Arctic Light

Tonight I finished reading a webcomic, Zebra Girl, that I started reading in probably about 2001 or so. Back in those days, it was part of a mixed bag of turn-of-the-century webcomics in the medium's early days, and it was very similar to most of what else was out there at that time: a series of strips roughly drawn in ink, joke-based and fourth-wall-breaking; it often had strips in which the cartoonist showed up to talk to the reader, scribble days or completely blank strips in which the joke was that the cartoonist couldn't bother to draw a strip that day. There are jokes about guys perving on girls and characters being mentally deficient. One of the characters is a talking rabbit. It is, in a word, not very good.

But even back then, what kept me reading it was that it really had its moments. A lot of the jokes are genuinely funny, the characters are appealing and quickly start to show at least a little bit of growth, and also, every once in awhile it would gut-punch you in the emotions in a really unexpected way.

Still, I drifted away around 2005-ish when I stopped reading comics in general for a few years. I came back because I ran across a mention a little while back that it kept going for over a decade(!) and had finally wrapped up in 2018. So I decided to reread some of it for old time's sake. It's available in print books now, so I ordered one. And then the next one. And tonight I got the last one and devoured it and oh, it got good.

At its core it's about three housemates -- level-headed Sandra, her ditzy best friend Crystal, and Crystal's lecherous brother Jack -- who find an ancient tome of magic in the attic of their house (as you do) and start messing around with it. Jack accidentally turns Sandra into a demon and then can't turn her back. Initially, it's just a series of gags about Sandra trying to adjust to having three eyes and hooves for feet and sudden cravings for violence, while her not-very-bright friends try haplessly to get her back to normal. ("Wow, I can't believe we found a specialist in radical demonology in the phone book!") But then it starts to grow a plot, and depth, and the art gets way better, and somewhere along the way it turns into a mythic epic about friendship and love and family, about community and responsibility, about change and growth and making hard choices, about being a monster and becoming better and growing up.

It stays fanservicey to the end, off and on -- there's an entire subplot at one point in which all the female characters' breasts are magically growing; it's that kind of comic -- and there's one possibly-kind-of-transphobic plot twist at one point that I can expand on in the comments if anyone wants to know more (basically a magical sexswap of a minor character), but if you can get past that and the roughness of the beginning, I really think for a male writer (and especially given how the comic started out) he does a really excellent job of writing about women: there are female friendships and women falling in love with each other, motherhood and sisterhood, monster girls growing into their personhood and women learning to grow out of the bounds of what society demanded of them, or what life made them. The male characters are really well done too, don't get me wrong -- I honestly adore them; one of them in particular gets a really lovely growth/redemption arc -- but some of the comic's themes are about being a woman in a way that I wouldn't normally expect from a male writer, and in a way that really landed for me. Even the worst characters are sympathetically treated, and it's one of those narratives in which life isn't fair but you can make it better, and sometimes getting a happy ending (or the closest possible thing) is about taking the set of bummer cards you were dealt and playing the absolute hell out of that lousy hand.

Basically I really, really liked it. If you enjoy monster girls, or just female protagonists who get to be messy and angry, Sandra is a wonderful protagonist -- broken and funny and furious and messed up, kind and vicious and loving and hard, all the things a monster girl should be.

It's all online for free, and you can also buy the entire thing as print volumes from the site:

http://www.zebragirl.thecomicseries.com/

It starts here: http://www.zebragirl.thecomicseries.com/comics/1/

If you want a glimpse of what it looks like once the art gets better: http://www.zebragirl.thecomicseries.com/comics/566

Other random enticements: one of the endgame pairings is F/F, and another is strongly suggested to be asexual/aromantic, though the words aren't used (and community/family also plays more of a role in the series than romance, really). Two of the three central protagonists -- the brother-sister pair -- are canonically Jewish, though it's a very background element and not a main part of the story.

And the last page (well, next-to-last page) made me cry, in the best way.

Over the last few days I've read through the archives of Freakangels, and now I have to wait for new installments with the rest of the world (woe!). Twelve psychically gifted teenagers cause the end of the world ... we've all heard this one before. But the story begins six years later, when they're trying to atone for their actions by picking up the pieces and restarting civilization in the post-apocalyptic ruins of what used to be London. It's not destroying the world that's hard ... it's fixing it. Especially when you have the powers of a minor god and have to struggle with the temptation to use them. The archive starts here and it updates with new installments on Fridays.

On a more fannish note, fkficfest is posting stories in the Forever Knight Ficfest. FK is a fandom in which I've never written or been socially active, but like TOS, it seems to be one of my touchstone fandoms -- every so often I'll rewatch a few episodes and dip back in to see if there's any interesting new fic around. They're posting two stories a day 'til the fest is over, and I've been really enjoying them. Two I particularly liked so far: A Contradiction in Terms by hearts_blood is a wonderful Nick & Nat character piece with a lovely Natalie and a light, graceful handling of the complicated and conflicted relationship between Nick, Nat and Janette. And Sugar and Spice by malinaldarose is a gen casefile story in which Jenny Schanke gets drawn into a murder investigation after she finds a classmate's drowned body; it features a wonderfully brave and resourceful Jenny, and an interesting mystery. (The fandom's handling of Jenny and Myra was always one of my favorite things about FK fandom, really; as characters, they never even appeared in the show itself -- well, we saw Myra from a distance one time -- but fandom does a wonderful job of fleshing them out and making them into sympathetic, three-dimensional people.)

ETA: Another rec, this one for SGA - Germination by thingswithwings (Jennifer/Rodney, NC-17, light kink) is a really enjoyable "Seed" tag, with great character voices, that worked beautifully for me in the context of the episode. I especially liked the characters' open negotiation of their sexual boundaries, which isn't something you see much in fic.