Who is Emily the Strange again?

Emily is a very mean 13 year old girl with exceptionally pale complexion whose favorite expressions include “Get lost” and “Wish you weren’t here.”  She is anti-cool, a subculture of one, and a follower of no one but herself. Now do you have any problem with that?

Her black sharp eyes are staring at you behind her bangs.  You try to look closer as if the mysterious demeanor that she’s trying to work on is luring you. She looks familiar yet you try looking a bit closer. You still don’t recognize her, not until you recognize the label right above her: Emily the Strange.

Oh, her.

You have seen her so many times for the last couple of years. Her image always appears in black, red or white (and very, very seldom in purple or pink) shirts and bags. Surely you noticed that she has jet black hair that flows down to her black dress and black tights, set off by large white Mary Jane shoes. Sometimes you spot her with a slingshot in her hand or with four black cats.

You wouldn’t have really cared about these details or her for that matter if only you haven’t read the line that sometimes comes with her melancholic image: “Who is Emily Stange?” and you began to ask that question yourself.

Why, with her appearance, she must be strange.

It is said that Emily is a very mean 13 year old (but definitely not a cheerleader-mean, more of a Wednesday Adam-mean) girl with exceptionally pale complexion whose favorite lines include “Get lost” and “Wish you weren’t here.”  Well, according to official records, Emily is anti-cool, a subculture of one, and a follower of no one but herself. She’s the anti-hero for the Do-It-Yourself movement. She has a dark, gothic worldview. Her black cats, who you could wager to be just as strange as she, are named Sabbath, Nee-Chee, Miles and Mystery.

Before getting enough media exposure and becoming the object of product placements, Emily’s first appearance was in a sticker, which was a freebie distributed at concerts, record stores and skate shops to promote Cosmic Debris, the clothing line founded by skateboarder Rob Reger and race car driver Matt Reed. Reger’s friend Nathan Carrico designed Emily in 1991 for a skateboard company in Santa Cruz, where Cosmic Debris was born. Reger created the designs and with Matt Reed brought them into the fashion world by creating t-shirt designs that captured the essence of this mysterious young girl with four black cats.

Not long after, Emily the Strange has gained a reputation as something of a feminist comic icon. Its franchise has a considerable merchandising catalog, including clothing, stationery, stickers, and accessories.

In 2005, the first two issues of her comic book were released through Dark Horse Comics: “The Boring Issue” and “The Fake Issue”. The third and fourth issues were published in 2006 and 2007 respectively.  An ongoing monthly, standard length series has been published since March 2008. Since then, Emily the Strange is published in France by Soleil Productions.

Emily the Strange fashion is popular and attractive in the Goth subculture with young adults and teenagers and more recently attributed to the Emo subculture.  This probably explains her discreet popularity as these two crowds are known to have their very own social world, so different from the conventional.

Emily is a very mean 13 year old girl with exceptionally pale complexion whose favorite expressions include “Get lost” and “Wish you weren’t here.”  She is anti-cool, a subculture of one, and a follower of no one but herself. Now do you have any problem with that?