The Battle Hymn of B. Clay Moore

By Mike Storniolo

B. Clay Moore kicked off his career in comics with the critically acclaimed series Hawaiian Dick from Image Comics, which was optioned as a motion picture, and followed with books such as Battle Hymn and The Expatriate. Clay took some time to sit down and talk with SBC about what 2006 holds in store for him…

MIKE STORNIOLO: How did you first get into comics, and interested in creating them?

B. CLAY MOORE: I read every kind of comic I could get my hands on while growing up…old comics, new comics, mainstream comics, alternative comics. So I spent my childhood writing and drawing comics with friends.

Then, around 1998, my friend J. Torres, who currently writes Teen Titans Go! For DC, as well as Love As A Foreign Language for Oni, among many other things, invited me to help him edit an anthology he was developing for Slave Labor Graphics called Love In Tights. Before long I was handling most of the gathering of material and communicating with creators, so it gave me a good idea how the industry worked, how comics were made. I decided to pursue comics on a more permanent basis, and pitched Hawaiian Dick to Image in 2002.

MS: You spent a good deal of time handling PR/Marketing for Image Comics, and I think it’s safe to say that the reason a lot of series don’t do so well is lack of good press. In your opinion, how do you feel proper marketing reflects on a book? Any certain ways to go about it?

BCM: I think the basic formula for success for non “Big Two” books is: 1) Do a good book with a strong hook 2) Have the book done ahead of time 3) Promote the book early and often 4) Ship on time.

One problem is that most books aren’t really that good. There are upstart publishers who are throwing ten books no one really wants at retailers, which makes it hard for the one or two books that they might really want to get noticed. And it’s still going to be hard to attract sales for quirky books that feature the work of relatively unknown quantities. There are books that have suffered from disappointing sales that I thought should have been bigger hits, but unless they’ve followed the formula above, they really haven’t given themselves the best chance to succeed.

MS: You’ve managed your share of original ideas for series, or at least putting an original spin or turn on something, how’s the whole process of creating something work out for you?

BCM: Generally something in pop culture will get under my skin and I’ll feel like I need to flesh it out and see what I could do with it; A genre or a certain type of story. If I have a collaborator involved early, I’ll usually run my thoughts past them and get their input as early as possible. For me the concept almost always comes first, and the story follows.

MS: How are things on the Hawaiian Dick movie moving along?

BCM: Pretty well, actually. The initial option is set to expire soon, but we may have some good news to share before too long.

MS: Your Image series with Jason Latour, The Expatriate, is being ended with issue six. What’s the reasoning behind this? Any plans to touch base with the characters again later on?


BCM: Well, for one thing the book has been plagued by lateness. Jason is doing almost all the production himself, and it’s just too hard to keep it rolling along regularly at this point. We actually do have a plan to continue the story in a different format. We’re committed to The Steel City Hawk for Narwain, and then Jason has a story of his own that he wants to tell (on a seriously epic scale), but if we can figure out how to do it, we should be able to continue The Expatriate in a rather unique way.

For what it’s worth, Jason is doing some astonishing work on the remaining issues. We’ve only scratched the surface of what he’s capable of.

MS: Are there any established characters you’d like a stab at sometime during your career, any certain reasoning for them?

BCM: Oh, there are old favorites I think it would be fun to play around with. I’d love a go at some of the older, more obscure characters in Marvel or DC’s library. The one “dream book” I’d love to do someday is Blackhawk. I’d love to spearhead a revival of the Archie Comics heroes…The Mighty Crusaders. Some people think this is pointless, but I grew up digging through back bins for books like that, and I think it would be fun to put a modern slant on them.

But I’m not dying to do anything. To be honest, if handed Spider-Man or Wolverine or someone, I’d probably take the character in directions completely different from where they’ve been and find myself attacked by Marvel zombies in San Diego. I feel less and less bound by devotion to the past these days.

MS: I remember a while back mention of a project with Tony Moore, Five Dead Men, what’s the word on it now?

BCM: It’s funny…I had dinner with Tony last night and we talked about it a bit. It’s a book Tony wants to devote full attention to, and we have no idea when that will be. I think we both want it to be the best Western comic produced in decades, and he wants to make sure he’s in a place to make that happen before he really jumps into it. The first issue is written, and the book is plotted.

MS: You’ve got two new limited series from Narwain Publishing coming out, The Modern Man and Steel City Hawk. What’s the lowdown on the books?

BCM: The Modern Man is a book about a sixties-era London kid who is suddenly granted cosmic power and expected to protect the universe. Only problem is he really doesn’t want to. The Steel City Hawk is about an Eastern city that long ago had a hero prowling the rooftops, but the hero has long since vanished. So, some of the city’s leading men take it upon themselves to create a new version of the old hero. And things go wrong.

MS: And ’76 with writer Seth Peck was just announced, your story, Jackie Karma, what can you tell us about that?

BCM: Seth, who I’m collaborating with on a proposed television pilot, as well as a couple of other projects, had this idea for a story set in the seventies about two bounty hunters named Pete and Leon. At the same time, someone on my message board, in a “what book should Clay write?” thread, suggested a street level seventies book, featuring kung fu characters and action heroes. I started turning that over in my head, and found the story I wanted to tell, so I suggested to Seth we piggyback the stories into one book, in order to help get the thing done on time, and also to give people a fun package. Jason Latour suggested artist Ed Tadem for the book, and, man…Ed has delivered in spades. Ed’s unbelievable. Tigh Walker is handling Seth’s story (called COOL), and it’s going to be a blast introducing these guys to comic readers.

As much fun as I’ve had with books like Battle Hymn and Expatriate, Jackie Karma feels perfect to me. Collaborating with Ed reminds me of the early days of collaborating with Steven Griffin on Hawaiian Dick, another case where I knew the book was going to be special. And Steven is slated to handle covers on ’76.

MS: Any other new projects or revisitings on the horizon you can talk about?

BCM: Jeremy Haun and I are following up our recent G.I. Joe one-shot with a five part, full color series from Oni Press called The Leading Man. It’s scheduled to debut in May, and Jeremy’s doing some knockout work on the book. People will flip for this one.

The book follows the adventures of Nick Walker, world’s hottest actor and world’s greatest super spy.

And the Battle Hymn trade will be out in February.

MS: Anything else you want to mention as we wrap things up?

BCM: I'm also working on a superhero project with artist Ramon Perez called The Black Kite. We're nowhere near ready to go with it, but I did want to mention it. Basically, it's a variation on recent superhero trends that show superheroes in a darker context, but done by people who don't have so much contempt for superheroes or their fans.