Strange isn't just her last name.
Emily The Strange is a media franchise associated with the company Cosmic Debris. The character of Emily initially began as an advertising mascot in 1991, but has since appeared in comic books and young adult novels. There's also a film planned, though it is in Development Hell.
Entries in the Emily The Strange Franchise:
- Four graphic novellas by Chronicle Books:
- Emily the Strange (2001)
- Emily's Secret Book of Strange (2003)
- Emily's Good Nightmares (2004)
- Emily's Seeing is Deceiving (2006)
- A comic series produced by Dark Horse Comics:
- The Boring Issue (2005)
- The Lost Issue (2005)
- The Dark Issue (2006)
- Emily The Strange: Lost, Dark, and Bored (2006) - a collection of the first three issues
- The Rock Issue (2007)
- The 13th Hour (2011)
- An ongoing, monthly series that's been published since 2008
- Emily and the Strangers Issue #1 (January 2013)
- Emily and the Strangers Issue #2 (March 2013)
- Emily and the Strangers Issue #3 (July 2013)
- Four young adult novels produced by HarperCollins publishing:
- Emily The Strange: The Lost Days (2009)
- Emily The Strange: Stranger and Stranger (2010)
- Emily The Strange: The Dark Times (2010)
- Emily The Strange: Piece of Mind (2011)
Tropes found in this Franchise:
- The Ace: In general, Emily, but most of the books center upon her finding ANOTHER ace who may or may not be more skillful then her—such as Venus Fang Fang in the second book and Dottie in the fourth.
- A lesser example is Molly, who succeeds in just about everything that Emily doesn't care about
- Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking: In the Revenge issue, Emily brutalizes a man for running over a cat, destroying her robot and wearing his hat backwards!
- Big Bad: Attikol is the main villain for two of the diary books, his distant ancestor is the big bad in another, and his side of the family, The Shady Uncles, are always at odds with Emily's side of the family, The Dark Aunts.
- Brilliant, but Lazy: Emily. She puts in all sorts of effort and time into her inventions, which are successful nine times of out ten, but when it comes to anything else she admits to procrastinating excessively, and no one could believe when she finished her first year of school (when she was in 8th grade) because they thought she'd get bored and give up—still, she's thirteen and managed to build a time-machine, a duplication device, a Thought Corder, and many other deceives. It's more notable in the novels then the comics.
- Butt-Monkey: Sabbath, of the cats.
- Dark Is Not Evil: Emily can be scary and sometimes selfish, and appears not to own anything that isn’t black, but she’s only 49% evil. Which is a problem in “Stranger and Stranger”, as she didn’t duplicate herself—she ‘’split’’ herself, leaving the evil fraction in total control of one body.
- Doppelgänger: A half-example with Molly looking so much like Emily in The Lost Days. A more straight up example is used in Stranger and Stranger where Emily has duplicated herself, but each Emily has varying talents and knowledge.
- Creepy Child: Emily herself.
- Evil Uncle: Uncle Attikol, except that he's not Emily's uncle, and turns out to not really be an uncle at all! The true Shady Uncle was his underling Umlaut
- Family Honor: Emily's main motive for 3 of the diary books, and The 13th Hour
- Feuding Families: A major theme in the diary books, although technically, the Dark Aunts and Shady Uncles are both a part of the same family.
- Gadgeteer Genius: Emily
- Heroic Comedic Sociopath: Most of the time Emily claims she hates violence, and yet many of her interests and hobbies are a bit gruesome, and now and then she doesn't mind bashing a guy whether or not he deserves it, especially in the comics.
- Iconic Outfit: Her Little Black Dress and mary janes.
- Kind Hearted Cat Lover: Emily has a natural love for cats and is frequently accompanied by four of them: "Sabbath", "Miles", "Nee Chee", and "Mystery"
- Love Makes You Evil: In The 13th Hour Oglieve's love for Emily's aunt Larue leads him to kill all the animals in her care except Mystery, and poison Larue, so she'd be weak, alone and dependent on him.
- Mad Scientist: Emily
- Memory Gambit: The plot of "The Lost Days" involved Emily waking up in the middle of one. She'd received a posthumous letter from her great-aunt Emma, telling her to come to the town of Blackrock to claim her inheritance. She was warned of danger from a young psychic named Jakey, so she erased all of her memories, preventing him from accessing what was in her mind. She later has to repeat the process when her accomplice in the plan uses a Trigger Phrase to restore her memories before the right time. Finally, she does a variant of this by erasing the memories of the accomplice (with her permission) and causing her to assume the identity of "Earwig" (Emily's amnesiac persona) for a short time because she was about to make a bet that would result in her having to join her enemy's traveling show, but she couldn't actually go herself.
- No Equal-Opportunity Time Travel: Zigzaged. When Emily travels back to the 1700s, she's shocked at the things women are expected to wear, and the meek servile way they're expected to behave, and other norms of the time such as slavery being defended. On the other hand, a black woman was able to become mayor of a town at the end.
- Non-Human Sidekick: Emily's four cats whom she calls her "Posse".
- Origins Episode: Poissibly The 13th Hour, where Emily mentions an inability to make her inventions work, but becomes a successful inventor at the end of her story. She also met 3 of her pet cats in here, with only Sabbath being with her at the beginning.
- Pardon My Klingon: Emily has an expansive vocabulary of made up swear words. Its especially prevalant in the diary books.
- Perky Goth: Emily comes off as one. She dresses in black clothing and finds scary things cool, but she also celebrates when good things happen to her and often writes a lot of exclamation points when excited (as seen in her diary entries from "The Lost Days"). Some of the other Dark Aunts seem to come across as this.
- Psychic Static: Subverted in "The Lost Days": Emily tries to do this when she needs to talk to Jakey without him reading her mind. She builds a machine that amplifies the thoughts of cats and uses it on her cats so that they'll drown out her own thoughts and prevent Jakey from discovering that she's lying to him. He later reveals in a letter that he knew she was lying the whole time and that her plan, while a neat trick, didn't work on him because he can only read human thoughts.
- Rube Goldberg Device: Emily uses one to tickle Father Time to death in the Bored issue. Another one was used to defeat and capture El Viego in The 13th Hour.
- Talking Animal: In some of the comics, the cats can speak like its no big deal. But in the diary books, Emily needs a special translation device to know what her cats are saying.
- Teen Genius: Emily, at age 13, being able to create machines that baffle even professional adult engineers!
- MacGuffin: The mysterious multi-use substance called Black Rock in the diary books.
- The Smart Guy: Nee-Chee is the smartest of the cats.
- Significant Anagram: In The 13th Hour, "Aunt Lare" is "real u" and "El Viego" is "Oglieve"
- What Happened to the Mouse?: Molly is last seen joining Attikol's troop. But the next time we see Attikol's troop, there's neither sight nor sound of Molly.
