After Strangers in Paradise celebrates its 25th anniversary with a year-long revival in 2018, indie comics icon Terry Moore plans to move into a second volume of Rachel Rising, his recently-concluded horror hit.
Rachel Rising centered on a woman who wakes up in a shallow grave, and realized that she was part of a centuries-old supernatural legacy in the small, creepy town of Manson.
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Moore introduced numerous storylines, featuring a variety of creepy and supernatural influences from mythology to the Old Testament to Jack the Ripper — and while the series’ resolution was a satisfying one, it certainly did not close all of the loopholes the writer left open.
“It’s unfinished,” Moore told ComicBook.com when we asked why he was so keen to rush back to Manson once Motor Girl and Strangers in Paradise were over.
Moore launched Rachel Rising, and it gained instant acclaim, a high-profile fan in the form of The Walking Dead‘s Robert Kirkman, and a TV deal, with a pilot meant to be written by Moore.
While the TV series never happened, Rachel remained Moore’s best-selling work since Strangers in Paradise for much of its run and built up huge demand on the back issue market.
It also burned out Moore, who has admitted that the relentlessly dark and creepy book drained him and left him desperate for something more fun. That’s a big part of why his next title was Motor Girl, about a woman who repairs UFOs with the help of her imaginary friend, a gorilla.
“My plan is, it became unsustainable in its format, but I plan to finish it one way or the other, either coming back to it with a little more clout as a new series with a new number one, or I will finish it in another medium,” Moore told his panel at Comic Con. “I am absolutely in love with some of the characters in there, and I care about them a lot.”
Moore previously talks about Strangers in Paradise as a property he could bring back as a prose novel, although he has had trouble doing both that and dealing with the press of deadlines on his ongoing comics work.
