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I'm looking for the title of a comic book I read 5-10 years ago, so around 2013-2018. It ran for about a dozen issues. The basic overview of the story as I recall it goes as follows:

The main character is an older teenage girl whose parents were murdered by organized criminals, in partnership with the local corrupt city government. Her uncle gives her an amulet that, unbeknownst to her at first, contains a spirit that occasionally (partially?) possesses her for the purpose of taking revenge. She kills the criminals using shadowy vines with huge thorns that emerge from her back. No human is remotely a match for her in that state, but later in the series she encounters mystical entities, perhaps including the one that possesses her, to whom she is far more vulnerable.

While desiring revenge for her parents' killers, she is ambivalent about becoming a multiple murderer to accomplish it. She is repeatedly traumatized when the possession fades and she finds herself covered in her victims' blood. Her uncle doesn't sympathize much and regards her more as a tool of revenge than as a person with her own desires.

The series was released by a small-press publisher, though I can't recall which. I think it had a short, one-word title ending with "girl." The word "Toygirl" comes to mind when I try to remember the title, but a sustained search on that term hasn't uncovered anything related.

Edited to add: I discovered a site called the Grand Comics Database that aspires to be a DB of all comics ever published. I searched series titles using the pattern *girl, narrowed it down to the years 2005-2020, copied all matches to my editor, filtered them using the regular expression \Bgirl (ie, "girl" in a position other than at the beginning of a word), and eliminated Supergirl and Batgirl. None of the remaining titles looked familiar, so I can only supposed that I'm wrong about "girl" being a part of the title. And I was so sure...

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  • She doesn't sound very toy-like.
    – Valorum
    Aug 28 at 9:09
  • @Valorum True, I don't know why that title comes to mind, unless the amulet is the toy.
    – Sean
    Aug 28 at 9:23

1 Answer 1

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So this comic book turned out to be Tomboy, published by Action Lab Comics between 2015 and 2017. I came across a reference to it completely by accident while reading Reddit.

I had thought it must have just passed by without anyone remembering it, but there's a pretty extensive TV Tropes page for it.

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