Strangers in Paradise seemed like a good place to start this project considering that I just finished reading the series less than a week ago. This is the first time I had ever read it. I should have read it ages ago. I was always interested in the idea of it. I had heard good things about it, after all. Not from any of my friends because the great age of my comic reading spanned from about the age of 8 to 17. This meant that all of my comic reading friends were either ones I had converted or boys in my classes. Let's also step back a minute and consider that once I moved to Indiana from New Orleans, I was in a fairly tiny school system. My graduating class was made up of 131 people. Unless we had new people move in, I was interacting with basically the same people from grade 5 through senior year of high school. Most of the boys in my grade who read comics were into either the same ones that I was or they read other super hero books.
Wizard became the primary way that I was introduced to new material unless I happened to stumble onto it in the comic book store as the owners of the comic books stores I frequented were notorious for ignoring the little girl mooning over the new comic selection and rummaging through their back issues.
So it was that I first read about
Strangers in Paradise all those many years ago in
Wizard. I vaguely recall being somewhat interested in it, but not enough to seek it out. I was young. I had a very limited amount of money, and a pretty big comic book habit as it was. I sort of put it into the back of my mind as something I would inevitably pick up someday, and, if fact, through the years I would occasionally think about it. It was one of those things, though, where I never really saw it. It was never prominently featured at my comic book stores. By the time I was in college, I was barely even going to comic book stores. I never saw it at the bookstores. It just sort of slipped away.
Then I became friends with
wanderlustlover, and I was reminded of
Strangers in Paradise because she has icons of it and mentioned it in several posts. Still I never thought to seek it out. It just elevated itself in my mind as something I should read. While
wanderlustlover and I have differing tastes in some areas, I still highly value her opinion. This was the first friend I'd had that had mentioned
Strangers in Paradise.
I'll be honest. I still haven't bought the series. Once I had my Kindle Fire and had figured out how to get it to read cbr and cbz files, I went looking for more digital comics to put on it. I was fortunate enough to find a source to download the complete
Strangers in Paradise series. Even after I had done that it took me a little while to get around to reading it, and I had to take some breaks in order to read other things.
I did finish it, though. I powered through the rest of it last weekend.
( Strangers in Paradise *possible spoilers* )