Molly Knox Ostertag (born October 28, 1991) is an American comic book artist, children's book author, and cartoon writer. Among the comics and TV series she's drawn for include Strong Female Protagonist, Star vs. the Forces of Evil, and Shattered Warrior.
Molly's own works include the graphic novel trilogy The Witch Boy and writing for The Owl House. She also has an Archive of Our Own account here
.
Molly is married to Noelle Stevenson, the author of Nimona and showrunner of She-Ra and the Princesses of Power.
Works include:
Comic Books
- Strong Female Protagonist: artist
- Tales of the Night Watchman: artist
- Shattered Warrior: artist
- The Witch Boy series
- Alleycat
- How The Best Hunter In The Village Met Her Death
- The Girl From The Sea
Animation
- Star vs. the Forces of Evil: prop designer
- Thundercats Roar: writer
- The Owl House: writer
Fanfiction
Tropes present in her works:
- Author Appeal:
- Cat Folk, such as Feral in Strong Female Protagonist and Celia in Alleycat. Of note is that Molly owns two cats, Fig and Toast, and shares her birthday with Catra.
- Her settings tend to have Grey-and-Gray Morality or White-and-Grey Morality, with mostly sympathetic characters with understandable reasons for clashing, at worst being Tragic Monsters or Knight Templars.
- Many of her works contain queer characters and relationships, and some are constructed as metaphors for coming out as gay, such as in The Witch Boy or How The Best Hunter In The Village Met Her Death. Molly herself is a lesbian.
- A recurring device in her comics is the use of bold color panels to convey emotion, filling the entire panel behind a character to portray their feelings. This can be seen in SFP's pages like here.
- Molly is an enormous fan of hobbits and any chance there is to ship gay hobbits, to the point that her fanworks about them have gotten her appearances in multiple Tolkien podcasts and web series simply to talk all about gay hobbits.
- Cat Folk, such as Feral in Strong Female Protagonist and Celia in Alleycat. Of note is that Molly owns two cats, Fig and Toast, and shares her birthday with
- Art Evolution: The progression of her art can be seen most clearly in Strong Female Protagonist. In the earlier chapters, the art is grayscale, the lines are thinner, and the characters are drawn with more angles and hard corners. As the series moves on, color enters the setting, especially when conveying emotion, the lines get thicker, closeups of faces become more common, and characters become rounder and softer in design.
-
Creator Couple: With Noelle Stevenson. Although the two have never officially signed onto the same project together, they've sometimes given each other creative input, such as Molly coming up with She-Ra's big twist of the planet Etheria being a weapon.
