Yuri Webcomic: Girly, Volume 4 (English)

January 15th, 2012

girlyset-caseThe last volume of Josh Lesnick’s Girly series, Girly Forever, is a testimony to passion. Passion for cartooning, first and foremost, but also the obvious, laudable, passion Otra and Winter have for one another.

Having established Winter and Otra as a couple in previous volumes, Josh felt comfortable splitting them up for a good chunk of this story. But, before we get there, in Volume 3, there’s a number of flashbacks and story building leads that we need to get through, then a few digressions and premature story starts and stops and then, suddenly, in Volume 4, the plot is a gigantic ball of story elements moving downhill and gathering complications like a webcomic version of Katamari Damacy.

When I was reading the chapters that would become the last volume as a webcomic, it was maddening. I would save up a few months of strips at a time, in order to feel like something was happening. Reading it as a volume, I found it worked much better than the previous volumes in terms of narrative. In effect, this was the closest Josh comes to a “graphic novel” rather than a comic strip collection.

The story as a whole has a pretty Yuri-riffic ending, in which Love saves the day – and is suitably rewarded with Sex, which is as it should be. And the things that made no sense still make no sense, which is also as it should be.

Ratings:

Art – 8
Story – 7
Characters – 8
Yuri – 9
Service – 5

Overall – 8

I’m kind of sorry that Girly is over. Reading these volumes (or re-reading the strips, however you look at it,) has made me miss it. Girly was the only webcomic I ever really followed. Nothing else has been consistent enough, cohesive enough and wacky enough to hold my attention for any length of time. I seriously want to thank Josh for Girly, it cheered me up on many a day that I needed a smile (since shooting someone into space was not an option) and congratulate him on this complete collection. I’m proud to have helped contribute to the Kickstarter and hope he’ll do another series some day that I can follow at irregular intervals and still enjoy.

2 Responses

  1. Anonymous says:

    You’ve probably heard of it already, and it’s incredibly lengthy and not everyone’s cup of webcomic/text-based game pastiche/whatevs, but Homestuck is nothing if not consistent, cohesive and wacky. And almost universally pansexual. You should give it a skim.

  2. @Anonymous- I have heard of Homestuck, but as I do not play games, I am unlikely to give it a skim. Hopefully one of my readers will offer to review it for us.

Leave a Reply