Sometime 1996. Caught up in relationship whirlwinds, desperate letters and bad decisions debris all around. I had been drinking regularly; drunken talk revolver: I love, I think.One of those nights again with almost constant listener, Dodo. Cutting my blah blah blahs short, he says, "It's like that elephant in the living room."
Huh?
A few days later, he lends me Terry Moore's Strangers in Paradise, Vol. 3, issue 1: Love Me Tender.
In its black and white pages, the elephant-in-the-living-room bit. Massive and towering, yet most of the times ignored. Or simply missed. Like most of the things we look for, yearn for.
It must be difficult to write about love without going all Hallmark and puppies. But Terry Moore makes it seem effortless, the bastard. Francine, Kachoo and Dave are flawed and fragile, flashy and forgiving in just a few lines; their love triangle quietly shifting. Blossoming earthquakes. There are also deep dark secrets, amazons, funny moments. Unpredictable at every turn. The bitter in the sour, with the sweetness of a stolen kiss.
Yesterday, in the newly opened Fully Booked in Greenhills. Scanning the comic book shelves, and there at the bottom:
Happiness.
6 comments:
Hey! I've followed the early issues of this comic back in college when I had lots of time to hang out and borrow stuff from friends and orgmates.
(Sadly, the guy who owned the comic lost 95% of his collection when someone stole them from another friend's car... He stopped buying comics, and I never got to read the rest of Strangers.)
Well, what Thor reads, I usually get to read - ummm, if there's spaceships, dragons, and if they're comics - sure I read them but sometimes he brings home contemporary literature books that I do read once in a time/space anomaly. Anyway, I was also hooked when he brought home "Love me Tender." No matter what, I'm a sucker for love stories and SIP is one hell of long "telenovela."
I've been collecting the collected SIP graphic novels for years now from #3 to the current one #16 (Love me Tender's #4) - thor's been distracted with a lot of things - gulat siya we have almost all of the graphic novels! Well, SIP is like a soap - you get hooked and that's it you just have to know how it ends...
Jovan: The one I recently bought is packaged as a novel. Because SIP does feel like one. And it collects Volumes 1 and 2! :)
Faye: Yeah, well, having me as a brother is priceless. For everything else, there's Mastercard. ;-)
Hehe. That elephant.
Nine years down the line and most of the time, I still tend to ignore it.
There are only two Moores doing comics worth the trouble. terry's one of 'em.
And Mandy! Di na kita malilimutan ever dahil sa SIP. Salamat talaga. :)
Anytime. At tumpak ka kay Mandy!
:-)
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