Meet Moxie Girl, the little superhero who gets her superpowers from her multicolored afro puffs.
Moxie Girl is the creation of 7-year-old Natalie McGriff and her mother, Angie Nixon, who hail from Jacksonville, Florida.
"About a year ago Natalie was having issues with her hair and her skin color and I was trying to figure out what to do," Nixon told BuzzFeed News. "I even made a Facebook page called 'Natalie You're Beautiful' that lots of people liked."
So Nixon suggestion that they write a comic book about McGriff and turn her hair into a super power. McGriff loved the idea, and the two got to work on the storyline for The Adventures of Moxie Girl.
In the comic, Moxie Girl hates her hair, but one day she finds a magical shampoo that gives her crime-fighting afro puffs. With the help of her puffs, Moxie Girl saves the Jacksonville public library from evil, book-eating monsters.
The Afro Puffs are made of fire and ice, and she can take them off and throw them at the monsters to defeat them. They always come back to Moxie Girl though.
"We write the stories completely together, usually in bed," Nixon told BuzzFeed News. "She's seven so it's a long process, but it's her concept and I have to listen to matter how silly some of the stuff she says is."
Nixon said Moxie Girl not only made McGriff "realize how powerful and awesome her hair is," but she started loving to read. "I told her if you want to make a really good book, you have to read more books and learn different words," Nixon added.
McGriff and Nixon entered the comic into Jacksonville's One Spark crowdfunding festival, where it beat out 530 other entries to receive $16,424 toward its publication.
"At the festival little kids of color would run up and be like, 'That's so cool she looks like me!'" Nixon told BuzzFeed News. "They were so not used to seeing people like them in books, they were so excited."
Nixon and McGriff want to use the award money to professionally publish this book, as well as many other different "Moxies" of different races and genders. "We want to take things all different kids might be insecure about and turn them into their super powers," Nixon said. "Everybody is different in their own way and that's what's makes them so cool."
Nice job, Moxie Girls!
