A new fantasy series combines Buffy the Vampire Slayer‘s action-heavy female protagonist with Gargoyles‘ abilities. Buffy the Vampire Slayer subverted classic horror tropes with the titular hero’s role as a fearless monster hunter among a sea of helpless female horror protagonists, plus an action-comedy tone that balanced “monster-of-the-week” conflicts with season-long story arcs. Today, irreverent genre subversions with witty dialog abound, but at the time, Buffy the Vampire Slayer was nothing like what came before.
Three years before the debut of Buffy the Vampire Slayer‘s premiere episode, Gargoyles broke the conventions of 1990s children’s television with its Shakespearean urban fantasy, filled with memorably smart villains like David Xanatos, and a cleverly interconnected mythology that didn’t dumb itself down for young audiences. Just like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Greg Weisman’s Gargoyles cartoon chose not to wipe the slate clean at the end of every episode, and instead allowed its characters to evolve visibly across multiple arcs, rivaling franchise-backed animations as big as Batman: The Animated Series and X-Men: The Animated Series.
Three decades later, a new series draws inspiration from both 1990s shows and adds an original high-fantasy twist.
Dragonproof Is A Love Letter To 1990s And 2000s Fantasy
AHOY Comics’ Dragonproof Is A Treat For Creature Fantasy Fans
Published by indie powerhouse AHOY Comics, Dragonproof is an urban fantasy graphic novel that merges mundane millennial struggles with mythical warfare. Written by Eric Palicki with art by Giulia Lalli, Dragonproof sees the twenty-something wanderer Ashleigh Cole stumbling upon a wounded dragon while camping in the Pacific Northwest. Though Ashleigh initially writes the encounter off as a hallucination, her perspective changes when she manifests draconic traits and begins hearing psychic whispers in her mind. Inspired by her experience, Ash embarks on a rescue mission to free the endangered dragon population from a covert government department that engineers them into living weapons.
Palicki draws inspiration from Buffy the Vampire Slayer‘s focus on a young woman overwhelmed by everyday life and thrown into a dangerous destiny as a supernatural hero. The dark hidden mythos of Dragonproof‘s creatures and Ash’s newfound powers channels Gargoyles as it portrays usually intimidating scaly monsters as sympathetic and endangered outsiders needing human empathy. The military co-optation of the dragons mirrors the brutal dragon-riding hierarchies of Rebecca Yarros’ The Fourth Wing, and Dragonproof‘s weaving of internal voices and a fight against tyranny echoes Sarah J. Maas’s A Court of Thorns and Roses.
Fantasy’s Dragon Subgenre Is Unfairly Unexplored
Dragon Stories Should Be Much Bigger Than They Are Now
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Despite their origins as emblems of speculative fiction, dragons are an overlooked cornerstone of modern fantasy. For real-world millennia, dragons were vital symbols in historical folklore across the globe, from the wise water-controlling serpentine deities of ancient East Asian cultures to the treasure-hoarding forces of nature in Western European epics. Nowadays, modern entertainment has largely pushed dragons into the background, most often reduced weapons of war that offer grandiose but brief visual spectacles, or simple background set dressing for fantasy settings.
Eragon‘s 2006 movie adaptation is a notable failed attempt to place dragons at the forefront of pop culture despite having a beloved literary universe as its source material. On the opposite side of the spectrum, DreamWorks’ How to Train Your Dragon franchise is a stellar exception, with a combined global box office of $1.63 billion, not counting the live-action adaptation. Still, even with massive television epics like House of the Dragon keeping reptilian imagery in the public consciousness, the dragon subgenre still has plenty of room to grow, starting with promising releases like AHOY Comics’ Dragonproof.
Dragonproof is available in 2027 from AHOY Comics
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