DAR! A Super Girly Top Secret Comic Diary (story behind the name here
) was a Slice of Life Webcomic drawn by Erika Moen before she ended it in 2009. As Erika changes a lot as a person during the six years she did the comic, the comic also changes significantly too. Here's the story:
Meet Erika Moen, 21-year-old college student. Gay and loving it, except for the fact that her mom doesn't like it, her crushes always break her heart and her on-again-off-again girlfriend keeps breaking up with her. Everything changes when spends seven months in France and meets Matt: they have a fling together, only for Erika to fall in love with him. After graduation, Erika moves to Portland, gets into a soul-sucking job, and tries to cope with a depression. Matt comes to visit and, on a whim, she and him get married. Erika becomes a full time artist (and loves it), and they all live Happily Ever After. Really.
Despite this, most of the strips are humorous, such as the continual fart jokes, jokes about sex toys, and the randomness of Erika's relationships with her friends.
The "sex toys" stuff has been spun off into its own strip, "Oh Joy Sex Toy," which concerns reviews of adult toys as well as more general sex-ed topics. Per The Content Policy, it would prefer us to not link it, so please Google-search the title if you want to see what she and Matthew have been up to since then.
DAR contains examples of the following:
- Ascended Fan Boy: Matt was a fan of her comic who suggested meeting her when she took a trip to Europe. Seems he's now her official number one fan.
- Art Evolution: At the beginning... you could tell that it was drawn by a struggling student. Not at all bad, but rather sketchy and stiff. Erika is now known for her fluent, energetic style, showing just how far her art has come.
- Butch Lesbian: She enjoyed considering herself one, toting buzzcuts and tattoos. Though she also loved wearing the occasional Pineapple dress.
- Happily Married: "We're special wed."
- If It's You, It's Okay: Up until she met Matt she never thought of herself as liking guys. It caused her to have an identity crisis in the fact that being a lesbian was what she identified as, she didn't really see herself as a bisexual, and "lesbian with one exception" sounded overly complicated. Then she sort of just said "Aw screw labels, I'm gettin' laid."
- Lesbian Until Graduation: Erika is a LUG.
- Journal Comic: Started off as mostly just a way for her to draw little artsy doodles while in college, but after a while became a great outlet for her.
- The Lad-ette: Erika. Very much so.
- Man, I Feel Like a Woman: A gender inverted example: There's a reason why Erika was born with a vagina.
- No Bisexuals: When she hooked up with Matt, her lesbian friends kept thinking that she turned straight, while some were upset that she didn't "become" bi. Some were very upset. She now calls herself "queer".
- Trans Chaser: One strip features the author, Erika Moen, talking about how she finds trans men hot. She even lampshades this trope by having a trans man in the comic say "We are MEN. Not some in-between for you to fetishize," but her Author Avatar dismisses his complaint. She would later get a lot of pushback for this comic, especially from the trans community, and amended the comic strip with an apology statement in 2012.
