Trailblazing independent comics creator Terry Moore has announced that his next story, Ever, will bypass the single issue comics format and go straight to short graphic novels, beginning with its first installment in November. The first book, which runs 72 pages, is called Ever: The Way Out. Moore shared a rough version of the book’s cover on his YouTube channel, which features a young woman who is the only person able to see a man standing in a busy street beside a dimensional portal. The series will center on angels and demons, which means there’s a decent chance it will have direct ties to Rachel Rising, Moore’s horror comic from a few years back.
That young woman on the cover is named Ever, and when she turns 18, she becomes the the key to opening the Pit of Darkness where all the sinful angels are kept. Moore explained that Ever, a descendant of a “an angel/human interaction,” doesn’t want to be the key, because it means sacrificing herself to The Beast, a gruesome, multi-headed, four-dimensional being.
“When I finished Five Years, the question was what do you do next?” Moore said in a YouTube video. “Long story short, the new story incoming out in November and it’s a trade paperback format; I’m not doing the single issues leading up to it.”
Moore’s Strangers in Paradise was a huge hit in the ’90s and has gone on to be an evergreen line of trade paperbacks for Moore. The characters from Echo, Rachel Rising, and Motor Girl, all of whom have ties to the Strangers in Paradise characters, joined up with SiP‘s Francine and Katchoo in Five Years, which recently concluded. During his Comic-Con @ Home panel, which was released earlier this month, Moore talked about the challenges of the comics industry — where readers often prefer collected editions, especially for non-superhero work, but the single issues keep the lights on and the comic shops open.
“Everybody was asking, ‘are you going to do an omnibus [for Five Years]?” Moore explained. “Yes, we will. I never promote the omnibus when the series first starts because people say ‘okay, well I’ll wait for the omnibus,’ which means I don’t see them for a year. I miss you — I want you to read the singles. People who buy the singles keep the series alive, of course, with sales. The people who trade-wait, at least I get to see you twice a year. But the people who wait for the omnibus, I only see you once a year, or when I finish a book — which is actually the way the book world is supposed to work, but it sure is nice to sell them a chapter at a time, too.”
Ever will be in stores in November.
Tim M. Hill helped bring Digital-Overload from a weekly newsletter to a full-fledged news site by creating a new website and branding. He continues to assist in keeping the site responsive and well organized for the readers. As a writer to Digital-Overload, Tim mainly covers mobile news and gadgets.