Terry Moore
Strangers in Paradise

A Graphic Novel.

I state beforehand, I have been an avid reader of comics since a young age: in elementary school, I was already the secret bride of Tarzan and occasionally the girlfriend of Tiger Jack. Therefore, I have never paid attention to debates about the genre: “Comics: C-grade literature or lesser art”,  since I have always considered them a moment of escape and pure entertainment and why not, of reflection. Over the course of my life, I have collected hundreds, endless series of Diabolik, Alan Ford, Tex, Zagor, Mister No, the promised groom Tarzan, moving in adulthood to Dylan Dog, Napoleon, Dampyr, Julia and finally to the mature love, Nathan Never, still the Uncontested Lord of my monthly escape on printed paper.

But what I am actually proposing today is apparently a simple American pocket-sized comic, discovered by pure chance on a boring and sultry summer day in August four years ago. It was a random day, far from any fixed release date of my heroes, a day when, at the beach, I wanted to read something not as demanding as a book nor as useless as a magazine.  
In a newsstand, I found this comic, which I later discovered to be in reality a work far from banal that spans the arts I hold most dear such as literature and poetry, music and cinema.

"Strangers in Paradise", for its devoted fans briefly SIP, is a story conceived, written, and drawn - in black and white - by author Terry Moore, originated from the USA, who divided it into three separate series from 1993 (birth year - Atlantic Press) to 2007 (conclusion - Comic USA). Of difficult availability (in Italy since 1998 and still ongoing, theoretically it would have fixed bi-monthly publication, in reality, it comes out whenever it wants and in different newsstands and bookstores) this comic is in fact a NOVEL narrating the events of the protagonist Katina Choovanski (Katchoo), a young artist no longer an adolescent, of her best friend Francine Peters, her forbidden love, and of David Qin, the common friend who positions himself at the center of the triangulation analyzed in every nuance of the complex relationship that ensues between them.

I quote from Wikipedia: “Starting from the second series, Moore introduces thriller elements tied to Katchoo's difficult past, which become the second mainstay of the story. The series is particularly noted for being followed by an audience that doesn't normally read comics, especially women. It is estimated that about 50% of its readers are women, although there are no confirmations.”

What fascinates about SIP is the complexity of the work, if we want to consider it as indeed a simple comic book. The narrative structure itself transitions from the flow of the story through the canonical use of panels with thought bubbles, to long typewritten pages without the support of strips, as if it were really a book, a long novel.
Often, to highlight the mood of the characters, Terry Moore breaks the constant flow of drawing-based storytelling through integration with other arts, like poetry, always heart-wrenching, which he accompanies with masterfully inked panels (among other things, the style is also worthy of the best Manara) or with the use of music, complete with guitar tablatures and lyrics. Moreover, since the protagonist is a painter, Moore often gifts full-page panels of her creations. And the impressive thing is that the product of each of these arts is his own creation, they are all tailor-made for a story in which we simultaneously have the images (almost cinematic), the thoughts, the soundtrack, to which he adds various quotations (from the Bible, literature, etc.), without neglecting the genius of the themes and the irony.

The continuous flashbacks, the time jumps, the alternation between the first-person narrative and the third-person storytelling, do not give us a break, keeping us glued in the reading and viewing of this cinematic comic that continues to amaze me for four years.
You laugh with SIP, with real pleasure and without restraint. And you cry, because the situations it showcases are those of everyday life, masterfully told: the joy, the love with a capital L, the pain, the loss, the desire, the desperation, the solidarity, the discrimination, the corruption, the purity of emotions, even the most confused and forbidden. It is impossible not to find so much of oneself in its narrative, impossible not to love its protagonists.
The only drawback, as I said, is the availability, but for the vicissitudes related to its distribution (FreeBooks) and for any curiosity, I refer you to Wikipedia or the official site.

Lastly, I recall that Moore has a very interesting blog structured like his comic, through which he interacts with his readers.