Story & Inspiration
The hero of “Refrigerator Girl” has a problem: she just learned that her boyfriend, with whom she has been living a nice, quiet, life, is actually Solar Flare, a superhero. Worse yet, Solar Flare has just found his nemesis, who is known only as The Trashman. This is great news for his superhero career, but bad news for the relationship. It is not safe, Solar Flare tells our hero, for them to be together, now that he has a nemesis. Villains always attack the wives or girlfriends of heroes, and those women turn up dead. He does not want to see that happen to her, so he leaves her, despite her conviction that she can take care of herself and survive the Trashman. While the Trashman turns the city’s treasures into garbage and drives it to the very edge of total chaos, Solar Flare works tirelessly to take him down and tries to convince our hero that she is not safe with him. In the midst of the chaos, though, she makes a shocking discovery, one that changes everything, and sends her story, Solar Flare’s story, and the fate of the city, on a new and unexpected path.
The term 'Refrigerator Girl' or 'Women in Refrigerators' was coined by comic writer Gail Simone and is in reference to issue #54 (1994) of Green Lantern where his girlfriend is murdered and stuffed into a fridge. A 'Refrigerator Girl' is the partner, usually female, of the main hero, usually male, whose only purpose is to add to his 'hero's journey' by getting murdered, beaten or de-powered and have almost no other character traits other than what their torment does for the main hero. It's a very common and very over used harmful trope in the comic industry.
This is the first comic story I was approached to do and partner with a writer to create. The writer (Jennifer) had a 10,000 word short story she wanted to be made into a comic and my college professor at the the time got wind of it and thought it would be something I would be interested in. I partnered up with Jeniffer and rewrote her story into a comic script and over the course of a few years I developed my art style and now it's finally in the works to be published! I was thrilled to work on a project that was a direct critique on over used and outdated stereotypes in the industry. This was an amazing story to develop and create.