Rachel Rising: The Whatdead

Today, the first volume of Terry Moore's creator-owned horror comic, Rachel Rising, arrives in stores an online in the form of a collected edition, Rachel Rising Volume 1: The Shadow of Death. While we've been bringing Rachel Rising to readers every week for a while, the earliest issues never featured full interviews at ComicBook.com. Moore, best known for his work on the legendary indie series Strangers in Paradise and its sci-fi-driven younger sibling Echo, has dabbled in horror in the past, writing not just a supernatural/serial killer story in SiP, but also a story for one of Bongos' Simpsons Treehouse of Horror issues. Rachel Rising is his first long-form horror work, though, and has so far been met with solid reviews and great word-of-mouth. He also recently went same-day digital, a first for Moore, and today will see the digital release-all at once--of Echo on ComiXology. In recognition of today's impending arrival, we've compiled the first three issues' worth of questions and answers about Rachel Rising, so that those of you picking it up in trade can read along with us. Need to try it before you buy it? Check out a preview of Rachel Rising in this week's issue of Image Comics' The Walking Dead.

Rachel Rising #1

ComicBook.com: You had said quite some time ago that you would have an announcement "soon" regarding digital delivery. Given your troubles with ordering through the direct-market, have you considered that as an alternative delivery route to your fans?Terry Moore:

 Not just me, but everybody in comics is watching the digital front move in like a storm. But it's not hitting like we thought. It's taking longer. There are no digital book success stories yet, most of the people on planes are not reading an ebook, nobody's rich yet... in fact, nobody's replaced their print income yet. When digital can replace your print income, then the storm will hit. My "announcement" was about the delivery systems being developed. But they're taking longer than promised and I've since become convinced that we should all stop focusing on the delivery mechanisms and focus on the business models. I don't care what gadget is in vogue this month, where's the frikkin' business model that will pay off my super-yacht mortgage? When does digital stop being the free-love commune of the geek set? We have houses and employees to support. Show me the frikkin' money. Well, I don't have any employees, but I'm sure somebody in comics has one... somewhere, doing something useful. And they need a salary. Man does not live on iCrap alone. How did it come to pass that Fabio Moon did a back cover for your first issue? He just sent it to me one day. How cool is that? We've been friends a long time. When you have talented friends, you get perks like that. I owe him one now. I can't help noticing that the mysterious woman who stands at the top of the muck while Rachel, ahem, rises...well, she's very quiet and zen. Reminds me a little of Francine's vision in the cemetery; is that how you imagine these deathly or supernatural figures in general? I wanted her to make an impression something like that. We'll see more of her and it will be interesting to see your idea of her challenged as we learn more about her. But I don't see the supernatural as figures in repose. I don't think the dead are calm at all. That's something Rachel is going to find out. After seeing the leaf set to light right at the start of the story, one has to assume that either Rachel has "powers" of some kind, or she's been resurrected by dark forces, or both. Will we find out soon, or is it part of the story's mystery, how she returned? How and why and what... that's the story, yeah. I'm not giving you any wiki-summary today! So it appears that she doesn't know who killed her, outside of just the shadowy figure. Will that be the long-term focus of the story or is that going to resolve itself and she'll move onto other endeavors eventually? I see the first story arc as establishing the characters and the town. But then new things happen beyond the discovery stage. The town itself produces the drama, beyond just Who Is Rachel. Manson (the town) is a like a character, too. You'll see. The four-panel page that follows right after the splash page (12, I think) is interesting in that the gutters on the page appear to form a cross--not only are there four equal panels, but the page itself is black at the edges and white inside. The gutters are that way all the way through but I first noticed it on that page. Was that just a graphic-design thing or is there subtext there? Both. The page design affects you as much as the art. All that hooey about subliminal messages... it's true. So I use everything I can think of to get my message and moods to rise from the page and into the head. When I looked at the pages in white, then added the black, it was so much closer to what I felt. White pages looked like Echo to me. Black is Rachel. Red is a Ferrari. It's as simple as that. The driver who helps Julie home reminds me a little of Dillon (from Echo)--riding to the rescue but allowing himself to be dictated to as he does so. I always thought Dillon was a little harried at first. Is this just "concerned motorist #1" or will we see more of him soon? It's a small town. Sooner or later their paths will cross. We talked a little on the podcast not long ago about your aborted "Motor Girl" series. Is Jet your way of incorporating that character into your current book and avoid the trademark issues altogether, kind of having your cake and eating it too? Yes. Damn, you caught me. I love my motor girl character. I'm glad it's her turn, she deserves a book. I didn't imagine that she would end up in a creepy town fighting the whatdead, but hey... who better? "Whatdead"... I just made that up. Undead isn't the right term for where we're going. Ray looks really familiar--like an actor I can't place. Did his looks come right out of the mind of Terry Moore or is there a model or inspiration for him? He is a mechanic I worked with at my first job at age 16, pumping gas at a Shell station in Texas. One eye, dirty mind, but good to his friends. I've known a lot of Rays. He's very real to me. Are we to guess after that last page that Rachel appears differently now to different people, or just that the speaker is "in tune" with something that we the reader are not yet? I guess even the first guy sorta noticed... TM: That's an interesting theory.

Rachel Rising #2

The mystery woman who was standing on the bluffs when Rachel came back from the apparently-dead seemed in the first issue to be a kind of quiet and gentle face of death. This month—not so much. I wanted to reveal her like an iceberg so you've just seen the tip and there's a bunch. She's a major part of the initial story, and I wanted her introduction to be confusing. You don't know whose side she's on, if she's good or bad, but by the time you finish the second and third issues you'll begin to realize that she's leaving a certain kind of path behind her, in how she's affecting her surroundings. You'll know her very well by the time we get to issue four. You've said in the past that the Town of Manson will be a big part of the story – Will we see more from the very disturbing little girl from this issue or is she just kind of a general representation of the creepiness in town? Actually you see the little girl return in issue three and you won't believe what she's doing. I'm just delighted by the characters that are in the town. The whole town is part of the story. The people in the town, and the town itself, is just creepy. It's like stuck in Halloween, so I'm really enjoying that and I'm enjoying revealing these layers. In terms of pacing: Is writing for a story with no definitive endpoint different from the approach you had to Echo? Yeah, it is, because when I find a good moment I always want to linger and present more character. I feel like it's worth it because unless you care about the person, you don't care what happens to them so the character moments are important. Because I don't have an ending in sight, I might linger just a little bit—like an extra page on a conversation or something—so it does make me feel a little less pressured. I don't want to use up my welcome and go too slow of course. Aunt Johnny is obviously something of an androgynous character, and the GBLT community has been behind your work since Strangers in Paradise. – Is it important to you to get that kind of diversity in characters into the book? I just feel like it's real life. I get real nervous when I get into a room full of white people—I mean, that's not real life, you know? So the same thing in a story: you don't want everybody to be middle-class white, or everybody's Judeo-Christian or something. I just see it as the variety of life. Actually, I grew up with a friend of the family and her name was Johnny and she wore cowboy boots and we all liked her and when I was younger I thought, "Johnny's different, and I don't know why, but we like her." So I grew up with an Aunt Johnny and this is my chance to put her in the story finally and I think she's cool. I think that without the complications of the baggage of husband and kids and an SUV and all that crap, you can get characters who are more flexible. If Rachel and Johnny decide to go to India tomorrow, they can. She doesn't need to say, "Oh, I need to get a babysitter," and blah blah blah. I like my characters to be flexible, in case they need to change and go somewhere. Their relationship is really great because while they get along really well and they care for each other, so far in the series neither of them is 100% sure that they can believe what the other one is saying yet. Is that going to be resolved soon or is that a longer-term issue for the characters? I like to reveal the story to the character along with the reader. It's a way of pretending like we're doing it first person. I really don't want you to know much more than the character so that you can both experience the discovery of the answers and things like that. So that's what I'm trying for there. And...I like writing stories where the characters lie. I don't use my characters for explaining the story—I hate that, I think it's a cop-out. They don't recap. I like the discovery of the story throughout the process. I do what I can to keep the mysteries from you, to keep things a mystery and let you always feel like you're learning something new. It's more interesting that way—it's like peeling away layers on an onion and you don't know what's inside. Is everybody in this town crazy, or are there going to be a couple of people like in Twin Peaks where they kind of realize they're in the middle of a group of insane people? [Laughs] Well, see, you've read two and I've read three. In three, it all happens in town and so there's a lot more town revealed in three and you'll get a feel for that balance. In three there's a scene in a jazz club and of course not everybody in the club is crazy, which makes the scary people...you need that contrast. They can't all be scary because then nobody is scary. So yeah, you need that contrast, and there's a variety. Maybe in another story Johnny would be creepy because she talks to dead people, but here she's endaring and kind of funny and maybe a bit odd but there are bigger fish to fry in terms of terror. It really is all about setting, isn't it? For instance, if we go to see a movie where it's all bad people shooting each other, you don't care who gets shot because they're all bad but if you go to see a romantic comedy and suddenly they're all gunned down, that's tragic. Because you didn't expect it, it was in the wrong setting. And that's how real life is, I think. You're making all of these plans and then boom! Disaster hits. As a horror writer, you need to know that to sucker-punch your reader and the best way is to not wear out your welcome and try to make every page scary because you can't. You have to have—nothing's loud if there's not a quiet, so it's all about contrast.

Rachel Rising #3

This issue reminds me more of the first issue than the second, in terms of the amount of silence it works with. Is that a conscious theme of the series, kind of letting the images do a lot of the talking.

It's a style that is part of Rachel and the way her story is told. I want each of my series to have their own personality. And the silent moments are part of Rachel's world. I got that from Hitchcock. The silent moments in Psycho are the most frightening because it makes it all too damn real.

Yes. I love music and its effect on life. And death. This issue continues to see all the new characters commenting on Rachel's appearance. Will this continue to color the way people see her throughout the series or is it just a matter of these changes being new and startling? I think you'll see something develop there. Alright, so when she threw up the bit of rope, my first thought was that it was hair—just to clarify, last month when Aunt Johnny found the item at the grave site and started freaking out, that was actually Rachel's hair, right? Spoilers. So...we're starting to see in this issue the way that Rachel's resurrection has affected her. Will this kind of extra-sensory jam she's got going on in this issue eventually help her to find out more about what's happened to her? She has no frikkin' idea what we have in store for her. The mystery is deeper than she suspects. You will see what I mean in issue four. Hopefully you will read the last page of issue four and say, "Holy crap!" Is there any endgame in place for this mysterious stranger who seems to be turning Manson upside-down? So far her actions seem to the readers to be fairly random. Her story is part of the first six-issue arc, so give it a couple more issues to explain. You've only seen her activity for "one night" in the story. It all connects, but it's a wide footprint. Are all these old-fashioned-looking cars important to a theme, or is it just that they're more fun to draw? Spoilers, my friend. Remember you said that. Those last few pages shows a town that's in the throes of some serious supernatural insanity. It's almost as though Rachel really didn't need to be the main character here. Is she "the key" to something or did you just kind of come up with this whole story and pick the character who was easiest to build a series around? Rachel is the gateway to a bigger story. We will have to see the story through her eyes. It's interesting; while most of this issue reads like part of a larger narrative or a graphic novel, that last sequence I alluded to feels like it could be a TV series finale or something like that. The creepy visuals and the story cliffhanger come together for a very effective feel of creepiness and finality. That's a good thing, isn't it? I would love to write a story that makes your hair stand on end.