The first issue of Terry Moore’s Strangers in Paradise XXV launched today, and within its pages featured a reference to events which occurred in Moore’s sci-fi series Echo.
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Echo was Moore’s first series after the end of the original Strangers in Paradise, which launched Moore’s comic book career 25 years ago. For a while, there were no obvious connections between the two, but eventually Tambi Baker — who discussed the events of Echo in today’s Strangers in Paradise — showed up and played a key role in the series’ final arc.
Ever since members of the Strangers in Paradise cast appeared in Echo, Terry Moore‘s comics have been established as taking place in the same, shared “Terryverse” — and that, of course, brings with it the potential for a crossover event. Moore told ComicBook.com back in July that absolutely intended to make such a story a reality — and probably soon.
Strangers in Paradise, widely regarded as Moore’s masterpiece, returns this year to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the series’ original publication. After that, he told a panel at Comic Con last week, Rachel Rising will return with a new #1 and start to resolve some of the plot threads the supernatural series left dangling when it ended in 2016 to make way for Motor Girl.
At San Diego Comic Con, ComicBook.com caught up with Moore to ask whether he was interested in a multi-title crossover, and before the question was even finished, he rushed out a “yes.”
“I feel like I’ve earned that,” Moore elaborated. “It’s like you’ve set up all your dominoes and so you’re the one who’s earned the right to push them, and I’ve set up all this inter-networking of characters and the day I can draw them all in one scene is going to be a delight.”
Strangers in Paradise, which ran from 1993 until 2007, was Moore’s entree in the world of comic books after a career in advertising, music, and animation. It centered on three friends (Katchoo, David, and Francine) who had a complex relationship — and two of whom had dangerous, intersecting pasts.
Each of Moore’s three other series since Strangers concluded has included members of the Strangers supporting cast in one role or another: Echo used Tambi Baker and Casey Femur, while introducing a mysterious box that would recur in Rachel Rising — a comic that featured the short-lived SiP supporting character Jet, as well as a previously-unnamed lesbian couple who had bought one of Katchoo’s paintings at the gallery where Jet had worked. A minor supporting character in Motor Girl was actually Francine Peters’s aunt.
Asked whether the story that would finally bring the cast together could be his thirtieth-anniversary plan, Moore answered, “I can’t wait that long.”
That certainly seems to be true; besides the Echo connection in the series’ debut issue, Strangers in Paradise XXV #2 features Katchoo standing beside Earl, a major player in Rachel Rising.
