Moore, Terry

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Terry Moore

Born 1954 (Texas)
American author, illustrator

Terry Moore is one of the most respected creators of what have been dubbed "real world" comics, those that deal realistically with characters and circumstances. Beginning in the 1990s, Moore created what he referred to in Strangers in Paradise: The Treasury Edition as an "alternate reality" for himself. In this alternate reality live the artist Katchoo, whose difficult past wreaks havoc in her life; her good-natured friend and sometimes lover, Francine, who struggles with self-esteem and weight; and their mutual friend, David, whose love for Katchoo introduces complications in the relationships of all three. These main characters are joined by a huge cast of others in the somewhat fictionalized town of Houston, Texas. 'What's it about?' Moore said to the CBR Web site, "I've never come up with a good answer for that. I'm open to suggestions. But that may be the reason it's survived." Interviewer Adrienne Rappaport summed up Moore's Strangers in Paradise as, simply, "One of the most complex explorations of human nature, and relationships, in comics history."

"My ambition has always been to get my own creative ideas out there to the public, then let the chips fall where they may."

Seeks outlet for creativity

Terry Moore was born in Texas in 1954. The oldest of three children, Moore grew up playing sports, drawing cartoons, and playing in rock bands. Moore's childhood, however, was also laced with more atypical experiences, thanks to having a father who was in the Air Force and—as Moore discovered later—working for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). In an interview for Jazma Online, Moore recalled that when he was ten years old his family had to leave the African country of Tanzania "in a hurry while there was rioting going on. Fun, huh?" Moore's family moved a great deal, in fact: "By the time I was eleven I had lived in Texas, Panama, Mississippi, Arkansas, Alabama and Africa," he was quoted on Jazma.

Moore had little interest in school and instead focused on his extracurricular activities. From the age of sixteen, he played lead guitar in rock bands and thought that it might be his career. Music was such a huge part of Moore's life that he dropped out of college to pursue it. "While my peers were getting medical degrees, I was playing Van Halen arpeggios [chords] in a smelly Texas bar. It seemed like a great choice at the time. Now I know better, but you can't tell a 22-year-old boy anything," he related to GN. He eventually started working as a television editor, and for about ten years he made commercials, documentaries, film trailers, and music videos—work that he came to detest.

Best-Known Works

Strangers in Paradise Graphic Novels

Book 1: The Collected Strangers in Paradise (1994).

Book 2: I Dream of You (1996).

Book 3: It's a Good Life (1996).

Book 4: Love Me Tender (1997).

Book 5: Immortal Enemies (1998).

Book 6: High School (1999).

Book 7: Sanctuary (1999).

Book 8: My Other Life (2000).

Book 9: Child of Rage (2001).

Book 10: Tropic of Desire (2001).

Book 11: Brave New World (2002).

Book 12: Heart in Hand (2003).

Book 13: Flower to Flame (2003).

Book 14: David's Story (2004).

Book 15: Tomorrow Now (2004).

Book 16: Viva Las Vegas (2005).

Book 17: David & Katchoo (2005).

Book 18: The Final Chapter (2006).

Other Graphic Novels

Paradise Too!, Drunk Ducks, Volume One. Abstract Studio (2002).

Paradise Too! Checking for Weirdos, Volume Two. Abstract Studio (2003).

Molly and Poo, a Collection of Moments: The Whole Bloody Story in One Bloody Book (2005).

Finds refuge in comics

Wanting to get back to his own creative work, Moore turned to comics, which he described to Jazma Online as the "best thing that ever happened to me." He traces his interest in comics to his youth. "I drew a lot and had artist heroes by the time I was twelve or thirteen. Everybody from Marvel [Comics] guys to Mad magazine to editorial cartoonists. I loved it all," he told GN. Though Moore had relegated these aspects of his life to occasional hobbies as he grew older, he never lost his love for comics or for being creative. "I was a married father of two with a good job, nice home and a daughter who wanted to go to college when I realized that I could spend the rest of my life never doing anything with my art," Moore wrote in Strangers in Paradise: The Treasury Edition. Horrified by his realization, Moore became more focused and began to draw comics in earnest, hoping to create a syndicated comic strip.

His attempts to write a comic strip resulted in heaps of material—all rejected by the numerous publishers he had contacted. While browsing in a comic book store in the early 1990s, Moore noticed some self-published comic books that didn't include superheroes; they were more realistic. These books looked like something he might be able to write, and he decided to try his hand at the longer form. "I wanted to work with more room on the page than comic strips. I wanted my characters to be able to talk in complete sentences and not the carefully crafted sound bites you are forced to create in the strips. Plus, with graphic novels you can develop a story for as long or short as you like. Coming from comic strips, the format felt like it was boundary-free," Moore explained to GN.

He pored over his pile of rejected comic strips to gather his best ideas. From the rubbish emerged two characters: "a sweet-natured girl and an acerbic one," remembered Moore. "Seeing those two girls in all my work was like a wake-up call for me," Moore wrote in Strangers in Paradise: The Treasury Edition. He framed his ideas for an ongoing love story built around these two main characters: Katina Choovanski and Helen Francine Peters, known simply as Katchoo and Francine. Moore marked September 7, 1992, as the day he first drew the main cast for his comic book: Katchoo and Francine; a woman named Darcy Parker and her brother David Qin; and Freddie Femur, a man dating Francine. The moment struck Moore because in the picture he drew that day, "[I] didn't see characters.… I saw people. And THAT made all the difference," he recalled in Strangers in Paradise. "As I drew these people I thought about who they were, how they got along and where the friction was. A story began to come to me, and within hours I was drawing the first issue of Strangers in Paradise."

Begins Strangers in Paradise

Moore drew the first issue of Strangers in Paradise on nights and weekends over a six-week period at his kitchen table. He sent photocopies of the finished story to various publishers and landed a meager contract for a three-part miniseries with Antarctic Press in San Antonio, Texas. Moore fine-tuned his story, redrawing parts and rewriting others, and on November 17, 1993, the first issue was published. Although sales were modest, "I had a comic book with my name on it and I was thrilled," Moore wrote in Strangers in Paradise: The Treasury Edition.

The series started as a humorous look at the loves and relationships of a large cast of characters, but Katchoo, Francine, and David stood out by the time Moore finished the third part of the miniseries in 1994. At that time, he had built up a fan base and attracted enough attention in the comics industry to prompt the publisher to reprint the first issue and to collect the series into a trade paperback that remained in print as of 2006. More importantly perhaps, Moore could envision an ongoing future for the series, and a new career for himself. Antarctic Press offered him another contract, but Moore declined in favor of self-publishing. He started business under the name Abstract Studio in 1994 and returned to his drawing board. Within two years, Moore remembered in Strangers in Paradise: The Treasury Edition: "I was cranking out SiP stories as fast as I could draw them," and the series "took over my life."

Adds depth to characters

In 1994, Moore began publishing volume two of Strangers in Paradise. Volume two offers deeper insight into the characters and their pasts. As Moore explores the characters, he begins to alternate the storylines of the series between romance and friendship and darker tales of crime and intrigue. These alternating storylines, as they react to both the good and bad in life, give his characters a more realistic dimension.

Readers learn much more about Katchoo, for example; she was the victim of child abuse, a teenage alcoholic, and a highly paid prostitute, none of which she has shared with her friends Francine and David. If this weren't enough, Katchoo's former boss, Darcy Parker, has tracked her down to figure out the reason for some missing money, taken the bewildered Francine hostage, and identified David as Darcy's younger brother. The relationship between Katchoo, Francine, and David becomes even more complicated as they explore their feelings of friendship and love for one another. It is the relationships between these three characters that form the meat of the series, even as Moore introduces a variety of other

Creating Realistic Female Characters

Terry Moore created such realistic female characters in Strangers in Paradise that readers sometimes assume he is a woman himself. When asked by Sequential Tart interviewer Katherine Keller about why he decided to focus on female characters, Moore replied: "It's because I've spent most of my life thinking about women instead of men. I knew that whoever I drew I would have to sit there day after day, hours and hours every day focusing on them, their elbow and their arm, and their thigh, and their shoulder, and how they look, and the nose, and the face, and I really didn't want to get obsessed over a guy."

Moore's focus on the details of his female characters has been widely praised. One reviewer dubbed him the best drawer of hair in comics. Critics and fans alike appreciate his realistic depictions of the female form, especially his sensitive depiction of Francine's struggles with her weight. When asked by Keller why he doesn't distort his characters to look like more typical overexaggerated comic book fare, he explained that he had no desire to do that, adding that he found the "different shapes and forms" of everyday women "absolutely perfect."

But Moore got more right about his female characters than their physical attributes. He created emotionally vulnerable, intelligent women who interact with their world in completely believable ways. Moore told GN that "I still say characters when I speak of them to others, but for me, alone in the studio, they are people. I write about people, not characters. That has made all the difference in my work." Instead of focusing on their gender, Moore concentrated on the common human trait of his characters, their heart. "I began knowing what type of people they were and that their inner values would bring them to where they are now," he explained to the Colorado Springs Independent.

characters over the years. And Moore, according to reviewer Sara Lipowitz of Seized by the Tale, has an "almost uncanny ability to understand and portray human interaction in all its grandeur and ugliness." Joe Shea praised Moore on the Empty Bowl Web site for "how real his characters are, and his ability to make you care for them." The comics industry agreed, and in 1996 Moore won the Eisner Award for Best Continuing Series.

That same year, comic book publisher Jim Lee (1964–) contacted Moore, asking if he'd like to join Kurt Busiek (1960–; see entry) and James Robinson in publishing under a new imprint called Homage Comics. Moore gladly accepted—Lee being among comic book publishing's elite—and started volume three of his series under the new imprint in 1996. Soon after, he saw his sales jump. In volume three, Moore introduces aging to his characters. Since starting the series, Moore kept the characters as young adults. He began the third volume with Francine and Katchoo in their middle ages, meeting after a ten-year separation. Doing so allowed Moore to offer glimpses of the characters at various stages in life. It also opened the series to new readers. While much of the series explores love and relationships from an adult perspective, in 1998 Moore wrote a three-part look at Francine and Katchoo in high school, where they first became friends.

Moore, however, returned to self-publishing after eight issues with Homage. In 1999, he explained his decision to Katherine Keller of Sequential Tart: "It was difficult for me to—it was distracting to run it through so many hands, to do a company process.… [I]t was never as fun as working to the last minute here by myself and dashing it off to the printer by FedEx, and bam bam bam it's out. The way I work right now is more like putting out a newspaper, and I found that I felt that was a lot more fun." Moore has since continued to self-publish under his company's name, Abstract Studio.

By the early 2000s, Moore had written and drawn more than one hundred issues of Strangers in Paradise. The saga of his characters continued to unfold in new and unexpected ways. David's past, for example, turns out to be filled with grim street violence.

As his fame grew, Moore landed various other projects, including some books and artwork for Dark Horse, DC Comics, and Marvel. As Moore worked, however, he never lost his love of comic strips and, over the years, he has generated a sizable collection of his sketched cartoons, various comic strips, and doodled character ideas. Starting in the mid-1990s, he has published an occasional and unrelated horror story about a deadly love affair between the characters Molly and Poo in Strangers in Paradise, and later began publishing snippets in a new series. Called Paradise, Too!, the new work includes a strip about the adventures of the tiny, strawberry cake-loving fairy, Kixie, and stories about a polar bear named Plato, along with musings from a caricature of Terry Moore himself. The series was collected into trade paperbacks starting in 2002. Moore's masterpiece, however, remains Strangers in Paradise. The series was honored with the GLAAD Media Award for Best Comic Book in 2000, a 2002 YALSA/ALA selection for Popular Paperbacks for Young Adults, and an Inkpot Award for Outstanding Achievement in Comic Arts in 2003.

For More Information

Books

Moore, Terry. Strangers in Paradise: The Treasury Edition. New York: Perennial Currents, 2004.

Periodicals

Luger, Kara. "Fine Print; Reality Bites: Comic Creator Terry Moore Gets Down and Dirty." Colorado Springs Independent (May 19–May 25, 2005): p. 60.

Web Sites

Keller, Katherine. "A Quiet, Soft Spoken Man: 30 Minutes with Terry Moore." Sequential Tart.http://www.sequentialtart.com/archive/oct99/moore.shtml (accessed on May 3, 2006).

MacPherson, Don. "Paradise, Too!, # 3." The Fourth Rail.http://www.thefourthrail.com/reviews/critiques/091701/paradisetoo3.shtml (accessed on May 3, 2006).

Rappaport, Adrienne. "Strangers No More: Terry Moore." Sequential Tart.http://www.sequentialtart.com/archive/may01/moore_2.shtml (accessed on May 3, 2006).

Roberts, Paul Dale. "Interviews: Terry Moore, Creator of Strangers in Paradise." Jazma Online.http://www.jazmaonline.com/interviews/interviews.asp?intID=167 (accessed on May 3, 2006).

Shea, Joe. "Terry Moore, Author and Artist of Strangers in Paradise." Empty Bowl. http://www.emptybowl.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=76 (accessed on May 3, 2006).