To celebrate the news that I will soon have a play published -- yay me! -- I bought the fourth Pocket Book of Strangers In Paradise. Just can't get enough of the chronicles of Francine and Katchoo...which is too bad, since the whole series is about to end.

But let us not mourn! Let us celebrate the brilliant artwork, writing, and characters created by Terry Moore. This volume (covering issues 41-60) finds gay Katchoo and (mostly?) straight Francice, who undoubtedly love each other, trying to find a way to make their relationship work. It doesn't go well. Francine gets engaged, gets pregnant. Their perky friend Casey tries to bring them together but only helps to drive them apart. Meanwhile, the criminal network that Katchoo seemed to have escaped is silently closing in on her...

The saga keeps on getting darker in this volume. Moore still includes plenty of fun banter, but all the characters are accumulating scars and learning to live with them. Comics (like television) excel at stories like this, in which we learn to love the people we read about and watch them change in something like real time.