Broken Frontier

You know dust is starting to gather on a webcomic when the chat box is starting to get filled with pointless spam messages on the front page. Then again, maybe it’s a good sign – the spammer wouldn’t have bothered if they didn’t think the site wasn’t popular enough to target.

I’m getting May off to an auspicious start, trying to search for signs of super-heroes. There’s one I remember hearing a lot about when I first started reading webcomics – the Green Avenger – but it hasn’t updated since sometime in 2006.

This webcomic presents a recurring vision of the day in the life of the Green Avenger – otherwise known as Abby Lark, a twenty-two year old super-hero. The art progresses extremely well in this comic. As you’d expect, the initial art is kind of rough, but even there you can see extremely solid character design, especially for Abby. Once the webcomic starts picking up the steam, the art itself improves at an especially dramatic pace – adding color, ink and definition at incredible speed.

The Green Avenger herself is a great character – more of a superheroic version of the author’s life than anything else – and this leads to some rather interesting revelations. Most notably, Abby is a real person under the tights, instead of Victoria’s Secret model, with real worries and real problems. Thus, while the first couple of webcomics are rather simple, the premise of Abby Lark and her problems are made powerfully real.

Again, the only problem is the strip hasn’t updated since 2006. The comic clearly ends with more to be resolved, and what’s more, the website is in dire need of updating. The author, known only as Ryuko-chan, could certainly use a cast page on the webcomic, as it’d be nice to know about the bits and pieces of her life which inform such a wonderful character.

Overall, Green Avenger is a great read for a webcomic which we can only hope will start updating sometime in the not-all-too-distant future.