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A graphic novel by Juno Ferguson

Strong Girls

Book One Bones Publication date to be announced

In the world of Strong Girls, women rule, but strength still belongs to the few. Collars no one may remove draw Thrill from the many and feed it upward to an Empress who cannot die. At the bottom of it all is Aeryn Reed, who has begun to want more than food. A starving girl is easy to overlook, until her hunger changes shape.

Cover of Strong Girls Issue #1: Bones. Two towering, heavily muscled women stand before a throne in a vast futuristic hall while a collared, chained young woman reaches toward the reader from the floor.
Strong Girls #1 — Bones
“They called her unnatural. What they meant was: unowned.” Dr. Laena Rih, Becoming Unreadable
A crowded daylight market. Every woman in the crowd is powerfully muscled and dressed for an ordinary errand; among them a thin, ragged girl walks barefoot with a chain running from a shackle at her ankle.
An ordinary afternoon, after the Unfolding

After the Unfolding

We still call
it liberation

The Unfolding began with a promise: no woman would ever again have to make herself smaller to survive. It offered safety, strength and an end to dependence. For millions, it felt like freedom.

But revolutions inherit more than their enemies. Strength became virtue. Softness became suspect. Men who adapted were called useful. Women who rejected the new ideal were watched. Liberation narrowed until it meant the power to decide what other bodies should become.

No one embodies that contradiction more seductively than the Seraphim. Engineered beyond human limits, they are soldiers, icons and living promises of female possibility. They are also monuments to everything taken from the people beneath them.

Strong Girls is not a warning against women becoming powerful. It asks what becomes of liberation when power is still measured by the right to dominate.

Close view of a guard's waist in deep shadow: weathered hands unbuckling a heavy leather belt, a ring of iron keys and a shackle hanging at the hip.
Book One, interior

The girl in the collar

Subject A

Aeryn Reed's story begins in a cell beside her father's bones. He gave her his food until there was nothing left of him to give. She survives by learning the law that governs everything above her: one body is spent so another can become strong.

Geneva teaches her what she is worth. Caught stealing bread, Aeryn is fitted with a Collar that will never come off. The resistance offers shelter, training and a place among them, but belonging has its own price. Her body makes Thrill in quantities no one has ever recorded. To the Empress, that makes her Subject A. To the rebellion, it makes her a weapon.

Everyone in this story has a use for her. The rebels have plans. The Empress has been waiting. Everybody disagrees about who Aeryn should become. Nobody has accounted for the possibility that she has begun to want something of her own.

Look inside

Drawn in glorious
black and white

A few plates from Book One.

A ruined old man in a metal circlet lies in the foreground while a figure made of pure white light walks up a crowded nineteenth-century boulevard toward him.
“There you are. Silver… and under it, something with teeth.”
Night rain on a colonnaded waterfront. Two powerfully built women walk out of the lamplight while a girl watches them from inside an open manhole in the foreground.
The city, after dark
A hugely muscled woman lifts a cast-iron manhole cover one-handed as she climbs out of the street, watched by a pair of boots at the panel's edge.
“Clearly a manhole, not a womanhole.”
A woman in black leans on a table covered in maps and open diaries under a single hanging lamp, a night city in the window behind her. She is planning.
“Mary has changed. She doesn’t sleep.” — from Violette’s diary
A period parlour. A young woman in a long dress proudly flexes a huge bicep while her seated sister and mother recoil and her father stares, appalled.
“The rupture was horror to traditional families.”

The series

Where it goes

Strong Girls comes in albums, each named for a single word from its world.

  1. 01BonesComing first
  2. 02FlawlessPlanned
  3. 03HerstoryPlanned
  4. 04UnaffectedPlanned
  5. 05SeraphimPlanned

… more to come

Book One is coming

The moment Bones is
released, you'll know

Join the Strong Girls list.

About the author

Juno Ferguson

Juno Ferguson is a British author and comic creator of Scottish, Norwegian and Icelandic descent. Trained in literature at one of England's oldest universities, she left academia for ink, trading footnotes for panel borders and taking the arguments with her.

Her debut series Strong Girls is a black-and-white feminist dystopia about what happens when women inherit the machinery that once oppressed them. Its women build their bodies into weapons and begin to resemble the power they oppose. If a woman must become powerful enough to destroy a tyrant, what is left to make her different?