Madeleine Lloyd-Davies is thankful for Strangers In Paradise by terrymooreart
When I was 13, I had the incredible fortune to be invited to San Diego Comic Con with a close friend and her family. I was a comics newbie and indiscriminately bought anything that was recommended to me (including Chicken Soup for Satan, a way-too-scary horror comic that I bought because of the funny title). By far the most important book I bought that weekend was the first volume of Strangers in Paradise.
This is the book that made me fall in love with comics all over again. When I was a kid, I would sit on the floor at CVS and read Archie comics (#TeamCherylBlossom). But I think people who grew up with friends and family who read and shared comic books can underestimate how hard it can be to get into them as a newcomer. I didn’t know where my local comic shop was. My attempts to play X-Men with boys on the playground were immediately shot down. And that was kind of…that, until SiP. As soon as I got home, I started trying to track down other graphic novels (I remember reading Castle Waiting, Alias, and slowly working my way over to collected editions of superhero novels like Astonishing X-Men).
But beyond pulling me into comics, SiP was really the first time I saw characters that I truly related to, in ANY medium. At age 13 I was coming to grips with the fact that I was chubby and bisexual (with a mullet, btw, #TeamMullet). At that time, I couldn’t have named a single chubby girl character OR bisexual character, let alone someone who was both (happily, I’ve since discovered plenty more great comics representation: try Love and Rockets: Locas or Wet Moon, for instance). To read a book with a woman who was chubby, who struggled with body image sometimes but was confident sometimes, who had people who thought she was beautiful AND people who made fun of her weight, whose sexual orientation was in flux—if you’ve grown up seeing a lot of people like you represented in media, you might not get how powerful that is. But I think a lot of people in this community are here for that very reason—something else that I am thankful for.
[Read Strangers In Paradise on comiXology]
Madeleine Lloyd-Davies is comiXology’s Production Director. She is very thankful to work in a company where she actually had to EMAIL TERRY MOORE!