Madras man pens comics

Published 12:00 am Sunday, June 1, 2014

Dresden Moss started writing comic books when he was 36 and studying publishing at a Seattle-area community college.

He’s now returning to the genre some 24 years later with plans to launch his second comic book series and a company he hopes will give Central Oregon’s undiscovered comic book artists and writers the tools they need to do their best work.

“The chance of a young, beginning artist getting published in this field is kind of slim,” said Moss, the 60-year-old founder of Airship Cascadia Comics. “I would like to seek out new talent in the Bend area and bring them aboard.”

Almost immediately after he graduated from school, Moss joined the U.S. Navy and spent eight years working as a photographer. The subjects of his pictures included one of Washington’s U.S. senators, the Shah of Iran and the commander of the 7th Fleet.

He received a certificate in respiratory science about four years after he left the Navy and continues to work in that field today, as a traveling therapist at hospitals and clinics across Central Oregon.

“There’s got to be some way to pay the bills,” Moss said, alluding to his career as a respiratory therapist.

“People get into the comic book field because they want to tell their stories and not because they want to be rich,” he said.

Eager to tell his stories, Moss studied offset printing at Seattle Community College during the late 1980s to get some technical experience he thought might give him a leg up in the region’s burgeoning independent comic book industry.

He produced his first comic book — “Rhaj,” which according to his website tells the story of “a bare breasted, sword wielding … woman who looks like Cleopatra” — as part of an assignment for his final class and then realized people liked it so much they were willing to pay for his work.

“I was really surprised with that one,” said Moss, who came up with and produced the first few copies of “Rhaj” with his wife. “We printed 100 copies and people bought them out in a month.”

Building off this success, Moss produced five more issues of “Rhaj” and sold them for $1.25 apiece at comic book stores across the Pacific Northwest. He also sent them to a group of about 30 mail subscribers who had addresses all over the continent, including Nova Scotia and a federal prison in New Mexico.

He continued “Rhaj” for another four issues when he signed a deal with Miscellanea Unlimited Press — a Seattle comic book publisher that produced more than 30 independent comic book titles during the 1990s — that printed and sold almost 4,000 copies of each comic book he produced.

“(MU Press) knew writers and authors who were trying to break their way into the field, and they were trying to help us out,” Moss said of the company and how it helped independent comics like himself find their niche.

But after signing this deal, Moss said, he felt the “Rhaj” saga petered out both in terms of his desire to write more of her adventures and his readers’ interest in seeing them continue. MU Press stopped printing almost all of its comic book titles in 1997 and shut its doors less than 10 years after that.

During the years that followed this adventure, Moss continued his career as a respiratory therapist — a job that gave him the ability to travel and work in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates for a total of seven years — and eventually moved to Madras so he could be closer to his family.

Moss said his desire to tell stories remained strong, and he eventually came up with an idea for a new comic book series, “Get A Life,” which tells the story of another strong female lead.

In this series, the main character is a bounty hunter named Kali who chases down spirits that have escaped from a cosmic prison. Moss has hinted on his website that Kali will eventually have a run-in with the “Rhaj” series’ main character so that he can bridge the more than 20-year gap between his two published works.

Beyond coming out with this new series, Moss has been busy trying to find new comic book authors and writers to join him under the Airship Cascadia Comics umbrella.

He wants to focus his efforts on finding people who write about topics other than superheroes and vampires — mainly because the comic book world is saturated with their stories right now — and wants to limit his search to people who live in Central Oregon so the company will have a truly local feel.

Moss said he’s received a lot of support for his plans from people at local comic book stores who are familiar with the genre. He’s also met at least two comic book writers — one who is interested in writing a melodramatic soap opera set in outer space and another who’s interest is writing alternative histories — who he thinks have the potential to succeed in the independent comic book industry.

“There’s a lot of ways that people can publish their own material,” he said, explaining the development of the Internet, self-publishing websites and new graphics programs have made it so much easier to put a comic book together now than when he was writing them two decades ago.

— Reporter: 541-617-7816, mmclean@bendbulletin.com