This is Why Terry Moore is King of the Independents
Writer: Terry Moore
Artist: Terry Moore
For the past several years, every time I hear a comic book podcast talking about the best comics to come out in the last decade, RACHEL RISING is almost always on that list.
RACHEL RISING? Never heard of it. I’d heard of the writer/artist/creator, Terry Moore’s other book, STRANGERS IN PARADISE, but I’ve never even SEEN an issue of RACHEL RISING. Wonder what it’s about.
Well, thanks to the good folks at Comixology and their Comixology Unlimited plan, I can find out.
Oh, THAT’S what it is and what it’s about. Cool, yeah, yeah, I’m totally on board, sign me up and give me more.
I recently read Volume 1: Shadow of Death, collecting the first six issues of the ongoing series and it made me wish I had like an omnibus in my hands at the time, because I could have read this book straight through without stopping, or with only minimal breaks, it was so engaging and engrossing.
Rachel Beck wakes up in a shallow grave one night out in the middle of the woods. She makes her way home, not sure what happened, not realizing two days have passed. She’s confused, disoriented, all the things you would expect from someone who woke up in a shallow grave in the middle of the woods. Except she’s not freaking out. She doesn’t even seem to realize, at first, that it was a grave she woke up in.
She goes off to see her friends and one by one they tell her, “You’re not Rachel.”
Well, she feels like Rachel, she has Rachel’s memories, what’s going on here?
Eventually the group, Rachel and her friends Jet and Aunt Johnnie, realize what’s happened, and now they have to figure out who strangled Rachel and buried her in the woods. Never mind the fact that she’s now dead and that even falling off the roof of a building doesn’t kill her for good, those are all minor details in the big picture.
The real mystery is, what happened?
I don’t read a lot of horror comics, but it’s not because I don’t like them: they combine my two favorite things, horror and comics. I just don’t find a lot of horror comics I want to spend time with. RACHEL RISING is an exception; I would read this thing start to finish in one sitting if I had the books and the time.
Terry Moore’s art is beautiful and gritty and strong enough to tell his story with little to no dialogue, which I appreciate in a world where some writers don’t trust their artists enough to NOT narrate every single action, even though we can see very clearly what’s happening in the frame. Long stretches of silence help carry the story and provide atmosphere and mood, creating this very dark, foreboding sense that permeates the book as a whole.
And it seems with every issue, Moore is peeling that onion, revealing one more layer, just when you think you MIGHT be getting close to figuring out what’s going on, just about to settle in for the ride and see how this thing plays out, he pulls one more trick out of his sleeve and you see, nope, didn’t see that coming, ok now things are REALLY interesting…
RACHEL RISING is everything all those podcasters have been telling me it is since 2014, and even then the details were scarce, consisting mostly of “this is a great book.” For years, that was all I knew about it. And it appears they were right. Simply put, RACHEL RISING is a great book, and one I would definitely recommend. But get it in print, you’re going to want to have this thing on your shelf, it’s just that simple.
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