Strangers in Paradise, Volume 3: It's A Good Life

I'm a big fan of poutine. For those of you who are not Canadian, nor have Canadians in your life, poutine is a Quebecois dish based on french fries, which have cheese curds placed on top of them, and then the whole thing is smothered in gravy.

This seems off-topic, but I swear it relates.

The thing with poutine is that it's a really common dish, because it's simple and easy to put together, but few people make it really well. I've been in restaurants where they've just shredded some mozzarella cheese and tossed it on top of the gravy, and other places where the curds are rubbery, or the gravy's watered down or tasteless. It's easy to make, but real easy to get wrong as well. When it's done right, though, poutine is artery-clogging ambrosia, and one of the tastiest foods on the planet.

Strangers in Paradise is poutine literature. It takes a lot of common elements from other stories and mixes them together - between the emo-before-emo-was-a-thing characters, the love triangle between those characters, the feminist politics, the complex interplays of sexuality, cross-gender friendships, and attraction, and the “on the run from the mafia” plot, you've got elements of around half of the cinema and indie comics of the early 1990s represented here in some way, shape, or form. And it works. My gods does it work. Everything fits in perfectly together - the plot, the characters, the artwork - and you end up both loving and hating those characters at the same time for the choices that they're making as the story progresses. It's a difficult, demanding story to read at some points, but it's a very rewarding read at the same time, one that gives you all it has and leaves you wanting even more once you're done.

Another highlight of this GN is the artwork - Moore's black and white brushwork might seem a little simplistic at first, but it's a concious choice, done to get you to pay more attention to the words on the page, and the way he varies style and layout throughout it (for example, cartoonish styles for dream sequences and complex, multi-balooned conversations in one panel between good friends), as well as incorporating things like music, poetry, and prose writing throughout the book - it's almost like he's using Strangers in Paradise to teach a seminar on what the GN is capable of while at the same time telling a great story.