Terry Moore to Launch Serial in January

After announcing that his first project after Five Years would be Ever, a new graphic novel that would bypass monthly comics altogether and publish as an oversized one-shot in November, Terry Moore surprised fans on Sunday with the announcement that his return to the monthlies would be just two months later, when he launches a new series that will ship beginning in January 2021. Ironically enough, that series is to be titled Serial -- which is definitely not a name that would be easy to justify releasing in a straight-to-trade format. The series will run as a year-long title, shipping 10 issues in 2021.

The series will center on Zoe, a character first introduced in Moore's Rachel Rising and a fan-favorite. She is, as the title might imply, a serial killer, but with the twist that the ancient evil motivating everything she does is obscured behind the adorable, innocent face of a pre-teen girl.

"She demanded it; I had to do it," Moore said, joking that since 2021 is going to be "such a great year," he's decided to do a serial-killer series that spans the year.

He said that the longer deadlines of his graphic novel work have taught him that he enjoys the routine that's afforded artists working in monthly comics, noting that he has felt slower and less productive on Ever and that if he had been trying to do a graphic novel-length project when he had to travel regularly for conventions, it likely would have had to be delayed.

Moore, best known for his debut series Strangers in Paradise, threaded characters from that comic into its follow-ups, Echo, Rachel Rising, and Motor Girl. Eventually, after the 25th anniversary reunion series Strangers in Paradise XXV, characters from each of the four books teamed up for Five Years, a story in which the women at the center of each title had to work together to prevent a global apocalypse tied to the nuclear technology at the heart of Echo.

That series ran for a year before wrapping up (the titular five years was not a mission statement so much as the amount of time the world would have left if the heroes failed), and since then, Moore had been fairly quiet, until the Ever announcement and now Serial.

You can get both Ever -- which will be available in comic shops this November, and a hardcover edition of which will go up for sale on Moore's website in October -- and Serial through Diamond Comic Distributors or the Abstract Studio website.