Stuart Moore has been a writer, a book editor, and an award-winning comics editor. His recent writing includes New Avengers/Transformers (Marvel Comics), Firestorm (DC Comics), the original science-fiction series Para (Penny-Farthing Press) and Earthlight (Tokyopop), a graphic novel adaptation of the bestselling fantasy novel Redwall (Penguin/Philomel), and the prose novels American Meat and Reality Bites (Games Workshop). At DC Comics, Stuart was a founding editor of the Vertigo imprint, where he won the Will Eisner award for Best Editor 1996 and the Don Thompson Award for Favorite Editor 1999; recently he has accepted an editorial role shepherding the new Virgin Comics/SciFi Channel comics imprint. Stuart has also contributed to prose and comics anthologies, including the acclaimed Postcards (Villard/Random House), The Nightmare Factory (HarperCollins/Fox Atomic), and Star Trek: Constellations (Pocket Books). He lives in Brooklyn, New York.
How did you end up with the New Avengers/Transformers book and how has it been as an experience?
I’d worked with Marvel editor Bill Rosemann before and he thought of me mostly because of my affinity for science fiction. I’d also recently written a New Avengers special for the U.S. military (with another to come), so that helped.
Licensed books with two publishers can be a headache, but this has gone remarkably smoothly. I have to give Bill and IDW’s Chris Ryall all credit for that; they’ve provided me with the tools I needed at every stage. And Hasbro’s been terrific, too.
Transformers has an almost endless amount of continuities that you could draw on, did you do any particular research for how you were going to portray the characters, or were you given assistance by IDW in order to tie into their line of Transformer comics?
We decided right at the start to fit this directly into the IDW continuity — which made things easier for me, as it’s only a year or two old. Transformers continuity is very complex — the whole thing’s been rebooted several times — and fans take it all very seriously. With a project like this, the most important thing to me was to be true to the core of the characters. Optimus Prime has been around for more than twenty years, in different settings and roles — but he’s always the same big, metallic leader-guy. The same is true for most of them.
Is it difficult to try and do justice to all the different characters you have to deal with in such a crossover? Did you decide up front which characters would be used or did the nature of the project dictate who would be appearing?
Some of the characters were suggested by the story and the situation. I had a particular idea about Iron Man, for instance, that I persistently talked everyone else into. The Decepticons’ M.O. on Earth is to stir up trouble between nation-states, so that suggested Latveria and Symkaria…which made Doctor Doom’s involvement almost inevitable. And yes, continuity affected the choice of characters too. We’d planned to use Starscream, but he’s effectively out of action at this point in the IDW continuity. That forced us to introduce a “new” (to IDW) Decepticon character, which actually worked out much better and will have ramifications for the Transformers down the line.
As for doing justice to all the characters: Yes, that’s the toughest part. The first issue is very heavy on the Avengers, because we wanted to introduce the gigantic invading robots through (super)human eyes. By issue #2, both groups are in full effect, and in issue #3 you really see the differences in their priorities. We also get into some tension among the Autobots that plays off recent events in the IDW books.
Tell us a little about the Virgin Comics/SCI-FI imprint. What’s the idea behind it, and what sort of things can we expect?
It’s a joint venture between the two companies. The goal is to produce real science-fiction comics — miniseries, mostly, to start — that have the potential to work as television series as well. SciFi is very committed and involved, and Virgin’s pouring a lot into this. It’s very exciting.
Who are the types of writers and artists you are aiming to bring into the imprint?
We’re reaching out to a mixture of comics and television writers. It’s a fascinating process because we all have to agree on a project before it goes ahead. We have one book set so far, which will be announced at Comicon San Diego, written by a prominent and acclaimed comics writer.
Do you think your role as editor of the line will affect your writing career?
I try to learn from every job I do. I’ve learned a tremendous amount about writing from my editorial work, and yes, I hope that will continue.
It’s funny: Comics in general has moved closer to television in recent years, reaching out to TV writers, which is great. But in television, if you’re a (story) editor, you’re expected to be a writer as well — in fact, you’re usually the head writer of a series. In comics, those roles have been very tightly segregated. I don’t see why that should be, necessarily. You can be both — it’s mostly a matter of finding enough hours in the day. Comics didn’t used to be that way; Stan Lee edited virtually everything he wrote. I’d like to see a little loosening up of all that, across the field. I think it’d be good for creativity in general.
What’s the work you’re most proud of so far in your career?
That changes all the time. This sounds like a cliché or like P.R. crap, but I really do pour everything I’ve got into any given project…and I don’t take anything on unless I think I can do it justice.
At the moment I’m very pleased with Earthlight, my Tokyopop graphic novel series. Volume 2 just came out, and that script just poured out very quickly, exactly the way I wanted it. I wrote volume 3 recently, and that was tougher, but more ambitious. The emotional content is subtler and the themes are more complicated. I’d like to do more in that vein.
I still have a very soft spot for Firestorm, too. It was a challenge to write the only DC/Marvel comic with a single African-American protagonist. I think Jamal Igle and I mostly did justice to it.
Any book you would rather no-one ever mentioned ever again?
Oh, sure. But I won’t mention them. I don’t want to insult anyone else involved with them.
Any plans for more novels in the future?
I’ve just been noodling around with one — an original novel — the past few weeks. It’s rather ambitious and would require a lot of concentrated effort. If I can clear the time later this year, I’d like to see if I can pull it off. I’ve done a lot of diverse jobs the past few months; it’d be nice to kick back, do a few comics projects, and give that book a real try.
The Dark Future novels didn’t pay a lot, but they were great because (a) there was a great deal of creative freedom and (b) they taught me how to write a novel. The first one, American Meat, is a lot of fun, I think; but by the second one, Reality Bites, I could tell I understood much better how to pace out 70,000 words. Which, by the way, is a lot of words. And that’s not even a very long novel.
You have done a number of your own comics for smaller publishers, is this something you will continue to do, or do you see yourself become more and more mainstream in your comics output?
I love hopping around from genre to genre, publisher to publisher. I have a couple of original projects I’m trying to settle with publishers now. That stuff tends to get pushed aside a bit when higher-paying work comes in — especially since there are usually tight deadlines attached. But the original projects are very important to me.
Which has been more rewarding to yourself, editing or writing?
Pushed to the wall, with a gun against my head, I’d have to say writing; the finished product is all yours. But as I said above, I don’t see any reason why one can’t feed into the other. I’d love to edit a magazine like the ‘60s incarnations of Creepy or Eerie; Archie Goodwin used to write most of the scripts himself, and then he’d hire the best artists in the field to do six- or eight-page stories. Of course, he did it partly because he couldn’t afford to pay writers as well. But it still sounds like a fun playground…at least until all the deadlines and artists drove you away, screaming and babbling.
James Dodsworth - Born and raised in Yorkshire, residing in London since 2000, James has a Law Degree and works for the Anti-Financial Crime Office of a International Asset Management Company. He is a writer and editor for FractalMatter.com.
But his main claim to fame is living next to the pub where Shaun of the Dead was conceived.