Interview by Pádraig Ó Méalóid
This interview came about in a very roundabout sort of a way. In July2004 I bought a copy of The Fleetway Companion on eBay. When I went to pay for it, I found out I was buying it from George Khoury, who wrote The Extraordinary Works of Alan Moore and Kimota! I’d previously written a review of Kimota! For The Alien Online at
www.thealienonline.net
so, between one thing and another, George ended up sending me a copy of his third book, TrueBrit, for review. Along the way, he mentioned that Leah Moore had said good things about the book on her website, and sent me the URL.
I knew Leah was Alan Moore’s daughter, and also that she had written a few pieces for Wildstorm, so went to have a look around, where I found that she was now writing in conjunction with her then husband-to-be, John Reppion. What really caught my interest, though, was the mention of what was then called ‘The IPC Project.’ This would eventually, of course, become Albion. I dropped them an email, joined their bulletin board (the only one I’m actually a member of), and ended up not only becoming something of an expert on Albion and related things, but also asking them both to come over to Dublin as guests of P-CON III, which took place in March 2006. Along the way we became friends, and we started this interview, all the way back in October 2005. I’d ask a few questions, and Leah & John would write the answers whenever they had the time. After a while, I’d ask a few more questions, and so on. And now it’s finally finished, and I hope you all like the results. These things take time, you know!
PÓM: So, to begin at the beginning, how did you two meet?
John Reppion: We first met when I was 15 and Leah was 16, as we knew a lot of the same people and hung around in the same places. Leah moved to Manchester to study when she was 19 and I stayed here in Liverpool. Then in 2001, I was working in an off licence when Leah and Amber came in to buy some fags. Leah had just moved back to Liverpool after completing her University degree. We bumped into each other about the place a couple of times, started going out and within a month or so we’d moved into our first flat together.
PÓM: You say you were working in an off-licence. Did you both have the usual odd collection of jobs that writers always seems to have in their pasts?
Leah Moore: I’m a work-shy fop by trade, so by going to university I managed to avoid gainful employment, and indeed entry into the real world, until I graduated. Once I graduated I worked in the bar and box office of a small theatre, and that was that until I stopped to concentrate on writing comics. I did used to teach pottery evening classes when I was fifteen, before I left school. I painted teapots and dragons and stuff and sold them to friends and relatives. No doubt these will become much sought after collectors’ items… I’m like the Clarice Cliff of the early nineties! John worked the early shift in a petrol station I believe, which meant getting up at five in the morning and trying to remember the code for the alarm, despite being still unconscious. I think the armed response unit only came out a couple of times…but that was possibly enough. I don’t know what other weird jobs he’s had; I imagine he was also doing his best to be a proper slacker. We all did man, it was the checked shirts. (If it’s good enough for Buddy Bradley…) Since I gave up real work I have noticed a decline in my standard of living, to the point where I am considering trying out crazy jobs to make ends meet. I am technically self-employed so I would have to find out how to put these jobs through the books too. Ah, it’s a hard life in the real world, I must say.
John: Apart from the petrol station job (just to clarify, there was only actually one armed response incident) I’ve worked doing “ground clearance and landscaping” (picking up syringes and pulling out weeds round the backs of council properties with a load of lads doing community service. Thanks for that whole New Deal thing Tony Blair), In a Pawn Shop (that’s P-A-W-N) and in my spiritual home the off-licence. Speaking of being self employed I had a lady come round doing one of those MORI polls not so long ago. She asked me what our yearly household income was and when I told her she said “No, per YEAR.” I nodded. “No, no. HOUSEHOLD income, you AND your wife”. I nodded again. “Really?” She looked at me as if she wanted to give me some money for a cup of tea or something. Alluring business this comic writing lark.
PÓM: Leah, the pottery class sounds intriguing, especially as you were so young teaching it. Can you tell me more about that? Were you just a child pottery genius, or what?
Leah: The pottery class began as the two-week work experience bit that you have to do when you’re fifteen. Me and a mate from school went to do it and the woman who ran the shop asked me to stay on doing teapots. It was fun to paint stuff and then have it fired and everything, I remember getting half way round a big giant bowl I was painting and I picked it up to turn it and the green ware (unfired clay) made a dink noise. Sure enough when it came out it had a huge big crack in it. (Such is the drama of a pottery studio!) The teaching was just supervising really, people would come and paint ornaments and trinket boxes and I would help them and advise them on colours and dry brushing and stuff. It was really nice just to sit with lots of women all drinking mugs of tea and painting away for the evening. I stopped doing it because I was trying to figure what to do with myself and wanted to go to university and get quite drunk a lot, so the teapot painting fizzled out. I do miss it though. Very therapeutic for a hangover! Also…some lucky folk out there have very limited edition Leah Moore teapots and don’t even know it!
Hope that clears up the mystery of the missing wild years of Leah Moore! (Is there anything more thrilling than middle-aged hobbyists?)
PÓM: Did you both always want to be writers, and how is it now that you’re doing it?
Leah: I didn’t to be honest. I used to write little stories and comics and stuff as a kid, but I no more thought about it than any kid would. Also, as dad was doing it already it didn’t seem like a glamorous kind of thing to do. I don’t know why it didn’t put me off completely to be honest. You would think having had the first hand experience of the long hours, little pay and no recognition a young inexperienced writer has, I might have decided not to bother. The thing I love about it is the old ’something from nothing’ aspect where after the hours/weeks of gruelling labour there’s something to show for it. With university, all I would have to show for an essay was a mark which would be percentaged to death and split this way and that and would go towards a small bit of my degree, with bar work all I had to show for it was soggy trouser cuffs on my jeans, a fierce addiction to tomato wheat crunchies and a deep loathing for people who put chewing gum in ashtrays. This working environment has to be the best though because it has a kettle and a cat and a bath, and my bed and all kinds of nice things, so it wins hands down. I find the ideas side of writing really hard, because I always think in terms of an English essay: research and compare and contrast… analyse imagery, nothing to do with idea-making. Luckily I am good at the finishing of things, I can make something sound right, and I can find words for things quite well, and the do more poncey side of writing, which is very satisfying indeed. It still takes me bloody ages though. John always says that he had no idea he wanted to be a writer until he started doing it, but then realised that it brought together lots of things he was interested in already, and gave him a way to make sense of it all. Sounds quite grown up to me.
PÓM: John, your first published work was, as far as I know, the lovely ‘Childe of Hale’ piece you wrote for Fortean Times. How did this come into being, and did you just send it off to them cold, or what?
John: >Yeah, pretty much. I wanted to prove to myself that I could write something good enough to be published before Leah and I had anything out together. I did it so that I could believe in myself as a writer (corny as that sounds). I’ve been an FT subscriber for a long time now so I thought I’d have a crack at doing something for them. I just went on their website, found the contributors guidelines and took it from there. The subject of John Middleton just seemed like a really natural one given the local history and my own experiences of visiting his home, grave and such. I’m still very proud of the article and I’d love to write for FT again. Unfortunately, the last couple of things I’ve submitted to them have been rejected (an article about the huge subterranean Georgian maze built beneath Liverpool by Joseph Williamson, which will now be published in Strange Attractor Journal #3, and a piece about the Yarmouth Suspension Bridge Disaster of 1845) but I’ll keep plugging away.
PÓM: What does an average working day for you both consist of, if such a thing actually exists?
John: It really depends what we’re working on and what stage were at in the process. At the moment, for example, we’re working on a proposal so there’s a lot of just sitting and talking and making notes. Over the last few days we’ve basically been taking it in turns to sit and add to the proposal. Leah will sit and type for a couple of hours, tweaking what’s already there and expanding upon the existing ideas. Then she’ll stop, we’ll have a talk about it and I’ll get on the PC and do the same. Once there’s nothing that either of us wish to add to the document or change about it then the proposal will be finished. It’s relatively simple but pretty long winded and labour intensive.
Typically we don’t get started on our work ‘til around mid-afternoon, and then we usually stop and have our tea (by which I mean “dinner”) in the early evening. After tea we’ll often continue working into the early hours of the morning. All of which makes it sound like we’re slogging away all the time but I suppose it depends on your definition of work. In a typical day we’ll discuss some ideas we’ve been chewing over (and probably disagree), answer a bunch of emails, chase a few people up about possible work and/or projects in the pipeline, maybe work on some separate things (articles for The End Is Nigh and such), check the boards, update the News Blog (if there’s any news) AND work on whatever our main thing is at the time.
There are times when the pair of us will literally spend the whole day typing more or less without a break, but that really intense stuff can only happen after protracted periods of pondering and disagreement. Typing stuff up is the easy bit; it’s coming up with the ideas that takes the time.
PÓM: Leah, you broke into comics first, with some pieces in ABC’s Tom Strong comics, although I believe John was co-writing even then. How did all this come about, and how did all this lead to you both getting more work for Wildstorm? Were they in any way resistant to you both wanting to write jointly?
Leah: Well I did the Solomon story while I was on duty in the box office of a small local theatre. In between customers, phone calls and queries from staff I sat and doodled away until I filled eight pages. Dad had just asked if I had ever thought of writing something for comics, and I thought what the hell… why not. I submitted it to Scott Dunbier at Wildstorm using John’s hotmail address to send it anonymously. Scott liked it and decided to use it for Tom Strong’s Terrific Tales #5. The Saveen strip followed, and then I got an email from Scott setting me “homework” to come up with an original story proposal for a six-issue mini-series. It was during this time that I found myself talking to John more and more and co-creating the series with him. When Scott accepted the proposal I asked if we could be credited as co-writing the series and Scott had no problem with that. I think as long as the story is good it doesn’t matter who writes it.
John: I felt weird about it myself because it seemed as though I might be kind of jumping on the bandwagon or something. To be honest though, by the time I was worrying about that it was already too late because we were already collaborating. It all happened in a totally natural way, we just bounced ideas off of each other and Wild Girl basically emerged from that.
PÓM: In hindsight, how do you feel Wild Girl fared in the marketplace, and do you think your publishers could have pushed it a bit more?
Leah: Wild Girl wasn’t pushed massively, and I think it could have sold really well if it had been pushed a little bit, but not at comic fans. I have had kids and young girls come up to me at conventions and say how much they liked it, my ten-year-old nephew loved it, my cousin of the same age loved it. The audience Scott told us to aim it at was basically teenagers. We did that, quite well I thought, and then it was criticised by middle-aged male comic fans. It seems that western comics are the only place where teenage girl’s opinions don’t rule the market, which in Wild Girl’s case was a shame. I am proud of it as a book, and as our first proper collaboration. There were lessons we learnt along the way about story telling and pacing and stuff, but I think for a first effort it stands up well.
John: I don’t think that there can be any doubt that the book would have sold better if it had been promoted more. However, I think that’s probably true of anything. We’re always going to want our work to be pushed and touted as much as is physically possible because it’s our stuff and we believe in it 100%. That’s not to say that Wildstorm didn’t have faith in the project or want it to succeed but it was just one mini-series of many that they were putting out at the time. I think we were given as big a push as any comparable book when Wild Girl came out but I think that we could have been promoted from a different angle. Like Leah said: we aimed the book pretty squarely at teenage girls, a market that is notoriously overlooked by mainstream comic books, and if we’d been promoted as such we might have done better. We were trying to fill a niche (not in a cynical way) but no one really realised it. .
PÓM: After Wild Girl, you found yourselves as writers on Albion. How did that whole project come about?
Leah:The initial idea for the project was Shane Oakley’s. He is the biggest fan of old British comics you can get, and he was really into the idea of tracking down who owned the old characters and whether we could somehow get hold of the rights.
He was talking about this to dad, and was saying how cool it’d be to do a project together some time. This was at the point when dad was trying to wind down his comic work, so, much as he wanted to work with Shane, he didn’t think he’d have the time to do anything. Dad asked Scott Dunbier at Wildstorm if there was a chance he could find out who owned the characters. Scott said he thought Warner Bros did, and said he’d look into it.
In the meantime, Andrew Sumner at IPC magazines was already talking to Bob Wayne at DC comics about the vast numbers of British comics characters mouldering away in a dusty corner of IPC’s offices. He thought it would be great if there was some way that they could be brought back into use again.
Now IPC, DC comics and Wildstorm productions are all owned by the multinational conglomerate Time Warner AOL, so it was simply a matter of Andrew cross-licensing the characters for use by Wildstorm. So Scott spoke to Bob and said “Alan Moore says he wants to do a story with all the old comic characters in” Bob said “IPC want to license the characters” (Or something along those lines) and the deal was made. The amazing thing was at our end, finding out that it was a done deal that could be started at once, and Shane finding out it wasn’t just a pipe dream but a reality. Dad decided he didn’t have time to script the series but was happy to take a background role by plotting the story, while John and I badly needed the gig, so were happy to act as script monkeys for the project. It was a weird bit of serendipity really. That’s the short answer by the way!
PÓM: As you are both too young to remember the characters first time around, did you have to do a lot of research for the story?
Leah: We did loads of research. We mostly remembered the humour characters, but all the action stuff was pretty much over by the early eighties, so we had to acquaint ourselves with those characters a bit better. Shane sent us tons of comics in the post, loads of photocopies and bits, and we used the web extensively. A good friend of ours at http://www.internationalhero.co.ukwas an invaluable source of info, and we used their excellent site as the source for any trivia we weren’t certain of. We had to cobble our knowledge together, but everyone who knew the comics then says we’ve got them spot on, so we must be doing something right.
PÓM: I’m sure you’ve seen the extensive annotations that are online for Albion. So, do you think the annotators are fearless seekers after the truth, or sad losers who need to get out more? And more seriously, have there been places where people either directly identified or just guessed something you thought was safely hidden until you wanted to reveal it? Do you think these kinds of annotations are a help or a hindrance to writers like yourselves?
John: It’s a complicated question because on one hand we tried to write the series so that it’d be totally accessible (and make sense) to readers who knew nothing about these old characters. On the other hand we’ve crammed the whole thing so full of references and nods and winks that it’d be really rubbish if no-one noticed or acknowledged them. I think that the annotations are a great excuse for interested and knowledgeable readers to get together online and exchange information. Also, if readers who are less well-informed want to find out more about the characters and stuff then Damian’s site is an invaluable resource. So, I suppose I’d have to go with the “fearless seekers of the truth” moniker if I had to pick one. I don’t think that anything major has been exposed prematurely by the annotations but there’s lots of stuff where people go “I’ve noticed X and Y, does that mean Z?” and we have to just go “no comment.” I think that’s all part of the fun though and personally I’ve really enjoyed being annotated, it makes you feel like people are at least paying attention to the series.
PÓM: Having finished Albion, are there any of the characters that either of you would like to do more work on? Or any favourite characters from the series in general?
Leah: Personally, I loved writing Fred and Martina; they had such a beautiful thing going on there… I loved writing Archie, and the other robots too. They were really fun.
John: Too many good characters to choose from. I really liked writing Danny ‘cause we made him a scouser but tried to keep it as realistic as possible. I’ve read reviews where people have complained that we’ve been over-flexing our colloquialism muscles and trying far too hard with some of the dialogue which is hilarious as Danny (who must surely be the prime candidate for these accusations) is basically written in exactly the same way that I talk.
PÓM: You’re both now signed up exclusively for twelve months to Dynamite Entertainment. What does this entail?
Leah: It’s not exclusive at all. I don’t know how that whole rumour got going. Hopefully people won’t believe it and will still offer us work! The deal is for twelve issues of Dynamite comics. Now whether that is twelve issues of one, or four of one series and eight of another or what, we really can’t say. We know they have some really cool properties at the moment so it’d be fun to get our mucky paws on some of them!
John: We’re working on issue one of our first Dynamite project right now and plan to have the script finished within the next seven days.
PÓM: Now that you’re both full-fledged comic professionals, and that comic fans can occasionally be a strange and obsessional bunch, have you had any overly intense fannish encounters yet? Given that you’re respectively the daughter and son-in-law of Alan Moore, has that led to any peculiar behaviour on people’s parts?
Leah: We haven’t had anything too weird yet. It’s all quite odd really. I’ve had a few people just kind of staring…and not speaking. But I assumed that it was either my dazzling beauty or that I had food in my teeth. Those things aren’t mutually exclusive by the way. I had a guy look up at our names on the sign behind us and then down at me and then up again, and then just say “Damn!” but in an amazed American way, not in a flustered British way. Nobody has tried to kidnap me yet if that’s what you mean.
John: Someone once asked me if I was “one of Alan Moore’s people” which unsettled me greatly. The way he said it didn’t sound like he meant, “do you work for or with Alan Moore” it was more a kind of “were you created by or are you subservient to Alan Moore.”
PÓM: Although you’ve both largely remained silent about Alan’s films so far, you’ve decided to speak out publicly about how you feel about V for Vendetta. Can you tell us what you think of the film, and why you decided to speak up?
Leah: I think that the film is visually very impressive, that it uses some nice set pieces from the book in similar ways, but to a different end. V for Vendetta is such a grim vision. It’s 80’s British politics taken to their (at that time inevitable) conclusion. Britain was a fascist state already in all but name, and V just said, right that’s it, the only solution is the opposite to all this, the only way is total Anarchy. Now the anarchy V features is total mental nonsense anarchy where you pretend to put someone in a concentration camp, where you murder people in bizarre ways, basically a very absolute standpoint.
The film however makes that anarchy into vaudeville. It takes out the nightmarish unpredictability of an anarchic vision, and replaces it with a character that makes overblown and dramatic gestures. There is I think a difference between blowing things up for the general good of the population, to ensure their eventual freedom, (forever!) and to make them open their eyes to their own complacency, and just blowing shit up because you can.
V in the book wasn’t arsed if the people of Britain were free or not, he was on a mental revenge kick and was acting like a horrific loony. The thing is the film hasn’t been sanitised exactly; it’s just been kind of twisted to fit the modern day version of the ethics in the book.
Now we all feel a bit outraged by the political decisions being made on our behalf, we all like to think of ourselves as aware of major issues, and we all like to imagine that we in our own small ways are doing something to help. Basically, we all still believe in democracy. We think that if only we could elect someone who knew what was what then everything would be all right. What V said was that it doesn’t work, and that it is pointless to expect any politician to be any different from the previous ones. The film makes John Hurt’s ‘1984′ style character into Hitler, which is silly, and it makes him into a caricature of evil, which is a lot less threatening and horrific than the everyday atrocities committed by governments in the name of “Good” and God and truth. Real life, and the original V for Vendetta say that when we find ourselves ruled by fascists, they won’t have comedic moustaches and large scary red signs (a bit of a give away) they will be exactly like all the previous governments, and we will have voted them in, and we won’t even know how frightening they are.
I suppose if the film caused millions of people to rise up and quietly elect a better government, and made wars end, and made countries alter their foreign policy, then it would be nice, but it has nothing to do with V for Vendetta. Watch a Michael Moore film followed by The Abominable Dr Phibes, and you will have pretty much the same feeling as you would from seeing V.
PÓM: You have a few more projects due to see the light of day soon. Do you want to tell us all about them?
John: Well, we’ve got a short story called “Lusca” in the Accent UK Monsters anthology which is out at the end of the month. “Lusca” provided us with our first opportunity to collaborate with Spring Heeled Jack creator and artist Dave Hitchcock who we’ve both been big fans of for years now. Dave really seemed to like our script and we all seem to be very much on the same wavelength so the story has come out really fantastic (even if I do say so myself). The anthology also boasts an exclusive Shane Oakley cover, which is truly wonderful. I can’t wait to get my hands on a copy to see everyone else’s stuff.
There’s an article written by me (and illustrated by Leah) in The End Is Nigh #3 which will be launched at the Bristol Comics Expo next month.
We’ve written a tale entitled “The Horror Beneath” for the Dark Horse Book Of Monsters, which should be out in June or July, with art by Timothy Green whose Swamp Thing work we both loved.
“Project Obeah” is the title of our eleven-page story, beautifully rendered by Jeremy Dale of Absolute Zeros fame for Th3rd World’s flagship publication Space Doubles which should be arriving in shops sometime this summer.
I’ve managed to get an article of mine into Strange Attractor Journal #3, which I’m very proud of. The book should be published in July or August according to their website.
In my spare time I’m working on some stuff for Revenant Magazine, an article from which will be debuting in new Irish fanzine Puny Earthling #1 in August.
Leah’s got a project, which we’re not allowed to talk about, that will be in shops in December. We’re not talking comic shops here, just “shops.” Exciting stuff.
On top of all that we’re steaming ahead with our Dynamite work and actively pursuing any other series opportunities we can.
PÓM: Where would you like to see yourselves in five years time? Although I know you hate being asked this, are there any of the major (or even minor) comics characters you’d fancy having a shot at?
John: In five years time I just want us to be more established with more books under our belt, keeping regular gigs and earning regular money. Not much to hope for is it? Ah well, I suppose it’s important to have realistic goals.
As far as characters we’d like to write goes, basically we’re happy to have a crack at anything as long as we can find something in there to keep us interested. As we’ve said previously, stuff like Batman or Superman would potentially be the least interesting because their attitudes and actions are so well established already. That’s certainly not to say that we wouldn’t love to write Batman or Superman but it might not be the most exciting thing to do.
PÓM: Thank you both very much for your time, and your vast patience as this interview slowly accreted over what must be months!
Leah & John: Our pleasure, Pádraig.
Thanks to OK Comics in Leeds who had Leah & John at a signing and allowed Sabrina to snap a few pictures
Pádraig Ó Méalóid is a middle-aged Irishman with an Alan Moore obsession. He has a ridiculously large collection of Graphic Novels. (photo here, and list here.) He also knows far too many things about the history of Miracleman, which he intends to get down on paper some day.
He likes to write, preferably things that require insane amounts of research, which is one of his favourite activities.
When he’s not being obsessional about the works of Alan Moore, he occasionally finds time to update the news section of Irish Sci-Fi News, as is currently working on his first fanzine, to be called Puny Earthling.
He is married to The Lovely Deirdre, the most patient woman in the world.
