By Lisa Fary
For the longest time, the only comics I read were in the newspaper, where the readers were old and the strips featuring girls were pretty bad. Consider the following:
Sally Forth: A mom, as in just about every single sitcom airing at the time. I accidentally saw a few minutes of Patricia Heaton’s new sitcom, The Middle, and it immediately made me think of Sally Forth. And not in a good way.
Luann: A grating teenage girl like most of the kids I went to school with.
Mary Worth: She was actually OK, kind of a sage woman of the California condo complex where she lived.
Cathy: The worst offender of them all. She’s just. . . blech.
What I wouldn’t have given for Nemi.
Nemi is a Nowegian strip running daily in Metro in the UK and Ireland, with roots in the Heavy/Dark Metal subculture. Cartoonist Lisa Myhre began the strip in the late 1990s as The Black Page, but as Nemi it’s more of a observational comedy through the perspective of a twenty-something Goth girl.
Nemi has been collected into multiple books – I recently received volume three and zipped through it in about an hour.
Reading Nemi vol. 3. . . let’s just say it was like Astrid, my inner goth girl circa middle school and high school (on the outside I wore blazers and loafers, but inside I was really wearing torn fishnets and Docs) had grown up and leapt into a comic strip. Nemi is acerbic and cynical, often unleashing those qualities in her observations to and about the people around her.
The strips in volume three vary from gag strips to short arcs, with humor from inward grins to outright, snorting laughs.
The following strips aren’t in volume three, but will give you an idea of the tone and humor:
I’m so in love with Nemi I want to go back and read volumes one and two!
Lisa Fary is a graduate of the creative writing program at Florida State University and holds an advanced degree in Special Education. Her earliest influences are Princess Leia, Rainbow Bright, Astronaut Barbie, and her 6th grade teacher, Ms. Palmer. She’s angry that it’s almost 2010 and she still doesn’t have a hovercraft, but will accept a jetpack as consolation. That jetpack had better be pink with a rhinestone monogram.
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Lisa Fary's earliest influences are Princess Leia, Rainbow Bright, Astronaut Barbie, and her 6th grade teacher, Ms. Palmer. She's angry that it's 2011 and she still doesn't have a hovercraft, but will accept a jetpack as consolation. That jetpack had better be pink with a rhinestone monogram. 
