Girly

An online digital internet webcomic

A webcomic by Josh Lesnick.

Can be found right here.

Explaining the plot is like explaining a train wreck. Not a bad kind of train wreck. Y'know, the kind of train that has lots of elephants, and puffy kitties, and weird superheroes...

A half-Dada, half-Adventure, entirely comical webcomic about Otra and Winter, two girls with more than their share of quirks who live together in the city of CuteTown. They go on adventures (for the sake of adventuring). There is a very eclectic supporting/main cast, including, but not in any way limited to: El Chubacabre (or Chuy)- a carefree, then troubled (oh handy Character Development) young man with unique women issues, Collette- a half-cutpaste videogame nerd, Policeguy- a responsible, pragmatic officer of the law and occasional Butt Monkey, Lucy- a self-declared genius veterinarian/animal fitness trainer, Chuy's two brothers- who are attempting to get revenge for their brother (despite the fact Chuy is fine), Captain Fist - whose head is a fist - and the rest of the CuteTown PD.

An overall lighthearted comedy, it revels in its own quirky humor. There's more to it than one might expect.

The series also plays with tropes left and right, and in some very interesting ways that must be seen to be believed. It is definitely worthy of your time, and is recommended reading for tropers.

What many people probably don't know is that Girly is actually a sequel to his previous comic Cute-Wendy which in turn was an alternate take on Lesnick's original webcomic and personal Old Shame, Wendy, which can be found here.

And now, 764 strips later, the comic has reached its Grand Finale. Josh Lesnick's main project for a little while was the delightfully smutty Doctor Voluptua, and he's also a contributing artist and founder of Slipshine, a paysite, but now he's dedicating all of his time to working on Princess Panic, a 2-D video games project with Paper Mario-styled gameplay in the (very) early planning stages.

Now has a character sheet.

---

This series contains examples of:

• A Winner Is You: Referenced in Cutewendy.
• Action Girl: Several. Winter and Otra to be sure, but also Officer Hipbone. Collete has even had a few, though mostly video game related.
• Alt Text: Since #151.
• Art Evolution: And how. The most recent strips are the most glaringly evolved.
  • Josh Lesnick made a conscious decision at one point to stop imitating manga artists and remove many of the Japanese elements in his art. His style is much more influenced by western-cartoons now.
    • As recent as comic #754, Lesnick has acknowledged that his art had slowly become anime influenced again over time.

"My art became so anime again, I don't even know how it happened this time." "You can never escape anime."

• And the Adventure Continues...: with Otra and Winter's daughter and her sidekick.
  • Or as the comic puts it: Never The End...
• As Long as It Sounds Foreign: El Chupacabre's name is not meant to evoke the chupacabra at all; the name was chosen just because it sounds funny when said in an outrageous accent. His brothers follow the same pattern, naming themselves with a semi-comprehensible string of Spanish words that changes every time it's mentioned. Word of God also says that they are not Hispanic.
• Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence: Officer Getskilled
  • And yes, that is the mother of all subversions.
• Author Appeal: References to 1940's cartoon history, a strip referencing one of the author's favorite bands (which doubles as a Title Drop and Shout-Out to the song that he named the strip after).
• Back for the Finale: Everyone who had a name or a unique character design returned to help fight off the final enemies.
• Badass Normal: Covers most of the cast at various points, but the CuteTown PD especially.
• Battle Couple: Otra and Winter, Policeguy and Hipbone.
• Beard of Evil: The upgraded Captain Fist Robot.
• Beta Couple: Chuy and Autumn, Policeguy and Hipbone
• BFS: Otra's Weapon of Choice.
• Brainwashed and Crazy: Otra.
• Brick Joke: The ninjas Policeguy mentions appear in the flesh a few strips later.
  • Detective Clampjaw left without ever finding Chupacabre. When they both returned to the comic at the same time...
• Bound and Gagged: Captain Fist after being kidnapped.
  • Winter's parents when they were kidnapped.
• Bunny Ears Lawyer: Winter, a capable adventurer with many eccentricities (the largest one being her fondness for adventures)
• Calling Your Attacks: Including a Shout-Out to the king of the trope. And with...
  • Combination Attack
  • Also: (Super) Kitten Bomber.
• Captain Ersatz: Detective Clampjaw and Nickel, of Inspector Gadget and Penny. Policeguy provides the mandatory Lampshade Hanging.
• Cats Are Mean: Or at least pretty hardcore.
• Chekhov's Gunman: All of the sex censoring animals. All of them.
• Chest Insignia: Otra begins to contemplate the zero on her shirt as an O after Winter points it out.
• Clothing Damage: "Stop! Our attacks are only making them sexier!"
• Cloudcuckoolander: Winter invented this trope.
• Combined Energy Attack: Treated with the same silliness as everything else.
• Covert Pervert: Winter, surprisingly.
  • Marshmallow Kitty is somewhere between this and downright sex fiend.
  • All things considered, you'd probably think Vet Lucy was pretty normal, too. Turns out, you'd be wrong.
• Cursed with Awesome: Chupacabre is irresistible to women, the greatest lover alive, and apparently has unlimited sexual stamina. It makes having a meaningful relationship kinda hard.
  • Averted in his initial appearance, where he's completely unaware that his existence is abnormal (or that women are physically incapable of rejecting him). Played straight once he gets a clue.
  • Eventually both he and his ex-wife learn to embrace their power as nigh-insatiable, irresistible love-gods.
• Cuteness Overload: KBOOM
  • Your Head Asplode
• Denser and Wackier: Inverted — Girly is less dense than Cute-Wendy was, and while it is still wacky, it's more coherently so. (Also, Cerebus Syndrome eventually sets in . . .)
• Destructo-Nookie: Subverted. Sex is quite literally a weapon in the Girly world.
• Deus Sex Machina: The ultimate The Power of Love attack used on the Big Bad.
• Does This Remind You of Anything?: Does it ever!
  • There's no way the last panel here was an accident.
• Duck Season! Rabbit Season!: Played straight here.
• Dude Looks Like a Lady: Officer Policeguy, though he got a haircut after his first encounter with Chuy.
• Eats Babies: As of 761, Winter, of all people.
  • What? She's always done that, she tried to eat the giant baby in page four!
    • She doesn't really eat them, she just nibbles and drools on them a bit...
• Evil Makeover: Good GOD, Otra! Talk about Darker and Edgier!
• Expy: A cavalcade of Josh's obscure and semi-obscure creations have appeared in the comic over the years.
  • Doctor Lucy and Nurse Yumi would be the most recognizable ones. They both come from his previous webcomic Wendy. Miki and her sister Yuki (who appeared in many old comics of his, but Wendy is the best known) also appear briefly as Evil Sidekicks toward the end of the comic.
  • The HappyCo staff — consisting of Tina the chairman, Cheyenne the secretary, the bodyguards Miles and Headlock, and the scientist Broadway — are all taken from his unfinished fantasy adult comic The Pet Elf. All the characters are drawn with hairstyles and headgear to hide the elf ears and ogre horns they originally had.
  • Josh Means and Lemon are childhood creations of his. Some of their comics are archived in his joshlesnick.horse site.
  • Captain Fist starred in a couple one-off comics during the Cutewendy days, before finally getting a starring role in Girly
  • The Knight originated from a comic he did for a high school assignment. Also archived at joshlesnick.horse.
  • Finally, Cutewendy herself was a character exported from Wendy... this character creation got the whole snowball rolling that led to Girly's creation. Essentially, the comic's entire existence stemmed from an Expy.
• Face Heel Turn: Otra seems to have pulled this here.
  • Thankfully, it didn't last long.
• Fake Ultimate Hero: Captain Fist.
• Fan Service: Where do we begin?

Now tear her dress a bit!

• Fetish: A gang of vore fetishists makes an appearance.

Alt Text: I apologize to those who had to go look this up and learn something they could have spent their whole lives without knowing.

• • Don't forget the author himself, with his rather obvious one that shows up in all his works.
• Flash Back: Plenty of 'em, too. Often act as Breather Moments.
  • Chapter XIII is an arc about Winter avoiding having flashbacks after an arc that was loaded with them. A Take That toward Family Guy indicates that Lesnick may have wanted to stop his comic from becoming similarly overloaded by flashbacks.
• Foreshadowing: That hackneyed romantic comedy plot Pop-Culture Girl outlines in the first two panels of the comic ever? That's a pretty handy summary of the first four chapters.
• Freaky Friday Flip: Gets a story arc.
• Gambit Pileup: Parodied here.
• Genre Savvy: Collette.
• Godiva Hair: Otra.
• Goofy Print Underwear: Not particularly used for comic effect — Chuy just seems to like wearing these.
• Grand Finale
• Grievous Harm with a Body: Here.
• Groin Attack: Here.
• Happily Married: Chuy and Autumn were this, until it was discovered that monogamy was literally killing Chuy. They divorced, allowing Chuy (and Autumn) to casually screw other people as well. They're still an Official Couple, they just have lots of sex with other people in addition to each other.
• Hartman Hips: Most of the girls in the comic are guilty of this. Winter and Hipbone are two glaring examples.
• Hammerspace: Where Otra's sword and Winter's giant dildo reside when not in use.
• Has Two Mommies: Winter has two female parents. Both of them biological.
  • It actually makes sense - well, at least as much as it can - if you followed Cute Wendy.
  • And Winter and Otra's daughter seen in the epilogue fulfills this trope.
• Hide Your Lesbians: Subverted and Lampshaded with Getskilled.
• Historical Badass Upgrade: Sir Walter Scott, in the Show Within a Show. (Or so I assume.)
• Hoist By Her Own Petard: The Pop-culture sidekick.
• Hypercompetent Sidekick: Slightly subverted. Winter and Otra work quite well as a team; however, Winter is useless without a sidekick to protect, while Otra, though perfectly capable of solo adventures, hates doing them.
  • Later played straight in the last storyline with multiple new sidekicks popping up. It was eventually justified as they were specifically created to be perfect sidekicks and then deconstructed when the sidekicks decide to take the lead due to being so much better than the people they followed.
• Improbable Weapon User: Winter's giant talking dildo and the epic dildo sword she made by combining it with Otra's sword.
• Informed Ability: One of Chuy's brothers has a culinary degree from the Academy of Vancouver. Apparently this trope applies even more than usual, as even he forgot about it.
• Informed Attribute: Collete is half-cutpaste.
  • This one was actually demonstrated thoroughly and consistently up until the final arcs of the comic; the problem was that nobody got the joke until it was spelled out.
• In Harm's Way: As one chapter title puts it, "The Adventure Never Ends".
• In Medias Res: Chapters I and XII, among other things.
• Inner Monologue: Makes up a good deal of the script, at least at first. This gets lampshaded, and perhaps justified, later.
  • Becomes entirely necessary when one of the main characters is transferred into the body of a cat.
• In the Name of the Moon: Parodied with a massive Shout-Out to G Gundam here.
• Juggling Loaded Guns: Lampshaded, as well as justified.
• Kavorka Man: Chuy, even when he's at his most depressed, has to beat off women with a stick.
• Knights and Knaves: Parodied.
• Laser-Guided Amnesia: After a hard blow on the head, Yumi forgot how to speak English!
• Leaning on the Fourth Wall: "All this swirly pitch blackness," "It's probably because it's so easy to draw...our attention with it."
• Limit Break: Of all shapes and sizes (Chuy's is a pelvic-thrust energy strike).
• Let's Get Dangerous: Just about any fight scene uses this.
• Look Behind You!: Subverted.
• Love Chart: Found here on Josh Lesnick's deviantART page (although it is currently two years behind).
  • Some might argue a Love Dodecahedron here, but many of the relationships on the chart are non-romantic.
• Love Epiphany: At the end of Chapter 3.
• Mama Bear Or rather, Mama Cat.
• The Man Behind the Man (or rather, the Elephant behind the Lion behind the Walrus.)
• Manic Pixie Dream Girl: Winter.
  • Interestingly, this seems to be a personality she developed purely to get Otra. Before her, she was a very cultured, dull and incredibly selfish girl. So while having none of the personality of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl, Otra still plays the role for Winter.
• Meaningful Name: The police guy who keeps running into Otra and Winter at the beginning of the strip is actually named Danforth Policeguy. Seriously.
• Moment Killer: Here. Yes, an unspeakable monstrosity of pure evil is just a moment killer. It's that kind of comic.
• Modern Minstrelsy: In a Shout-Out to a common discredited Golden Age sight gag, a white guy gets accidentally covered in black paint and exclaims, "Oh, Lawdy!" The Unfortunate Implications are mitigated by the black guy standing next to him immediately being covered in white paint, and by the fact that the chapter in question contains many Golden Age tropes and sight gags throughout. Also see Refuge in Audacity.
• My Favorite Shirt: Subverted here
• Never Bring a Knife to A Fist Fight: Parodied (among others) here
• New Powers As The Silliness Demands
• No Man of Woman Born: Not actually a prophecy, just a phrase: During Otra's Face Heel Turn, she says to Winter, "I don't want to be your sidekick anymore". How did Winter get her back? Saying she'll be Otra's sidekick from now on if that's what it takes.
• Nominal Importance / Meaningful Name: Subverted, Inverted, Played with, Lampshaded...just about anything except played straight. What else can you say when one of the protagonists is named "Officer Policeguy"?
  • Though Officer Getskilled is for sure the major offender... of subversion.
    • Played straight, apparently, here and then subverted, with prejudice, here. Ladies and gentlemen, this is how you play with a trope.
• No Name Given: Otra at first; Winter's mother.
• Noodle Incident: Many. Otra refers to a previous instance in which Winter instigated "interspecies animal bootknocking," and a lot of the plot of chapter VIII is driven by a particularly crazy adventure that is never explained.
• Omnidisciplinary Scientist: Not only is Doctor Lucy an omnidisciplinary veterinarian (shown at various times performing optometry, chiropractics, dentistry, psychiatry and aerobic instruction on various animals), she is also a Gadgeteer Genius and an elephant-whisperer.
  • Also a debatable aversion of Mad Scientist: Doctor Lucy is sometimes arrogant (quick to remind people of her genius), but her abilities are always used for the good of the community.
• Only Sane Man: Otra (at least most of the time)
  • Policeguy tends toward this as well.
• Out-of-Clothes Experience: Lampshaded.
• Pair the Spares: Immortal Guy and Officer Getskilled, as more-or-less confirmed by the Grand Finale.
• Playing with Fire: Fred Burrows, who is also an arsonist. Go figure.
• Police Are Useless: Subverted heavily. Girly's police regularly show up the resident superhero and occasionally even the protagonists. Just two of CuteTown's police are able to best an entire squad of genetically modified super police without taking any real damage.
• Power of Love: And how!
  • And the latest strip has given us an example on par with the Sekiha Love Love Tenkyouken. Seriously.
• Prehensile Hair: Huh. Didn't know OTRA?! could do that.
• Precision F-Strike: Graphical instead of in dialog, but still.. after years of censor panels, the "climatic" "battle" is fully explicit.
• Prophetic Name: Pretty much all the CuteTown P.D. Poor, poor Officer Getskilled.
• Punny Name: Collette is a pun on "collate", since she is half-cutpaste.
• Put on a Bus: Literally with Detective Clampjaw (probably intended at the time to be a Long Bus Trip. It took him over 600 pages to return to the story.). Played straight with Chuy and Autumn's summer-long honeymoon.
  • Note the Alt Text for that admitted it was a pretty lame way to write them out for a while.
• Qipao: Otra and Winter's daughter wears something like this.
• Red Shirt: Most of the Cute PD besides Policeguy, Hipbone, and the Chief. Officers Getskilled and Oneshot both make the leap to Mauve Shirt, then Getskilled achieves something close to Ascended Extra status (and finally just ascends).
• Ridiculously Cute Critter: Marshmallow Kitty and her children, leading to Cuteness Proximity effects on various characters.
• Running Gag: Elephants.
• Sex God: El Chupacabra possesses legendary skills to please any woman (and practically every woman) he ever faces. The action itself is never shown, but the immediate aftermath, quite a lot. Generally the ladies are barely able to walk from all the fun their nerves had.
• Sexy Discretion Shot: Whenever two characters have sex, they are drawn frolicking through a meadow with adorable forest creatures, in Kawaisa form.
  • Then this happened.
• She Cleans Up Nicely: Actually, they both do.
• Shout-Out: Inspector Gadget and Penny (Detective Clampjaw and Nickel), that college girl who looks like Gadget from Chip 'n Dale Rescue Rangers, and others.
• Show Within a Show: Action Up the Butt.
• Shut UP, Hannibal: "Nice try."
• Sidekick: Just about every character either has one or is one. This becomes a major plot point later.
• Single-Stroke Battle: Oh yes.
• Skunk Stripe: Collete, sorta, kinda.
  • Now she has two-toned hair.
• Slap Slap Kiss: Or Insult Insult Sex...
  • Also Subverted in the mallard/chicken fight.
• Slow Clap: As done by Oscar Wilde.
• Spinoff Babies: As revealed on the last page, Otra and Winter's daughter and Chuy and Autumn's daughter grow up, pair off, and go have adventures of their own.
• Sprite Mirroring: In a rare non-video game example, one of visual cues that Collete is half cut-paste (before the artist stopped bothering with it) was that when she turned in one direction her shirt would be mirrored from its design when she's facing the other way. Especially obvious when she's wearing a shirt with writing on it.
• Standard Female Grab Area: Here, here, and Lampshaded here.
• Stylistic Suck: The in-universe print comic Funny Bunnies, among others.
• Sunglasses At Night: Hipbone wears these so often, Policeguy doesn't recognize her when she appears without them.
• Super Soldier: Possibly Otra.
  • The Police sidekicks are also super soldiers, not that it helps them for very long.
• Take Our Word for It: Subverted and Lampshaded in comic 511.
• Take That: Collete's father was drawn entirely with cut-paste, both in Girly and its precursor, Cute-Wendy. Her mother was drawn normally, and so she wound up being half cut-paste. Having her like video games falls right in line with the many other times he has criticized the artwork of many Gaming Webcomics.
• Taking the Bullet
• Throw the Dog a Bone: Policeguy generally catches a break these days.
• Thundering Herd: In Strip 598. The natural result of any chase scene involving a pair of gigantic household pets.
• Time Skip: The story sometimes jumps ahead a few months between chapters.
• Tomato in the Mirror: NOOOOOO!
  • Actually And Then John Was a Zombie.
    • She got better. The Power of Love wins again!
• Tomboy and Girly Girl, though the "Girly" moniker was first slapped on Otra, the tomboy.
• Too Kinky to Torture: Immortal Guy!
  • And Lucy.
• Took a Level In Badass: Anyone else notice how Policeguy's gone from a somewhat wimpy Butt Monkey to trouncing entire teams of Elite Mooks and making one of the most badass entrances on record?
  • Well he kinda was always that Badass. He just escaped his Butt Monkey status.
• Tyke Bomb: Otra, apparently.
• Webcomic Time: Mildly lampshaded in strip #429 with "It feels like it's been two years, six months and seven days when it's actually been two months and five days!"
  • Also done earlier when Otra comments it felt like she knew Winter for a year when it had only been three days.
• Wham! Episode: Oh. My. God.
  • Hope!
• What Do You Mean It's Not Awesome?: The omelet's so good it speaks German!
• Wimp Fight: Otra's fight in the background.
• Wouldn't Hit a Girl: Parodied/lampshaded during a fight between a mallard drake and a female chicken.
• Villains Never Lie: See the wham episode. Subverted.
• Your Tomcat Is Pregnant
• Yuri Genre: Otra and Winter's relationship is surprisingly deep, especially considering Lesnick's, ahem, other work.
  • Does it count as Bleached Underpants if they're still drawing porn and they advertise their porn site all the time?
• Zombie Apocalypse: By the looks of this comic....

---

Good night!