New favorite webcomic, all.
Shadoweyes has Wet Moon and Water Baby creator Ross Campbell on both the story and the art (which, as frightening and desperate as it can get at times, I can’t help but think of as “cute noir”, but that may be the result of Sparkle’s adorbness).
Hook: It’s the year two-thousand and *cough mumble mumble* in the city of Dranac. Would-be teen vigilante Scout Montana (aka Shadoweyes) and her best friend Kyisha attempt to stop the beating of a homeless man, but Scout winds up concussed during the rescue. The cranial trauma somehow causes Scout to transform into a blue, reptilian creature with superhuman speed, strength, and enhanced senses. Cut off from her normal life, Scout takes up the name Shadoweyes full time and continues her quest to clean up the streets…but being a superhero isn’t as easy as it seems, and right and wrong have a way of blurring together in the long run.
Campbell’s writing and artwork are appealling in their own right, but what stood out to me most was that this is a work in the superhero/vigilante genre minus the usual gobs of classism and white, straight dudes who get to be right about everything. We’ve got strong relationships between female characters, a single parent who rivals Bianca Reyes as Most Awesome Mother in the History of Ever, chromatic main characters with distinctive drives and voices, an intersex main character who kicks ass and whose body formation is not being teased at like the big tent attraction at a sideshow, a superhero who can’t force herself to distill the moral choices that come with her chosen responsibilities down to a simple black-and-white worldview…
…and Sparkle, whose cuteness could lay waste to entire worlds.
Not that Shadoweyes doesn’t have her moments as well.
This is an imaginative, well-thought-out, and fantastically executed work, and I really cannot recommend it highly enough.
The first two volumes are available as trades. The Shadoweyes webcomic lags behind the print volumes considerably, but is free to read and updates every Monday.
!!!! oh wow i loved Water Baby and Wet Moon (well i’ve only read the first volume but), i totally want to get in on this!!
cool lookin’ webcomic alert
I FUDGIN LOVE SPARKLE!
(via tha-htwnbelle)
