I’ve been wanting to share Strong Female Protagonist for awhile now, but I wanted to wait until the current story arc was resolved since it was such a nail-biter. Strong Female Protagonist can be an incredibly emotionally intense story; best be prepared to sometimes have a powerful cry at your monitor. The comic tells the story of Allison Green, a New York City college student. She’s a pretty average girl who studies for exams, lives in a dorm, and clashes with her professors with one notable exception: she’s a former teen superhero. Super strong and completely invulnerable to harm, Allison publicly unmasked herself and denounced the superhero way of life when she realized she wasn’t really doing anything to actually save the world. She wants to draw attention to fighting poverty, disease, and war, but that’s difficult when everyone’s afraid you will squish them like a bug, old friends are nagging you to get back in the crime-fighting game, and super villains bust into your life to settle old scores. There’s also the question if some mysterious power or shadowy organization has a vested interest in preserving the status quo, and if they are quietly assassinating heroes who are trying to actually make a difference.
We have to worry about suddenly running into our exes. Alison has to worry about guys like this.
The comic is black and white with gray-scale washes for shading. The characters and art style are more cartoonish than the average mainstream comic book. The anatomical rendering is excellent, with clear actions sequences and intense facial expressions. And I do mean intense. While not a depressing comic by any means, the emotional anguish of the characters at certain points in the story really reaches into your chest and starts pumping your heart for you. The comic has updated biweekly with regularity, and three complete “chapters” have been published.
The Authors and their Other Works:
The duo behind Strong Female Protagonist are writer Brennan Lee Mulligan and artist Molly Ostertag. Mulligan is a filmmaker in addition to being a writer, with some short films available for streaming on his website. Ostertag has created some other comics in print, including a retelling of the true story of Khutulun, the Wresteler Princess, a Mongolian folk hero.
FANS OF WEDNESDAY’S WEBCOMIC: I need your help! I am running out of comics I know of to read. If you are writing or reading a webcomic that you love, please let me know about it so I can read it and maybe recommend it in the GonnaGeek’s new forum!
