early teens so when Dynamite asked us to do a zombie series we were well up for it. We just tried to do it right rather than re-define a genre or anything like that. Zombies are already perfect as they are; they don't need to run or talk or have feelings to be interesting. We just concentrated on delivering what we considered to be a proper zombie story with plenty of gore and suspense and I think we succeeded pretty well.

Other than those first three minis we've also worked on Battle for Atlantis, which is a classically styled fantasy adventure series (drawn by the legendary Pablo "Tales of the Zombie" Marcos) appearing in Dynamite's bi-monthly book Savage Tales.

At the moment we've got The Complete Dracula and The Trial of Sherlock Holmes in the shops.

The Complete Dracula was a massive project; faithfully adapting Stoker's novel for the comic book medium. We finished writing the series a good while ago now but the issues are oversized, the panel count high and the detail pretty intense so it's not been coming out too speedily. Hopefully fans will think it worth the wait and Colton Worley's artwork is certainly always a pleasure to see.

Dynamite asked us about Holmes around the same time as Dracula but we were too busy for a long time. When it finally came to tackling the series we decided that writing an original Holmes mystery that was in keeping with Conan Doyle's tales would be the most interesting and challenging way to go. It's definitely the most complicated and demanding project we've ever worked on but it seems to be paying off; issue three (of five) just came out last week and reactions have been really positive*.

Again, we've been really lucky with our artist, Aaron Campbell, who has really got into the Victorian spirit with the series. Hopefully we'll get to write more Holmes in the future, we'd love that!

Right now we're working on The Complete Alice in Wonderland which will be a four part series, each issue having 40 pages. The first two cover Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and the second two will cover Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There. Like Dracula, we're trying to make it as faithful to the original as possible; it's not a re-imagining, it's an adaptation. We're trying to make it very kid-friendly without being patronising and so far it's been a lot of fun.

Eric Awano is our artist on the project and we're really, really pleased with the pages we've seen thus far. We're very excited about the project.

downthetubes: How important is it for creators who are just starting out to have a website/blog? Is your blog/Twitter a marketing godsend or a rapacious monster that is never satiated?

LM: At first, the web site was just a way to keep track of when things happened, and to let people know about things, although when it started only about four people ever read it, but its turned into a multi-headed beast with a blog and a forum and then there's Facebook and MySpace and Twitter and you spend more time updating your status to say "Leah is working hard" than actually working. No wonder we're still skint!

The theory is that I will spam all my MySpace friends with info on our work and then they will all go rushing feverishly out and buy ten copies each. In actual fact it means I get a load of sleazy guys trying to spam me with NSFW comments, and 300 people I don't know being my friend on Facebook and asking me to do millions of rubbish things all the time. I still enjoy Twitter, because I am nosy and like to know what people are talking about with each other, and I like to moan at people.

I would say it is vital to have some kind of a web presence, but anyone who says that they need to spend half their time 'marketing' on the internet is just procrastinating!

JR: Twitter is actually proving to be one of the most sanity-preserving web applications I've come across because it grants us the illusion of having colleagues. Suddenly all these solitary writers and artists across the globe are gathering in one big virtual office together. I like that. I like it when someone twitters that they're having a cuppa and you think, ‘Yeah, I could do with one actually' and take a break. It means you're more aware that there are other people out there doing the same stuff as you and you don't feel quite so weird about sitting typing in your dressing gown.

In terms of marketing I think it's a lot more personal than Facebook, Myspace, et al because you feel like you're talking directly to people and they tend to react better to that. And in terms of securing work and networking, Twitter has already secured us one of our most exciting projects to date.

downthetubes: One final question. Who are the other up-and-coming creators that we should be looking out for?

JR: Wow, loads of people. Leigh Gallagher is doing his sterling work on Defoe for 2000AD. He's great and has a very bright future ahead of him. Hopefully we'll get to write something for him one of these days.Emma Vieceli is a brilliant British manga artist with stuff coming out through Sweatdrop and Self Made Hero. She's one of those dynamo-like artists who just seems to churn out all this amazing stuff at an incredible rate.

Dave Hitchcock, who we've worked with for Accent UK, is an amazingly talented chap who really doesn't get the recognition he deserves. His artwork is so intricate and so original and his architecture is just unbelievable. Buy his stuff! He is fantastic!

Andy Bloor is another artist we've had the pleasure of working with through Accent UK. He has this wonderfully bold scratchboard/woodcut type style that just jumps off the page. I highly recommend Wolfmen written by Dave West and drawn by Andy.

James Fletcher has this marvellous, inky David Lloyd meets old EC horror style, which people might have already seen in his work for Negative Burn and From the Tomb. He'd be good in 2000AD!

Finally, someone readers should definitely be keeping an eye on is Matt Timson who is currently doing art chores on Top Cow's Impaler. That boy is going to be a star!

downthetubes: Leah, John, thanks very much for your time.

Creator Links

• Leah Moore and John Reppion's Site

• Leah Moore on Twitter

• John Reppion on Twitter

• 2007 Leah Moore and John Reppion Interview on Albion

* I'm a massive Sherlock Holmes fan and I'm loving this comic. It's well worth tracking down – Matt Badham, interviewer

** I agree! - John Freeman, downthetubes Editor