Leah Moore Brings Back the Brits

This story originally appeared in PW Comics Week on January 16, 2007 Sign up now!

by Wil Moss, PW Comics Week -- Publishers Weekly, 1/16/2007

Scripting Alan Moore's plots might seem a little intimidating—unless you call him "dad." Leah Moore and her husband, John Reppion, recently completed the task of scripting Alan Moore's plots for Albion, a six-issue miniseries that was just collected in graphic novel format by Wildstorm.

Illustrated by Shane Oakley and George Freeman, Albion tells the story of several old British superheroes—the Steel Claw, Robot Archie and more—who have been forgotten about and locked away in an asylum, but someone is determined to return them to glory. Both a celebration of Britain's comics past and an effort to revive those comics for today's audience, Albion is part of a publishing deal between the characters' original publisher, IPC Media, and Wildstorm, which has also resulted in Dave Gibbons's and John Higgins's Thunderbolt Jaxon miniseries and Garth Ennis's and Colin Wilson's Battler Britton miniseries.

Albion is just the latest step in the writing career of the Liverpool-based wife-and-husband team, having previously written the miniseries Wild Girl and they are working currently on a Witchblade crossover with Oscar Wilde's Dorian Gray. Using literary characters in a superhero setting shows the apple hasn't fallen too far from the tree, but Moore and Reppion are finding their own voice and look forward to exploring it, as they discuss in the following interview.

PW Comics Week: Leah and John, describe your writing process, both with Alan Moore on Albion and between the two of you in general.

Leah Moore: The main thing was to make sure Dad was able to get on with his work with minimal interruptions. He had suggested we script Albion because he simply hadn't got enough hours in the day to add another series to his schedule. He wanted to get it all plotted as quickly as possible, and then we'd go off like little comic automata and produce the series. It pretty much worked, too. The only time we had to consult him was if there were problems with which characters we could use for the lead roles, or whether something should be put in one issue or the next. It was a painless process, really. He's used to thinking while he's talking, so we could just ring him and ask what he thought and he'd be able to think it through instantly.

Our own process is very simple, too; we break the issue down into scenes and then draw out the pages roughly, and we then take it in turns to type the pages up into a big weighty script. (Often who types it will depend on whether one of us has other stuff they want to do, or if one of us is off out to the pub.) Once it's typed we print it off to dialogue it, and then type that in and do the final polish. With Albion we'd then post a copy to Dad (he doesn't do the Internet or e-mail), and he'd phone through his "corrections" or suggestions or whatever, and we'd send it off to Wildstorm. The only difficult bit was balancing the creative suggestions of Dad and Shane [Oakley] at the same time. They both throw out masses of ideas the whole time, so we had the task of keeping the story on track while incorporating some of the ideas along the way.

I really enjoyed working with Dad, though; he's very appreciative of little extra flourishes and touches, so whenever we'd worked extra hard on something, he was always first to congratulate us on it.

PWCW: What were your goals with Albion? Jump-start some dormant characters or simply tell a good story?

LM: The goal was to try and convey the whole of the British comics industry as it was when it was in full swing, all at once, in six issues of modern comic. We wanted to try and get across every different type of character, every weird idea, every genius creator and every obsessed fan all in one go. The sad thing about British comics is that we are all so used to dismissing them in favor of adult-oriented, grown-up, modern American comics. The stock phrases of "Comics have grown up!" and "Not just for kids!" have been part of the industry for so long now that admitting to reading kids comics, even if you were a kid when you did it, is kind of embarrassing. Comic fandom only accepts the super-duper team-up type efforts that fill the shelves these days, that or the bizarro version of it which is the emotional, haunting indie comic, again for grownups, again very concerned with ticking the boxes of its readership. There aren't many stands at a comic convention where kids could stroll by and pick something up.

Albion is basically looking back on more innocent days, but days when creators were doing really exciting things in the pages of kids' comics. The characters in Albion are grownups, too, now, but we have tried to let them keep their original flavor and charm.

PWCW: How much research into the IPC characters did you do for Albion?

JR: We were both familiar with some of them (mainly the humor characters) as they had actually continued to see print into our childhoods. Also, I think we both had a kind of peripheral awareness of characters like the Steel Claw and Mytek the Mighty, but we certainly weren't experts on any of them, so research was a very big part of this project. Shane was incredibly helpful and sent us a ton of comics, annuals and photocopies of old strips. We also stumbled across www.internationalhero.co.uk pretty early on and befriended its creator, Stuart Vandal, whose knowledge and assistance proved absolutely invaluable.

PWCW: Did you find an inherent difference between Britain's superheroes and America's? And did that factor into how you wrote the story?

LM: I think the difference was more the decades they came out in, and what that meant to British people and to comics. British people's experiences in the '50s and '60s were vastly different from the American experience. British kids were more likely to have catapults and pet mice than plastic ray guns and action figures. They lived in terraced houses, had outside toilets and wore hand-me-down jumpers [sweaters]. Comics in Britain were often about kids, just normal kids doing normal things. Eating tea, going to school, annoying their mums and dads, where America had already got Superman, Batman and the primitive version of the modern comics market we have today. British comics also [had] really weird, genius creators like Ken Reid, who introduced a really gross, hyperdetailed Basil Wolverton-like style to the scene. [And] Leo Baxendale, who did such action-packed, hyperactive panoramas they'd take you the afternoon to look at them properly. People who would probably have fitted into the '60s American underground scene just as easily were using their creative powers in comics for children. The British comic industry had nowhere else for them to work, so we got the benefit of their limitations.

PWCW: Tell us a little bit about your history—how did you two meet? Which came first, the writing partnership or the relationship?

JR: We first met when we were teenagers, but we didn't bump into each other again until late 2001 when Leah finished her degree at Manchester University and came back here to live in Liverpool. We were already living together when Leah wrote her first story for Tom Strong's Terrific Tales and then her second for Tom Strong. Scott Dunbier [Wildstorm executive editor] sent Leah some "homework" asking her to come up with a pitch for an original miniseries, and she started bouncing ideas off me. Before I knew it, we were collaborating on this proposal, which eventually became Wild Girl, and we've been bound together as this two-headed Moore and Reppion comic-writing creature you see before you ever since. We do write separately, but comics are something that we still do exclusively as a couple.

PWCW: You signed on to do some work for Dynamite Entertainment last February. How has it been working with them so far? What do you have lined up with them?

LM: We are having a ball writing for Dynamite. They certainly live up to their name, having a never-ending amount of ideas and enthusiasm, it makes it really exciting to open an e-mail—you never know what they will be asking for ideas on next. We have just announced our first series with them, which is a crossover between Top Cow's Witchblade and Dorian Gray called Shades of Gray, and they have just put up the first announcement of our second mini with them, which is called Raise the Dead, a no-holds-barred schlock-fest zombie series we have been having so much fun writing. We are also hoping to contribute something to their Savage Tales title, but nothing's certain yet. All that and we still have another mini to do for them. I think we will be happy to keep working with Dynamite for as long as they want us to. It's been great.

To be honest, we are just trying to get as much experience as we can, in as many different areas and companies as we can. We are loving the "jobbing writer" work because it's the best way to learn the trade. Once we have worked like this for a while, we might be able to start thinking of a big project we'd like to come up with from scratch, but at the moment we're happy.