Terry Moore’s Strangers in Paradise was one of the first “alternative” comics I read when I was a teenager getting tired of Marvel (I bought it after reading the preview in Cerebus). I picked up around the middle of “I Dream of You,” I think, so fairly early in the run. I followed the series faithfully all through high school, painted Katchoo on my graduation mortarboard (and got the photo published in the lettercol!), angsted and argued over the characters, and decided with my best friend that she was Katchoo (but taller) and I was Francine (but gayer).
In short, it was the perfect graphic addiction for the kind of teenage girl I was. Later, I grew up, started hanging out with comic snobs (you know, the kind of horrible people who write for The Comics Journal), and found out my SiP love was stupid and misguided and didn’t I know Moore stole everything he knew from Jaime Hernandez?
I have to confess, I never read any bros Hernandez until last year or so, when another comics snob (allright, so I’ll name-drop) lent me the whole run of those giant Love and Rockets phonebooks, two by two, over the space of a year. The comic snobs may have a point with the ripoff thing. Hopey is Katchoo but moreso, and Francine has Maggie’s daffiness, voluption, and super-heterosexuality-with-one-teeny-exception. Both storylines could be called an exercise in fanny, in that they’re well-realized women in a women’s world, created for straight male gratification (at least the creators themselves are clearly getting off on drawing so many and varied hot women). And no one could dispute that Hernandez has it all over Moore in terms of artwork.
But I don’t really know that Moore is just a poor man’s, or middlebrow girl’s, Hernandez. If I had to pin it down, I would say Locas (if that’s the term for the Jaime parts of L&R) is better fanny, but SiP is better chick-lit.
One of the notable things about SiP is that it always had a very large female following, and those women, going by the lettercols and my own experiences, were disproportionately the type who “didn’t read comics” except of course Archie when they were little. Even today, SiP will always be one of the first works mentioned in message board threads of “what comics can I get my girlfriend into?” (of course, responders almost never follow up with “what kind of books does she like to read?” as if women were, you know, individuals, with divergent tastes. But I digress.)
I’m too lazy to google, but I don’t recall that L&R comes up in those threads more often than most popular comics do (because anyone who knows a woman who’s liked a comic, or is a woman who’s liked a comic, will mention that comic, and the list inevitably and logically ends up all over the map). I think the height of L&R’s popularity was before my time, but by the time I was aware of it, its boosters were all Comics Journal reading types who want to educate me about Important Comics.
Now, I never would have read and loved L&R if not for those people, and I am a sucker for anything anyone tells me is Culturally Important. But we run an iconoclastic blog here, and suburban Archie-reading housewives will always win out over comics scholars, at least until Archie moms make up the majority of our readers. So why does Moore capture that demographic better than Hernandez?
Mostly because SiP is a straight-up soap opera, whereas Locas is only an homage to soap operas (of both the telenovelistic and professional-wrestling varieties) among other things. Maggie and Hopey have a semi-fraught relationship, where Hopey expresses frustration and jealousy over Maggie’s straight crushes and Maggie is hurt when Hopey viciously puts her down as a cover for her feelings of love. But those moments are very by-the-way, and usually played for laughs rather than drama. They do fall out and get back together occasionally, but it doesn’t really seem to matter why.
SiP was, what, fifteen years of will-they-won’t-they, while Maggie and Hopey’s sex life is more do-they-don’t-they, serving the cause of male titillation rather than suspense. You don’t ache for the women’s relationship to go to the next level, cause implicitly it has, and it was no biggie…. you just kinda hope Hernandez will get around to drawing the nitty-gritty. You want Katchoo and Francine to have sex because, the way the story’s set up, it will change everything.
Most importantly, SiP is both plot-driven and episodic in exactly the way TV soap operas are. The proportions of love triangles, scheming villainesses and flawed heroines and how they will all be changed forever drives every issue. This is great for getting a devoted, strongly identifying readership. But like soap operas, it gets really boring and repetitive and forced when it becomes clear that the creator is too attached to his characters to let them go. Which is why I quit reading years before, apparently, Francine and Katchoo Did It (and my sister insists that in her universe, SiP ended after “I Dream of You”).
Locas is a weaker soap opera, but ultimately a much more satisfying work to read straight through, because Hernandez doesn’t seem very invested in What Happens Next. He likes the locas, he likes their friends and surroundings, and he likes writing stories about them in all sorts of genres. He creates plot arcs, but he’ll nonchalantly scrap them (Maggie loves Rand Race, Hopey has a baby, etc.) when he gets bored of them, and may or may not revisit the continuity years later (note, of course, that I read all of the phonebooks of Locas together, one time, rather then following each issue over ten years like SiP, and this colours my readings). Background figures become stars and then fade out again, settings and tone drastically change around the characters.
On a superficial reading, it seems like Hernandez is just exploring whatever interests him, but what interests him ends up being more interesting than will-they-won’t-they, will-this-change-everything-forever. On the downside, the sheer virtuosity of Locas, and the people who recommended it to you in the first place, can give you the impression that there must be something else going on, something symbolic, or Literary. Maybe you’re supposed to be Learning Something from the characters, rather than lusting after them.
What a drag, man. Bring on the busty bisexuals in denial.
(disclaimer: i’m all strung out trying to finish drawing an issue, so please forgive all the hysterical italicizing and the Portentous Caps.)
The whole “changed forever” thing seems to be coming up in the more recent of the Locas stories…since it seems to want to be a bit less about sex and a bit more about love (although the sex is still there, not to fear). After Maggie gets a divorce, presumably for Hopey…Hopey starts telling Maggie she “loves her” on the phone…an assertion Maggie takes seriously (unclear if Hopey does, so much)…So maybe it’s drifting toward SiP territory a bit…or toward a conclusion? See “Dicks and Deedees” and “Ghosts of Hoppers” (not in the
“phone book” format yet, but coming in hardcover in Locas II in a few months). Or have you seen these already?
I read a fair amount of SiP in the library in 2000-2001, before I realized I didn’t like it.
Here’s what I wrote on an old tcj message board thread:
SIP is such a utterly god damned weird comic.
It’s like I read a different comic from everyone else.
I mean really. It’s basically a comic about all powerful organization who secretely control the world, with their lesbian super soldiers.
The plots never make a lick of sense.
It alternates between the conspiracy arcs and the soap opera arcs. In the soap opera arcs Moore half ignores the conspiracy arcs, but they completely undermine the soap opera plots.
It’s all extremely disjointed. No editors here.
All that incoherent conspiracy shit is never played for laughs or even lighthearted. There’s an intense committment to the material.
On a page by page basis, it’s usually not weird at all. It’s uninspired, generic, in some sense competent. The contrast between these all too conventional qualities and the trippy incoherent aspects is what really makes it weird.
Eric, no, I only read what's in the collections, when robin lends me them. Truth be told, I picked up a couple of issues in 2002, when I was sort of feeling like I should expand my comic horizons (but before I decided to be a cartoonist, the decision which actually blew my comic horizons wide open). There was like, a story of penny century meeting the devil guy in high school, & another one of fritzi getting sexually assaulted by a band or something. It just all seemed like pointless cruelty. Even now that I have context, I'd rather wait for fuller stories.
David, I always figured that the core characters & relationships were the heart & soul of sip, & the lesbian hitwomen were just there to create suspenseful situations. I believed in darcy well enough, but after she died, I dunno if I took the organization that seriously, at least outside of the flashbacks & katchoo & David origin stories. It's clear when Moore talks about the creation & process of sip, that he's fascinated by friendship, & love, & personal redemption…. He doesn't go on about his fears of whether lesbian killers control the world.
Maybe that lets Moore off the hook for too much of his weak plots, but I think it's the way a lot of fans read it.
As far as "generic, in some sense competent" etc., I have to disagree with you, at least as far as the art. I didn't get to address this in the post, but I maintain that nobody in comics draws women the way that Moore does, & that's no small part of his appeal for female fans. They have actual physiques, with, like, fat deposits (& no two women really have them the same!), rendered in a way that is sensual without being, you know, fetishistic. The characters' bodies are worshipped without being turned into smoothed-out pop icons (like hernandez's), or wank objects (like, say, crumb's).
(It sure as heck is a fine line between worship & objectification, but I guess it's one of those I-know-it-when-I-see-it things.)
To be clear, I think hernandez & crumb are both more skilled & powerful artists than Moore. But Moore does reach out to women, in my opinion, in a unique way.
Actually, Moore’s female characters these days all have long thin legs, big breasts and, more often than not, vague expressions. As a fan of his, I miss the fat deposits and the individuality.
putte, that’s sad to hear. i haven’t read his new series at all, but i thought i might pick it up in trades. oh well. i’ve moved on to drawing my own damn fat deposits, anyhow.
Now, I know in the TCJ Messboard days I’ve said SiP just seemed a wannabe L&R clone stripped of the counterculture and Latin@ culture, but maybe the problem is just that despite my obvious chick-ness, I don’t like chick-lit?
Honestly, when I reviewed an SiP trade back in the days the internet bubble allowed me to make a living doing such things, I was struck more at how poorly Moore wrote MEN. It seemed like every male character was a leering predatory jackass save poor little Nice Guy David, dutifully taking any abuse Katchoo dished out because he was “in love” with her (love in this universe apparently doesn’t include listening to or respecting what someone says. Like that they’re a lesbian?)
I can’t speak for women everywhere but Hopey and Izzy both had traits I could relate to and see in myself, no one in SiP did. On the other hand, a close friend of mine loved SiP and found Francine very relatable to herself. So really, if you want to revive this 90’s piss-party(oops, a masculine metaphor!) over which is better, the “women as a demographic like it better” maybe you could consider that not every comics loving woman is an “Archie reading housewife” or whatever?
Hey Jenny. Just so you know, Miriam left the building long ago; I don’t think she reads HU anymore. So if she doesn’t respond, that’s probably why.
Ah, no problem Noah—the article showed up in my FB feed today, I didn’t look at the date on it when I read the text.