It’s the age-old story: girl meets girl. Girl falls for girl. Girl is confused. Both girls meet guys. More confusion. A sinister cabal known to topple governments rears its ugly head. Suspense ensues. Tragedy results. Love conquers all. They live happily ever after. The end.

That, in a nutshell, is Terry Moore’s Strangers in Paradise, one of the most highly regarded self-published series of the past two decades. Terry started SiP in 1993, and the world of Francine, Katchoo, David, Casey, Tambi, Darcy, and—lest we forget—Freddy Femur, has delighted comics readers for years. The series ended in 2007 but lives on in collected versions. Terry moved on to create Echo and his current series, Rachel Rising. But it’s hard to say goodbye to the family, and Terry and his wife Robyn, who together make up Abstract Studio, are celebrating the 20th anniversary of SiP in a big way, as you’ll see during part one of our exclusive interview, which keys on Strangers in Paradise. Terry is a special guest at Comic-Con this year.

Toucan: What’s a typical day like for you? I ask this because, like clockwork for the last—I don’t know—how many years, you’ve been putting a book out pretty much every six weeks.

Terry: Yeah. The way I do it is I just don’t do anything else. I wake up and shower, eat breakfast, sit down at the drawing table and start drawing and then I break for the next two meals and then I draw until about 1:00 or 2:00 at night and that’s all I do until it’s time to go to a convention. So I live like a monk. The only room I really use in the house is the studio room. Even if I go to the kitchen to eat lunch, I won’t sit down because I’m so tired of sitting down. I’ll just stand up in the kitchen and then I’m in and out in 10 minutes and I’m back up there. So it’s not so much a job as it is just a lifestyle. And over the years Robyn has developed the same lifestyle with me. It’s just how we conduct the house and we’re just all about trying to make the business work.

Toucan: Do you have days when you concentrate on writing, or is it always drawing?

Terry: I try to write when I’m trying to jumpstart a book and I end up drawing a blank. So if I need a kickstart, I sit down with pen and paper or computer and I’ll write. But usually I just cartoon, meaning I have a scene in my head and then I’ll sit down to blank paper and make it happen, cartooning being writing as you draw. I will develop the scene as I’m drawing it. It’s a way of freeze-framing film, and you’re starting at it wondering what they’re going to say next and you have all day to figure out five or six panels of dialogue. So it works really well for me. That’s basically what I’ve been doing since I was 13: blank paper and just cartooning scenes. So this is what’s comfortable for me, I guess.

Toucan: With something like Rachel Rising, you know pretty much where you’re going to go when it comes to a long-term plan, right?

Terry: Yes, I do. I have the big beats figured out. I know where I’m trying to get to like a road trip. And typically what’ll happen is there’s a scene pause and it stays on the characters for a little bit. That’s where I’m cartooning because then the characters start getting into a rhythm; like if it’s two girls and they’re ping-ponging cleverness back and forth, that’s cartooning. That’s me just thinking while I’m drawing. But in terms of major scenes in the book and each scene accomplishing this or that, that’s the kind of stuff I have to figure out.

Toucan: You’ve used the word cartooning a number of times. Do you look at yourself as more of a cartoonist or as a storyteller?

Terry: You know storyteller has only come up . . . people have only accused me of that in the last year. Before that nobody knew what to say to me, so I always just said “cartoonist,” because what I’m doing is cartooning to me. In the grand sense when you go back and analyze this volume of work, it’s storytelling, but I’m really just a bricklayer. I’m doing it a page at a time and all that. So the mechanics of it, the day-to-day life for me is that I’m just trying to cartoon a page every day. The big picture, when you pull back and look to tell the story, that’s pretty cool, but I don’t identify much as a storyteller. I guess I identify myself as an eccentric person who’s spending a lot of time in a fantasy world, like a gamer.