I am sick to death of bonding through kinship and the family, and I long for models of solidarity and humanity and difference rooted in friendship, work, partially shared purposes, intractable collective pain, inescapable mortality, and persistent hope.
-- Donna Haraway

Why do we love the comics we do?

Sequential artists may arouse what Eisner calls our "deep seated primitive feelings" (Comics & Sequential Art, p. 89) with the help of tactics employed to seduce us: "The shape of the panel and the use of perspective within it can be manipulated to produce various emotional states in the viewer" (Eisner p. 90). My paper concisely examines instances of Terry Moore's using framing and perspective techniques in Strangers in Paradise (SIP) in order to spark his readers' empathy--an empathy repeatedly articulated in readers' letters printed in the back matter of every issue--for the series' queer family of Francine, Katchoo, and David. Moore's use of "Eisnerian" (pardon me) techniques to evoke reader response--SIP's rhetorical pathos--serves to advance the series' ongoing arguments for alternative models to the traditional family.

My paper focuses on a single issue (no. 45, November 2001) of SIP (but gleans supporting examples from the series' eight-year history), looking both at its sequential art and its readers' letters to Moore. Texts that inform this paper's argument include Will Eisner's Comics & Sequential Art, David Halpern's Saint Foucault, and essays by critics Stanley Fish, Jane Tompkins, and Donna Haraway.