Terry Moore Talks Five Years: “I Think I’ve Set Myself Up For This”

Last week, fan-favorite indie cartoonist Terry Moore, creator of titles like Strangers in Paradise, Rachel Rising, and Motor Girl, released the first issue of Five Years. The series, which brings together characters from all three of those titles plus Moore’s Echo, centers on a group of women who band together to prevent the construction of a weapon of mass destruction that is almost certain to destroy the world within five years. The events were set up last year in Strangers in Paradise XXV, as Moore used Katchoo to explain the weapon, where it came from, and who put it in place, so that Five Years can more or less be off and running.

The Echo characters are the big question mark, as none of them appeared in Strangers in Paradise XXV, and the technology behind the Five Years bomb is tied directly to the catastrophic event that kickstarted that series. There are a lot of open questions, and we figured the start of this massive, culminating series might be as good a time as any to try and get some answers. Moore recently joined me for a discussion on Five Years at the Emerald City Video Podcast. You can hear the whole thing here, or read on for the highlights.

When we talked, two years ago at Comic-Con, I asked, “Are you going to make the big crossover for the 30th anniversary?” You said you didn’t think it was going to wait that long. When Strangers in Paradise XXV happened and we started seeing Rachel and Jet pretty early on, I assumed that you were just talking about that, but this feels…bigger.

Yeah, it does. I wanted to blend it all, to make it all one story, which is dangerous. That’s not a given recipe for success. I mean, you could mess it up, but I felt like I was conscious of it for a long time during the making of each book, and I was kind of steering them in that way so that they could [cross over]. I think I’ve set myself up to do this.

It worked petty well in Strangers. One question I did have about the end of Strangers is when Tambi asks Katchoo to be part of the Task Force, Katchoo says no, because “if you guys fail, I want to have spent time with my kids.” Was that taking Katchoo off of the table, because it’s hard for her not to suck up all the oxygen in the room?

I feel that way about some of the other characters though, too. Tambi sucks up a lot of oxygen and Zoe does, so it’s I’ve got people that can compete with her on the page. I was thinking, it just seemed like everybody always assumes she’ll get into the middle of the fight but even James Bond has said no several times. I think it’s one of those things where you have to think, given what she had just been through and the question being posed, she would rather stay right where she is for the moment. It’s going to take something more threatening, more immediately threatening, to get her out.

Also, Tambi’s plan is her usual MO of search and destroy. Katchoo thinks a slightly different way. It doesn’t mean that she’s going to go home and ignore the problem. It means that she needs time to think and process and come up with her own approach.

A kind of obvious question: is your plan to have this actually go for five years, or do you think that you’re going to compress time?

In my dreams, I wish it would go five years, because that would be cool. But in the real world, I’m not sure I can get it five months in the comic business. I can’t take anything for granted, so all I know to do is to dive in and just start telling the story, and then hope that the industry will continue to be there for me.

I’m a very fortunate person to be able to make my own comics and sell them, and I use the comics industry to do that. I don’t take it for granted. I think it’d be a mistake for me to say, “Oh, we’ve got this big, five year plan.” Usually when people talk about, “Oh, we’ve got this big huge multi-year plan,” and it’s so really complicated, they do three issues and stop. I’ve seen that happen a lot, so I don’t want to do that. I’m just going to dive in. The story is five years, not the real world, so it’s all fiction. It’d be swell if I could do Five Years, Four Years, Three Years, Two Years, because that’d be fun.

I actually want to be more focused on the story, and let the story do its own timeframe. That’s a long answer just to say that. I’m going to focus on the story, and the story has its own timeframe. I should’ve just said that.

Ever since Tambi showed up in Echo, the idea that these characters all exist in the same space has been real for fans. Obviously, every time you mix and match them, it tends to make news with the people who only remember Strangers in Paradise. Is it a little strange to you, like talking about this book as though it’s totally unheard of, when really, this has been there in the background the whole time?

I’ve been slowly trained to realize that this is how it is. Every day of my life, I meet somebody who’s read none of them or one of them. It’s just how it is. When I announced Five Years, I got a lot of tweets and Facebook messages back saying, “Do I need to read the other books to understand this one?”

My answer was “No. Just if you want to read Five Years, go for it and enjoy it on the level it is. Just realize, that if you want to know more about the characters, all of them have backgrounds. There’s a story behind all these characters and you can go find that story if you’re interested.” I think that’s that’s probably the healthiest way to approach it.

Is it kind of helpful when you encounter new or lapsed readers to be able to point now and say, “Strangers in Paradise is on ComiXology Unlimited now?”

Well, that’s another world. I don’t get into that so much. I just focus on making the story. The business stuff is really run by Robyn [Moore, my wife and publisher]. All I know is that ComiXology has been really good for us. It’s like having a second distributor. Like when we all had all multiple distributors, it feels like that. It feels, I don’t want to compare it directly, but it feels a little bit like we got a second distributor back in the business. I think they have their own group. I know for a fact that I sell books to people that also read digital, so I hope that that’s just the case, in general, for all retailers and people who are selling books. At my table, that so many people come up and say, “I’ve read what I wanted to online and now I’m here to get the book,” or vice-versa or whatever. Yeah, hey, whatever works. I just want everybody to read the story.

One thing to admit here is that after I’ve been in it for a while — 25 years — it’s kind of like being a musician. I almost don’t care what format I’m in anymore, because I’ve been in several formats. Whether you buy my stuff on an LP or an 8-track tape or a cassette player or a CD or YouTube, just listen to the band. Just read my stories, whatever format you want. If we switch to sky writing, I hope that they’ll read my skywriting story too.

That’s actually, the music analogy gives me an opportunity to ask: are you still working on the Griffin Silver album that you talked about releasing as part of the twenty-fifth anniversary, or is that getting pushed off to 30?

Well, it’s too late for 25. That ship has sailed. We’re into 26 now and looking forward. What we talked about here was remaking the Strangers in Paradise Treasury. Really, the first Treasury that we made years ago, we only went up to issue #60, and so it’s only half-complete. We’re talking about finishing that out and including Strangers in Paradise XXV in it, so kids, everything.

Then in that big, new Treasury edition, have a music CD in there. Yeah, I am still planning to still record, and I’m very, very, very, very, very shy about getting into any of that with anybody because I don’t want anything to take away from the book. It would be fun to have a CD in one special little place, if somebody wanted to get that Treasury. That’s going to be a big, monster coffee table type book. I don’t know if we’re going to release it in 2020, or not quite sure when we’re going to do it.

We’ve talked about this before, that the reason you’re not monthly is because you do, between you and Robyn, basically, everything for the book. It’s not like you have a ton of downtime.

Yeah, like zero downtime, you’re right. We do it all and it is very time-consuming. I’m amazed at it. Then, when I have to put together a collection, like a SiP book. Anything to do with a SiP was hard, because there was so much of it, so we would decide, “We need to put a black dot on every page.” Well, that means I had to go through 2,400 pages and put a black dot on there.

Then we’d send it off the printer, and he’d send me a new proof back, and then I had to proof 2,400 pages again, just to make sure they didn’t delete one. Everything is time consuming when you’ve been at it for so long. It just adds up. Strangers in Paradise is like a mountain now. Every time I want to do something with that, I have to push a mountain. I’m probably making it worse by putting them all together into one huge landmass now, one big story.

Going back to that Comic-Con, when you announced 25, somebody asked, “What’s next?” I think you said either Rachel or Echo, that you wanted to wrap up dangling plot threads. Is it safe to assume that the Echo characters are going to be much more of a kind of presence here than they were in the Strangers revival?

To me, this is like an Avengers story. When you watch, when you read The Avengers or watch the movie, you are getting all of their stories, so it’s going to be that way for me. The characters from Echo are just as important as the characters from Rachel in their attempts to address the problem in the story. Yeah, each one of these character groups has my respect and I want them to all get equal time.

There will need to be a golden thread, otherwise it’s a lot of misaligning, so there’s several common denominators and golden threads that tie it all together. A couple of them are characters, and some of it is just story continuity, things that tie it together…both in a good way and in a bad way. In the world of physics, some bonds that bind are bad news.

In the spirit of that, obviously, it’s been 25 years of everything you write getting options and then nothing actually getting made.

Welcome to the world, yeah.

Putting it all together — is that a thing that concerns you at all? Do you ever think “Oh, this might make it easier or harder to package this the next time around?” Because now you’ve got all of these entanglements between the characters.

No. Everything is taken now, so there’s no repackaging any of it. I’ve retained my ability to continue to make books, any book I want, so I have my book, my freedom in my world. In terms of like is Echo spoken for? Yes. Rachel? Yes. Strangers? Yes. They’re all taken, and it’s up to them. They’re doing well.

I’ve noticed, I’m sure you’ve noticed, that when you see people say thank you for their award, they always talk about somebody having faith in them for 16 years. That’s how long it took to get it made, unless you’re inside the system and people can make whatever idea you came up with. If you’re an outsider like me, and trying to get things to develop, there’s a process, a natural time where you have to find the right people, and they have to find the next correct circle of people, and so on. It’s a very organic process.

At first it seems impossible or just random, but after you’ve been doing it a while, you see that there’s a logic to it. It does kind of become something you can navigate. I’m feeling pretty good about it. I know that something will happen, something will get made but now what I tell people now is, “In my lifetime, please. Please don’t take another 25 years. I’ll be gone.” I would like to be able to watch one of these.

Did you know going into SiP XXV what kind the structure of this whole larger story was going to be, or was that a discovery along the way?

Well, I always have a general framework in my head when I start. I’ve described it as like a road trip, where I know what my destination is and the main things I want to get done along the way. Then, every day I work, I look for those individual moments of what’s said, flesh out the scene. It’s like my idea of the story is like a homework assignment. “Here’s an outline, now go make it real, flesh it out.” That’s what I do in the daily process, is flesh out the general ideas.

When I start an issue, I have maybe four major scenes in mind, and I know what the mood is, and how it’s impacting the people. Sometimes, if the conversation is tricky, I’ll write out the dialog, things like that. Or if I only have four pages but I have a nine page idea and I have to fit it into four pages, I’ll sit down and work that out in Final Draft or something.

I’ve got boxes and boxes of pencils and pens and art tools, and I just use whatever I need. It’s the same way with the writing. I have Final Draft, I have my Prose programs. I have my computer and my laptop. I have paper and pencil. Sometimes, I just stare at the ceiling. Whatever moves it all forward.

There were a lot of fun page turns in Strangers in Paradise XXV, when the scene moved from the setting of one comic to another. Is it a different dynamic trying to come up with those hell-yeah moments when they’re already all together?

For me, it wasn’t necessarily switching from New Mexico to Massachusetts. It was more about watching what happens when Katchoo is in the same space with Jet and they’re talking about Lilith. Katchoo meeting Lilith was a big, fun scene for me. Tambi having lunch with Zoe and Rachel, and Tambi seeing Zoe and kind of getting her impression of Zoe for the first time. To me, I feel like I worked a long time to earn the ability to get that moment.

I had went to all this trouble to describe Tambi and how she is, and then all this trouble to describe Zoe and how she is, just so I could have them meet at breakfast. There’s a different kind of payoff there. There’s satisfaction in making these individual characters and their stories, and then bringing them together, and watching the new dynamic happen. Man, there’s nothing more fun than that. This must have been what it was like for Stan and Jack whenever they wanted to bring two people together for a blockbuster story. It’s a lot of fun. Especially if you have a reason. It’s not like you’re just saying, “Oh, they’re going to accidentally cross paths in one issue.” No, this is a whole different thing.

I loved that beat from the Strangers in Paradise XXV finale, when somebody mentions Tambi and Sam realizes like, “What? Wait? This is Tambi Baker’s family?” Just the face that she had in that panel, you could feel the weight of all of the information that just hit her.

Yeah, exactly. See, that’s so cool because you know everything there is to know, that’s available to us, about Tambi. You know so much about her, so you get the gravitas of that moment, you get it. Hopefully, a new reader will read that and think, “Oh, okay, so Tambi is somebody that they know. Maybe I’ll see her again.”

Then later on, when they read all that, they’ll hopefully get the same feeling, buy they’ll have to go through a different process to understand. That’s a long road, that well is deep. Whether you read it all first and then you get it, or you see this stuff and then go back and fill in the gaps, whatever works.

You left Katchoo and Francine on the shelf with that door closed for a long time. Is it tough for you, as somebody who’s emotionally invested in these characters, to revisit some of these things, and not necessarily break, but kind of tamper with the happy endings?

No, because that’s not life. You don’t get to have a happy day at the age of 32, and then the rest of your life is a breeze. That’s just not how it works. When the girl finally becomes queen and marries the king and then it’s a big celebration, the next day, the Visigoths could have attacked. All you get is that moment. I think, for me, I had the opposite feeling, that it was wonderful to be able to go back and see a little bit of the life they were having with in Santa Fe, with the girls in preschool, and having a house and SUV and running around and having a young family life. That’s cool, that’s what you kind of hope for.

But we’ve established that Katchoo lives in a dangerous world, so the stuff happens and she has to go out there, and that’s really kind of a different kind of heroism — when the hero who doesn’t look for trouble, but it comes back and finds them. Who’s going to get up from their comfortable position and go do something about it? Well, that’s Katchoo and Tambi, and apparently, some of these other characters too. So I didn’t feel guilty about it at all. If you have a good day, congratulations, you had a good day. No promises for tomorrow.

Is it a little bit different writing? Certain bits of Rachel not withstanding, your writing is not bleak. Most of the time there’s a working assumption that most of the characters are going to make it out all right. When you have kind of an audience that has that expectation, is it hard to kind of write around that expectation and make sure that you’re surprising them?

Yeah, because I could always pull the rug out. I think one of the reasons you’re picking up on the “not bleak,” is I’ve noticed a difference in my approach versus some other writers’ approaches, whether it’s in comics or in TV. Some things are bleak and you wonder why. My take from it is, is because of the writer. That he, the writer, actually doesn’t believe in anything. The characters have no hope because the writer has no hope, so there is no solution. They present these beautiful problems, but there really is no answer. They’re just going to run around until they’re all dead.

I don’t work that way. I don’t really believe that. My characters always have hope, and they’re working towards a solution — not just survival, but solutions. It makes a big difference in a story. I’m probably carrying my semi-dated hippie-ism towards all that. Having faith and believing that life can be beautiful. That trumps everything, all the little problems that we stir up as creatures. There’s an undercurrent of that idealism underneath all that, I guess. Not everybody has that now.

After SiP XXV, I almost thought you could just do a Tambi comic. Is it nice to have supporting characters who connect that much with the audience?

Yeah, it’s great. It’s very rewarding. I have that with Tambi and Zoe and Julie and Rachel, of course, Lilith. I have that in spades, actually. Any of these main characters could support a story of their own, and in my head, I see that story. I try to bring that, when I do get to use these characters, I try to inject as much of that as possible so that people can understand these characters have depth and they’re doing something when the camera’s not on.

I really don’t like useless characters that exist because I just need somebody to walk in and say something. I don’t do that. The closest I have to that is Video Pat. He’s the little dumpy guy with the mustache. He kept appearing at the different jobs around town during the first Strangers in Paradise series, and he’s a creepy little guy. He was my comedy relief, and he just kind of became a running gag, “Oh, there he is.” It’s like he became like a member of a comedy skit team, like, “Oh, there he is with a different costume.”

I really enjoyed putting him in to work at the rental agency at the airport in Boston, in Strangers in Paradise XXV. He’s the one renting the car out to Katchoo and everything. Even Video Pat has a life, to me. I can picture his apartment and all that kind of stuff when I’m drawing him and why he says what he says. Why he’s the umpteenth million person to say, in Boston, to say, “I know a place with good chowder.” All that kind of embarrassing stuff. He’s the closest I have to using somebody to just get messages across, but even he has a reoccurring role, kind of like a Seinfeld character.

A last SiP XXV question before we wrap up. Going in, did you know that the last cover of SiP XXV would be part of the recurring visual motif that you’ve had since the beginning?

Again, it’s just one of those things that I feel like I worked hard to get the right to do that. It takes a long time to set that up, to have one at the beginning, and the middle and the end. It was just a sheer joy to do that. It meant a lot to me and I’m glad you noticed.

I particularly liked the fact that David got incorporated into the final one.

Well, his presence will always be there, because he’s the father of Katchoo’s girls. So she keeps his presence known for her daughters’ sake.

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