Strangers in Paradise 82

For years now, I’ve had a love-hate relationship with Terry Moore’s Strangers in Paradise. The title has had some of the best moments I’ve ever read in comics, but has also managed to drive certain plot elements into the ground, through repetition and over-analyzing. Which really is something that most of the mainstream superhero books we all enjoy are guilty of…but the long and the short of it is, SiP is not supposed to share that much with mainstream superhero titles.

With less than ten issues remaining in the title, Moore is trying to put a lot of dangling plot threads together in just under a year, as well as coping with the new and predominant story that one of the book’s main characters has massive brain trauma and will likely not live to see the end of the series.

Again, for most sci-fi books, that’s not particularly uncommon. But it’s been more than a dozen years now, and none of the main characters in SiP has ever bitten the bullet. What started out with three main characters, and an antagonist in the person of Francine’s ex-boyfriend Freddie, has developed into a title with a half-dozen “main” characters (though it still centers firmly around the original 3) and a handful of ancillary characters (these are the “expendable” ones whenever the organized crime factor returns to the story).

For those who haven’t read the book, or haven’t read in a while, the long and the short of it is that there are three friends who had lived together for years: David, who has a thing for Katchoo; Katchoo, who has a thing for Francine; and Francine, who’s had things for a string of bad men. Usually her love (which is a confused and confounding kind of love) for Katchoo will bring her out of a relationship before anything too tragic happens to her, but recently, a fight with Katchoo and the Right Guy at the Right Time all converged, and Francine married rich doctor Brad Silver, brother of the fictional “rock legend” Griffin Silver, whose lyrics have been sprinkled throughout SiP since long before Brad was a gleam in Terry Moore’s eye.

This issue centers mostly around Francine, who is home with her husband while a variety of other characters have been thrown into a frenzy by last issue’s revelation of an impending death in the series. The other characters are making a variey of plans–some productive, some just seemingly random–while Francine sits alone at home with her thoughts, missing her absent husband, who spends 18 hours a day at the hospital where he works. When she finds a cell phone in his pocket that she doesn’t recognize, though, Francine becomes suspicious. One thing leads to another, and your first impression is given validation–her perfect husband is cheating on her. Discovering this, Francine shatters the phone and then drives off into the night–she wakes up alone, somewhere (presumably a hotel), and has a spectacularly high number of missed calls and messages on her own phone–not just from the cheatin’ hubby, but from her mother, Katchoo, David and everyone else ever associated with Francine. “What did you do?” She asks, “Tell everyone we know?”

And then, when walking down the street a panel later, she sees a newspaper headline that, while it’s unclear at present how it might impact the story, it’s clear will change the dynamic of the book for the remainder of its run. It’s a twist that you never see coming, and it doesn’t seem particularly contrived. The realization of what it means for the characters (starting with, “So they really weren’t calling about the girlfriend at all!”) hits the reader slowly after taking in the final panels of the book, and I was left with the feeling the SiP #82 is possibly the best single issue of an ongoing comic that I’ve read since at least Identity Crisis.

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