Leah Moore Talks Witchblade, Raise The Dead & Much More!
Writing sensation Leah Moore was kind enough to take time out of her busy schedule and visit Dragons Keep.com! This was a great opportunity to talk about her current projects Witchblade: Shades of Gray and Raise The Dead. So, grab a seat and enjoy our interview with Leah Moore!

Dragons Keep: Leah you are currently writing the Witchblade: Shades of Gray series and Raise The Dead out of Dynamite Entertainment, you have also worked on Albion, Tom Strong, Tom Strong Terrific Tales, and Wild Girl. However, before we talk about what you are working on, I have to ask, what motivated you to become a writer and break into the comic industry?

Leah Moore: To be honest it was curiosity. I wanted to see if I could do it. I have always written stories and done little comic strips since I was little, but the eight page story I did for terrific tales was my chance to see if I could do it for real. I was so pleased when Scott Dunbier at Wildstorm accepted it and I got a cheque for it. The first time you get paid for doing something you love is the best feeling ever. It’s still a great feeling to get paid but more in a rent paying way.

DK: Thus far what has been the highlight of working in the industry for you?

Leah: I think every time we get a page of art in an email for us to approve it’s amazing. Comics have the great quality in that they reward the writer at each stage. When we see pencils we can get all excited about them, see which bits worked best which characters look how they looked in our heads, the same thing happens when we see the inks and the colours, and every cover we see is wonderful. By the time the issues actually come out we are usually grinning like Cheshire cats. It’s fantastic that we have been able to work with such amazing artists too, seeing pages drawn up by Sergio Aragones or J H Williams III is a fantastic feeling. Guys like Hugo Petrus who take the time to add extra little details to the story really make the job fun.

DK: The premise of the Witchblade: Shades of Gray series, reads great and I have to say the art work is also awesome!

Leah: Yes we’ve been really lucky to land Stephen Segovia as our artist on that book. He has had to adapt his style to the Witchblade look a little, and he has carried it off really well I think. The Witchblade look is really slick and dark, and Stephen has made our script really look the part. Witchblade was so much fun to write because it’s an action comic with lots of fighting and supernatural stuff, it’s also a detective story so you can put in a lovely old fashioned mystery and it has a glamorous girl in the lead part, so it’s hard to not enjoy doing. Writing the character of Dorian Gray was really interesting, he has a unique viewpoint on the world, so conveying that subtly and without too much in the way of obvious explanation was quite a challenge. You have to tread a line between wanting the reader to find things out as they go along, and providing some explanation in case they don’t quite get it.

DK: How will your Witchblade story impact the continuity of the Witchblade?

Leah: I don’t believe it will impact it much. We set it between issues eight and nine in the very first run of the comic, so everything that happens afterwards still happens and Sara doesn’t have anything happen to her that affects her long term. The only thing which does affect the long term continuity is us sneakily slipping in another Blade Bearer from history. The bearer fills a gap between two previous bearers though, so instead of it being passed from an old lady to a baby it has another bearer who fits into our story very nicely.

DK: What is it about Sara and the Witchblade you enjoy as a creator, writer, fan?

Leah: I think she’s a great character because she has the Nancy Drew girl detective thing which is always fun to read or write, and she has this secret other side to her and her relationship with the blade to deal with. She’s not straight forward in any way. She can respond really well to most situations but the blade adds an element of surprise. You never know what the blade will do and at the stage of her life we wrote the story in Sara is pretty confused about its powers. I think that the blade is really archetypal, like a singing sword in an old fantasy story, or like Green Lantern’s ring. Once your power rests in an object, you don’t fully control it. Even wearing the blade constantly, Sara hasn’t got it totally under her control. It jumps up and surprises her still.

DK: Will you be returning to write more Witchblade?

Leah: I hope so, we are always happy to return to the worlds we have written before, because they stay in your head long after you have finished the scripts. We find elements from projects working their way into our other projects just because we sort of miss them. We write a page of dialogue and sometimes we’ll think wow that really sounds like a Witchblade balloon, or a Wild Girl one. It’s cool. We have so enjoyed working with Dynamite, they are a great bunch of people and they have great attention to detail when it comes to actually selling the books. A lot of comic companies let their work speak for itself, but Dynamite really want people to pick it up, even if it’s not what they’d normally read. So yeah, we’d love to return to Witchblade or other properties from the same universe, whatever looks like a winner.