Terry Moore’s ‘Motor Girl’ Being Developed at Hulu

Indie comics legend Terry Moore is writing a pilot script based on his creator-owned comic book series Motor Girl, the writer/artist revealed on Twitter today.

The series, which centers on a veteran who is struggling with PTSD while operating a car repair garage frequented by aliens, is set in the shared “Terryverse” also occupied by his series Strangers in Paradise, Echo, and Rachel Rising. Each of Moore’s properties has been optioned one or more times by Hollywood, with nothing substantive coming of the partnerships so far. A feature film based on Strangers in Paradise is currently in development. According to his tweet today, Moore has optioned Motor Girl to Hulu.

“I wanted to do [Motor Girl] in 2007 when I finished Echo, but when I said ‘I’m going to do a story called Motorgirl,’ somebody else said, ‘I’m already doing that,’” Moore said at the time the series launched in 2016. “So I just immediately dropped it and said, ‘Okay, I’ll do something else.’ But in all this time, they haven’t done anything with it, so I figure it’s mine now and I’m going to go do it.”

That something was a year-long lead-in to his revived Strangers in Paradise, itself a year-long miniseries designed to celebrate the comic’s 25th anniversary.

Motor Girl centers on a girl and her best friend, a gorilla. The pair work together fixing cars at a gas station in the desert, and one day, they’re approached by an alien with a damaged UFO. She helps him on his way, and word of mouth about her excellent services makes her little garage a UFO hot spot, attracting the attention of an investigator from Area 51.

Shadowy government agents and agencies are a frequent feature in Moore’s work, beginning with Strangers in Paradise and absolutely pervading Echo. In Strangers in Paradise XXV, threads of all four books were pulled together, bringing the conspiracies and conspirators face to face.

Moore’s Rachel Rising, a horror series about a woman who is magically revived from the dead after being murdered, was in development for a while with producers from Watchmen and The Walking Dead behind it. That project seemed real enough that it significantly goosed the value of the series’ first issue on the aftermarket.

There is no word on any potential production date for Motor Girl which, as far as we can tell, had not been announced in any way prior to Moore’s tweet.