Strangers in Paradise creator Terry Moore paid a visit to Abbey Road Studios this week, and left some SIP-themed graffiti behind on a wall that encourages guests from around the world tagging it. Abbey Road, a functioning recording studio which became famous with everyday fans after The Beatles named a record after it, has been a tourist destination ever since 1969. That year, The Beatles released Abbey Road, which features a famous photo of the four band members crossing the street at a crosswalk near the recording studio. Recreating that image has become a rite of passage for fans who find themselves in the area.
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Moore stopped by the studio to take a couple of selfies, and to draw Katchoo (the lead character from his series Strangers in Paradise and Parker Girls) on the wall outside. There, a long tradition of fans covering the wall in signatures and graffiti is so widely accepted that you can see previous layers of the practice just below the white paint in photos.
You can see Moore’s post below.
Abbey Road was the final album recorded by The Beatles (although it ended up being released before Let It Be), and is often seen as their best work. As documented in the Get Back documentary by Peter Jackson, the band functionally broke up during the Let It Be sessions, so it’s also remarkable that Abbey Road exists at all, let alone in a form that’s as coherent and impressive as it is.
Moore himself is also a musician. His love for The Beatles is fairly well-documented, and his music wasn’t just a career before comics, but something that has been a part of his comic book work for years. Everything from songs written into Strangers in Paradise to a rock star character playing a surprisingly big role at the end of that series, to a couple of songs he recorded and released based on Strangers got fans of the series interested in Moore’s musical background all the way back in the ’90s.
Strangers in Paradise is a love story set against the backdrop of an organized crime story, and is one of the most celebrated indie comics of the ’90s. It was the first comic by Moore, who almost immediately joined names like Jeff Smith and Dave Sim on “best-of” lists of the era. He has worked consistently in comics since, creating his own little “Terryverse,” a shared universe of comics that often don’t seem to have much connective tissue, but which all take place in the same world.
