Little Stabs At Happiness

As of last month's issue, Terry Moore's Strangers In Paradise will be counting down the final 10 issues on the cover art of each issue being released within the next ten months.

Damn, y'all. Remember in the old blog when I used to write monthly updates with each issue as they came out? I have no idea why I did that with just this one comic book as opposed to any of the other titles that I regularly follow. Maybe it was its intrinsic soapy style of the storytelling that that made me hunger for it like crack on toast, and although I gradually grew a little (no make that extremely) frustrated with the series over time I still felt compelled to pick it up every month year after year ever since I first read a review for the first issue back in an issue of Subliminal Tattoos around 1993 or so. In fact I have nearly 90% of the first edition comic issues as well as every compilation available.

It's been almost 13 years, hasn't it? Sure he's no Dave Sim (and for the record, Sim actually enjoys SIP) but 13 years drawing and writing and living the same characters over and over takes the kind of stamina that I always admired in cartoonists and strove to achieve in my own serials as a teenager passing my stories around the schoolyard. You grow to believe in your creations, and to treat them like real living human beings. Not to mention a certain godlike empowerment to conjure and manipulate lives, like forming man out of clay, has an intoxicating appeal that's hard to deny.

Should be interesting to see how this all ends.