DEPPEY: Let's talk about Katchoo and Francine a little bit. They're different in some ways but similar in others. They come from totally opposite directions, but in many ways, they are both very messed-up people in terms of their emotional content. Katchoo is very guarded, very defensive, owing to a very tough past. Francine comes from a very normal, white-bread upbringing, but by the same token, that has made her kind of reserved, in that she measures herself against what's normal, and what's expected of her as opposed to what she actually wants. Were these characters fairly defined like that when you first began writing them, or is this something that just developed slowly over time?

MOORE: No, that was there, because the one thing I did go into the series with was the idea of who these two women were. I have a piece of art I did, it's the very first drawing I ever did of the cast. I did it before I wrote the story or anything. It was Francine sitting on the couch with her boyfriend, and I think she's even eating out of a tub of ice cream, and then Katchoo is in the background by herself, painting at a canvas, and her hair is a mess, and Darcy Parker and David are over there by the window, smiling and looking on.

I don't know, it's like I say, I didn't know then that David was Darcy's brother, but maybe it was one of my subconscious ideas, because I put them together in this first drawing. But that drawing was kind of a launching pad for the story. That's when I stopped making character sheets and character notes and all that. I thought, "Well, fuck that, this is not an English class exercise."

So I decided I'd look at this drawing and write about the people I see in the picture. That's what I did. I looked at the picture like a photograph, because I've always been able to look at people and just kind of make it all up in my mind who I think they are and what I think their life is like.

Looking at the picture, I knew Francine was the girl next door. And I thought, I know this kind of family. So I began writing a girl-next-door family, and how, in this case, they mess each other up. Here's the tension inside Francine's family.

The same thing with Katchoo. When I was in high school and in bands and all that, I always knew girls like Katchoo, the kind that were tough and hung around with the boys on smoke breaks between classes. She was the cool bartender at the clubs my bands played, things like that.

DEPPEY: So obviously you were drawing from people you knew when you were drawing these characters.

MOORE: I knew nice people around the neighborhood and I knew the kind of people who lived in bars. I knew the preacher's daughter and I knew the guys who were into really seedy stuff. Once you meet all these people in life, it's like you have a wealth of things to draw from as a writer.

DEPPEY: You definitely seem to be more character-centric than story- or issue-centric.

MOORE: Absolutely.

DEPPEY: One of the things that really impressed me with Strangers in Paradise is that while you're dealing with a lot of gay issues, you're not dealing with them in a Very-Special-Episode-of-Family-Ties kind of way.

MOORE: One thing that bothers me about that kind of work is that it has such a strong agenda. Like all those 1970s Norman Lear shows, they're unwatchable now. It's like watching a 1940s prowar movie or something, you know. Very preachy.

DEPPEY: I remember seeing a film a couple years back called Black and White, which was all about interracial relationships. And in every scene, everybody was sitting there and talking about interracial relationships, as though they never actually discussed anything else, or watched a sports game or something.

MOORE: Exactly. If you read a book, and it's the type where everybody's agreeing with the main character, you think, "Well, this writer sucks. Where's the counterpoint?" [Deppey laughs.] I think that people can get on some sort of agenda, I don't know whether their heart's in the right place, or they're being overly politically correct, or... I don't know. But that's just as ineffective as people saying all the wrong things. When I wrote the storylines in the series, I wasn't interested in statistics or causes or special-interest stuff, because I was really getting to be turned off by all that, it was too much. I just wanted to discuss the heartfelt story behind the statistics. The real people, and how their lives are being affected by what is going on. I'll leave the causes and questions for somebody else to figure out, how to maneuver America into answers. [Deppey laughs.] I just want to tell the individual stories.

DEPPEY: Katchoo is fairly obviously gay, with at most lingering bisexual tendencies, but it's not something she really seems to think about unless the issue gets thrown in her face. It's just sort of a part of who she is. Francine, by contrast, doesn't seem to be so much attracted to women as to Katchoo specifically, and it doesn't seem sexual so much as romantic, I mean, she's clearly intimidated...

MOORE: Well, that's the problem. That's the whole... I've noticed in most great lingering debates, the problem is the two sides are not arguing about the same thing. And that's kind of the problem between Francine and Katchoo, that's what keeps the whole thing going, they have something in common -- which is a draw and a bond to each other -- but it's not the same attraction. Katchoo is attracted to Francine in a totally different way than Francine is to Katchoo. The problem for Francine is that she found the love of her life, but it was in the wrong sexual gender. Now what does she do?

DEPPEY: There's a scene toward the latter part of the series where Francine walks into a bookstore, looks around to make sure nobody's watching and walks into the Gay and Lesbian section. I can't imagine Katchoo intellectualizing it that much, where she'd actually turn to books.

MOORE: I don't think she's ever bothered to look at anything like that. The closest thing I can think of is... there was a very popular counterculture book in their high school years, Elegant Waste, it's in the story, and Katchoo read it again and again. It's a fictional coming-of-age book, the kind that all the teens and college kids would read, like Catcher in the Rye or whatever. Other than that, no, Katchoo's less about over-analyzing and more about going with the chemistry, and going with her impulses and her heart.

But Francine, she's tried so hard to rationalize this relationship. She has seriously considered cutting Katchoo out of her life and she's seriously considered embracing everything and giving it a go. The broad story in SiP has been Francine's journey, trying to figure it all out.

DEPPEY: In addition to a romance story, this is also something of a crime drama, in that you're also dealing with the Parker Group, and you're dealing with conspiracies to manipulate the government and things like that. What does each half of the story offer the other half, and how does this keep the story going?

MOORE: I've tried to figure that out myself.

DEPPEY: Why did you introduce the Parker Group subplot in the first place?

MOORE: Well, it kind of helps to know that I'm not just one kind of person, I have a lot of different sides to me. There's a part of me that really cares about people, and there's another part of me that thinks in action terms. I guess I was just bringing two storytellers to one series. If I did a music album, there would be ballads on there and really hard stuff, it wouldn't all be one sound.

When I was about 11 years old, I found two series that I read in that same year. One was the James Bond books -- I read all of Ian Fleming's books and loved them -- and another one was also by an English writer, Enid Blyton. She did a bunch of children's books back in the '40s and '50s. I found a series by her about a girls' boarding school, called Malory Towers. It was for girls. It wasn't a book that 11-year-old boys would read, but I was living in Africa at the time and there wasn't much else to do and I couldn't find anything else except these English books. So that year, I read the James Bond series and the girls' boarding-school stories. I loved them both. Years later, I come out with my own series, and it really is just drawing from these two diverse influences in my life. I think I got inspiration from both of them. I've enjoyed that dichotomy of entertainment my whole life.

DEPPEY: So it wasn't so much an attempt to keep the readers' interest up through the romantic parts by throwing these fistfights and gunfights in as well, as much as just naturalistic storytelling?

MOORE: Yeah. I think it's probably just more my style, because although I'm a guy writing about women, I can only stand so much femininity. I don't want to be in a room full of women talking about clothes and shopping and planning the holidays six months from now. That's just too much for me. I'm trying to write about something a little bit deeper inside. They're human beings experiencing a woman's life, but hopefully they're still doing something that entertains the average male reader. If I just drew Francine and Katchoo always going to the mall and talking about guys, no man is going to want to read that. But I really like crime drama, and I really wanted to tell a very intimate story about some female characters, and when I put the two together, this is what I got.

DEPPEY: Let me turn to David for a second, because next to Francine and Katchoo, he's probably the most complex character in the series. I'm assuming that the David Qin versus Yousaka Takahashi, the whole dual-identity thing didn't come along until later.

MOORE: Right. I'll tell you what happened there. I started with David Qin, which is a Chinese name, right? But I always thought of him as Japanese-American. I actually just gave him that name because I liked it, I liked the sound of it. Then after I Dream of You, I realized Qin wasn't a Japanese name [laughter], and I thought, "Oh, great, what am I going to do now?" I really wanted David and Darcy to be relatives from a yakuza family, but I don't know how you're going to put a Chinese Qin inside of a Japanese yakuza family. So later on I did my research, and realized what I fool I'd been. I really had to do a lot of gymnastics, plot-wise, to figure that one out. But, that's part of the challenge. The readers saw me doing it as we went along. If I'd been a novelist, I would have hit a snag halfway through the book and figured it out and retrofitted it all in. So, again, the price of doing a serial comic.

Just Not Culturally Acceptable Any More

DEPPEY: At what point did you decide a conversion to Christianity was the central defining moment in his life?

MOORE: I think right before I got to that scene. I was thinking that they needed to trade secrets. I knew that the problem for Katchoo in that conversation was that David knew more about her than she knew about him. And she was going to hold him to task for that. "You know all this about me but you're not sharing anything, and what kind of friend is that?"

So I was trying to think, "What can he reveal?" For some reason it struck me that there were no real Christians in comics, in mainstream-accepted comics anyway. I thought, "Well, that would be one of the most revolutionary things I could do right now." Because this was in the heyday of like Preacher and Son of Satan, whatever. Everybody was into being as wicked as they could be, or at least looking like they ran with wicked anyway, and I thought one of the most rebellious things David could do was just say, "I'm a Christian." I mean, he was the only one I could think of. There weren't any Christians in comics at all that I could think of, so I thought, "Well, I'll do that." And I'll do it with the same sort of in-your-face-attitude that I did with the whole Emma lesbian thing and dying of AIDS and all that. Here. Boom. Deal with it.

DEPPEY: Now that you mention it, there aren't a lot of positive portrayals of Christianity in comics. Or even in general media. And when it is, it's generally seen by the Coastal types as a sop to the so-called "red states."

MOORE: Exactly. I mean, being a Christian right now is the most uncool thing you could possibly be, whether it's in comics or literature or TV or film or whatever. Pop-culture-wise, for somebody now to stand up and say, "I'm a Christian," they'd have to be very anti-establishment. Unless, they're standing in the middle of the Bible Belt surrounded by churches or something. But, you know, in mainstream culture, it's just not acceptable any more. Which made it all the more fun for me. I like thumbing my nose at both the establishment and the revolution.

DEPPEY: In Volume Four of the pocket editions, Francine's mother introduces her to the local minister who finds himself trying to talk her out of, for lack of a better term, "lesbian temptation." What's interesting about this scene is you don't take the easy, politically correct route of depicting him as a two-dimensional bigot; rather, you portray him as a good man who's simply out of his depth and doesn't have a very firm grasp on what he's talking about.

MOORE: I've known men like that, where the times have just left them behind. They are good men, they mean well, and they're not trying to pass on a political agenda, they really are trying to pass on this lifestyle of faith. But their advice just doesn't work for a young person dealing with a new world, and Francine wasn't buying any of it. She's not a Christian, although she was raised one -- going to church services for holidays and things like that -- but it doesn't work for her, and she doesn't have a very high opinion of it all. I was interested in writing a scene where those two types of people come together. Whereas Katchoo would tell him, "You're wasting your time. Shut up." Francine allows people to talk, even if she's not listening, so you get this incomplete conversation, this unfulfillment.

DEPPEY: And she is very polite to him. You really get the sense that she's lived in this kind of community her whole life, and flows through it fairly easily.

MOORE: Yeah, not everybody's going to have a big reaction to things they don't agree with. Not everybody's knee-jerk emotional about "hey, back off." Given the setting at her mother's house and with somebody she knows, I think that's how she'd handle it. Polite, yeah, thanks but no thanks. She just never thought the answers were going to come from him. I think it was important for me not to make the whole problem of her and Katchoo... I didn't want that to be a religious problem because it's not about that; it's about human instincts. One person walks this way and another walks that way... How did they end up walking together? That's the level I wondered about.

Harsh Women

DEPPEY: Now, Katchoo has very, very definite ideas about men. She states several times that she just thinks they're sheep. She looks at them --

MOORE: Even worse.

DEPPEY: [Laughs.] She looks at them not so much as the opposite sex but as the opposite species.

MOORE: The failed sex. [Laughs.] Yeah, she does look at them as the opposite species, and I don't always totally disagree with her.

DEPPEY: About a year and a half ago, we did a critics' roundtable on Dave Sim, and I'm sure you're aware of his, what's the euphemism, "controversial" views on men versus women. I have to say that the official Comics Journal line was best described the first time around they did this, which basically, you know, had an artist's rendering of Sim as the commandant at a concentration camp for women. I have a difficult time working up that level of antagonism toward Sim's views, not because I agree with them, but because most men and women I know really do view the opposite sex as the opposite species on one level or another. The whole men-are-from-Mars-women-are-from-Venus thing is fairly ingrained, not just in our culture, but virtually all cultures. Sim just went a little overboard in trying to turn it into an all-encompassing, goofy-ass theory, in my opinion.

MOORE: I think that's a more thoughtful perspective.

DEPPEY: Sorry, I didn't mean to lead this off to Dave Sim. Getting back to Katchoo...

MOORE: Are you thinking she is a female Dave Sim?

DEPPEY: I'm not sure I would call her a female Dave Sim, but she certainly views men through a very unflattering prism, and I was wondering if there was some thought behind giving that to her character, or was there something you were trying to explore or express, or is that just something that kind of grew out of your thinking about her?

MOORE: You know, I think most people's opinions come from their life experiences. By letting you see her opinions first, I was hinting at her life experiences. It was like, "Wow, what do you have to go through to get like this?"

That's what I was implying as a writer. Then I had fun showing you. You know how actors like playing dark characters, because there's more of a challenge to it. It's the same for a writer. It's more fun for me to write about Katchoo's past than it is to write about Francine's. I've never done a lot of stories about Francine's past because a lot of it's just very domestic and routine. There's not a lot of drama there.

But that's what I was originally thinking. Then as I worked on it, of course, you're trying to put your heart and soul in there. I mean, I have certainly met a lot of people like Katchoo and I know a lot of people like Katchoo right now, so, man, we are definitely turning out people like that. You know, society right now is so messed up. It's such a mess, and a lot of people are lost or just pissed off, whether it's over relationships, or politics, or religion, or whatever, you know?

Everybody in Houston is still pissed off about Enron. So if somebody asked you a question about Enron, not living in Houston, you might be able to say something thoughtful. But ask somebody in Houston about Enron and about CEOs and businessmen with $65 million in their personal checking account, and you're going to get a vehement tirade. That's how it is. Francine's had better experiences with men than Katchoo, who has had experiences even harsher than what the story ever reveals, and this is how they are now.

DEPPEY: Speaking of harsh experiences, I wanted to talk about Katchoo's half-sister, Tambi. Her motivations become harder to ascertain as the series goes on. At one point, Katchoo sneers at the notion of Tambi as a patriot, and uses that to belittle her a little bit, but you seem to leave the idea open as a distinct possibility. One gets the impression that there's a certain warped sense of morality to Tambi's actions, despite how nakedly self-serving they are.

MOORE: Oh yeah. Tambi, to my mind -- and Katchoo said this -- Tambi's a hawk. She's going to be Tambi no matter what. She'll always fall into something that suits her, whether it's crime or working for the military or the government, or whatever. In Tambi's eyes, there's no difference between working for the mob or working for the government. She's not trying to fix the White House or change the big picture, she just does things her own way. She can only control her turf, wherever she is, and she doesn't care if her turf is Chicago or Afghanistan. Whoever will hire her, she'll do her thing. She follows her own personal code, which is basically patriotic to the American ideal. Like, here's a free country, and I have the right to be Tambi, and I have the right to kill my enemies. [Laughter.] That's Tambi's code in a nutshell.

DEPPEY: Right. Tambi is such a generally expressionless character, you really have to look deep into the story to see any of that. You transmit a great deal of information through expression and body language, and there's a scene in which Tambi is watching an investigative reporter die after being tortured by somebody else, and she tries to give him a little bit of closure by telling him out of the blue that the criminal conspiracy he'd spent his career investigating was real, and very much like he described it. You can tell by the look on Tambi's face that she considers this a very noble act on her part. It's almost like she's providing last rites to a fellow warrior or something. But his last words are, "How terrible," and upon hearing them, Tambi's face just drops. Half the drama in this scene is played out in her facial expressions.

MOORE: For Tambi, her point of view is: Life is war, and she is a warrior. In that scene, she might as well have been in Braveheart or on the front lines of some war. In her point of view, people are either warriors or casualties. In fact, one of the concepts that I drew from in doing SiP was love is like war, it has warriors and it has casualties. Katchoo and Francine are both casualties, and they deal with it in two different ways. One is becoming stronger despite her wounds, the other one is becoming crippled by them. There is a war metaphor to this whole romance comedy, or analogy, I should say.

DEPPEY: I'm kind of curious as to how Molly and Poo fits into this. It's clearly meant to be a sort of a metaphor thrown off the stage that reflects upon the greater story, but it's just so twisted inside out.

MOORE: I had this notion that if you had this character off to the side -- just a walk-on character, some girl they went to high school with, that dated Francine's brother for a little bit, and that's it -- you would come up with an entire story all its own, and one you would never expect. That's what I was doing with her. I was thinking she's a struggling writer and she's another love casualty -- I mean something's gone horribly wrong in her life -- and there she is in New York trying to make it as a writer and trying to build a life for herself, but her demons are not going to let her go, and everything she tries just screws her deeper into madness.

This story is just one version of what happens to people like that, where somebody who commits a crime like hers comes from and how they go crazy. It allowed me to explore the dark side of creative people. A lot of creative people, myself included, have dealt with sleepless nights and panic attacks and losing touch with what people see as the cheery, sunny real life of daytime. When that happens you look at everything through a dark filter and disengage yourself from society and it's amazing how you see things, how the death of life can overcome your mind and just scare the living hell out of you.

I was exploring that through Molly; her writing about her muse, the angel of death and, in Molly's case, she doesn't come back from the edge, she never regains her balance. Her demons consume her and she commits this horrendous act. Then, at the very end of the story, we find out her grandmother, or great-grandmother, dealt with the same demons.

Maybe it's all genetic. But then I had this idea that her grandmother was actually Jack the Ripper, that Jack the Ripper was a woman. I've always been pissed off by the fact that violent crimes against women are usually committed by men. You never read about women ripping men apart. I mean it happens, of course, but it's not the --

DEPPEY: Yeah, you'll run into the occasional Aileen Wuornos, or...

MOORE: Right. That's occasional, but it's not the norm and it makes men look like animals to me. I thought, "Well, the most shocking thing I can think of today is that a woman could commit the Jack the Ripper crimes." It's just not in their nature to do that.

DEPPEY: In terms of the story, it made for a neat little twist.

MOORE: Yeah, and that's all it is, it's just a horror story, where I want to surprise you. Because I assume that everybody is well read, and they're jumping ahead and thinking they have you figured out, and it's nice if you can entertain them with something new.

One last thought about Molly and Poo: If I was going to write novels, I think I would love to write horror novels. Horror/mystery-type things. I really enjoyed doing that.

DEPPEY: It's a neat little story, and personally, I'll take any opportunity to look at Charles Dana Gibson's artwork.

MOORE: [Laughs.] I know. It helped set the tone to use all that old stuff. It's amazing how easy it is to find. I went to the art-supply store, and they had all these clip-art catalogs, one that was just full of his stuff, and all kinds of art nouveau illustrations and everything. I was using them from day one on the series, as little letter-column designs and things like that.

[To read the rest of this interview, please see The Comics Journal #276.]