I started reading the web comic Shadowgirls back in August of 2007, shortly after the site went live. Written by David A. Rodriguez and drawn by Dave Reynolds, the about page says:
At the tender age of fifteen, Charon McKay disappeared from the small coastal town of Innsmouth. When she turns up, nine month later, she is incoherent and raving; and slightly more surprising…pregnant. No one knows who the father is and even Charon is unable to remember what happened to her. The only thing people know for sure is that she gave birth to a beautiful baby girl named Rebecca Sue McKay and that both her and her mother are decidedly strange. In fact, most people stay away from them entirely. But Charon and Becka have more immediate worries. Strange creatures have appeared in Innsmouth and awaken dark and terrifying powers within the girls. Only the Shadowgirls can stand against this ancient threat…if the power doesn’t consume them first.
The story uses as its springboard H. P. Lovecraft’s town of Innsmouth, and the Deep Ones part of the Cthulhu Mythos. The art and the storyline are both fantastic, and I’ve been an avid reader since I discovered it.
They have already developed a loyal fan base who chatter in the comments section of each page, debate on what each page means, talk about what they think is going to happen, and interact with both the artist and the writer. There is also an active forum. However, the Daves have taken it a step further by creating a sister site, the Innsmouth Insider, where one of the characters, Fides, blogs about the conspiracies that are going on in Innsmouth, and what it means in terms of what is going currently in the storyline. Fides has also interacted with one of the main characters of the comic, with promises of help.
The entire sister site is written in character, with multitudes of comments from other fictional characters on the posts. In addition, readers of the comic are also able to post responses to Fides’s posts, playing along in across between role-playing and make-believe. As the Innsmouth Insider is new, and readers are still adapting to the part it plays, (readers have to click the vote incentives to find out the user name and password for the Insider), I am watching it closely to see exactly how well this form of roleplaying will work with the comic. (As a side note, the Daves are planing on creating RPG guides to go along with the comic, the first of which will be in the spring of ‘08.)
The site is well done, the comic is quality, and the Innsmouth Insider is an intreging way of enticing and incorporating the reader. It is a site I will be watching closely to see how well it does in the long run.
