Emily isn’t your typical 13-year-old girl. She builds traps for fun, dresses in black, and dreams of bats. And she isn’t your typical global brand.

For misfit girls around the world, Emily the Strange is a comic-character superstar. Her jet black hair and alabaster face adorn T-shirts, calendars, chocolate bars, and books, sold everywhere from Urban Outfitters to Barnes and Noble, bringing in $30 million in retail a year. A feature film by 20th Century Fox is in the works for 2008. And the unlikely mogul behind her creation, a 37-year-old skater named Rob Reger, is determined that his antiheroine emerges true to form. “If you sell your integrity,” he says, “you kill the brand.”

Street cred isn’t just hip. Maintaining an underground identity is the surest way to sustain demand. Matt Groening started out creating twisted ’toons for alternative weeklies, then successfully embedded his skewed satire into The Simpsons. David Lynch hit the public eye with The Elephant Man and Blue Velvet and never strayed from his idiosyncratic path. The White Stripes spent years off the charts before winding up on the MTV awards show, and haven’t abandoned their minimalist blues.

Reger has so far made the precipitous trip out of one of the most territorial undergrounds—punk-rock comics —without hearing the “sell-out!” cry. Emily started as a face on a sticker that became popular in a small area of Southern California. But over the past 13 years, through his Oakland-based company, Cosmic Debris, Reger has methodically built Emily into an international icon without alienating her core fans. As one of his mottoes goes, “Emily never changes, she is always strange.”

Reger knows his audience because he’s one of them. As a rebellious kid growing up in conservative Orange County in the 1970s and ’80s, he found solace in punk music from the Cramps and the Damned, as well as from the nascent skater lifestyle. “It was the anticorporate culture,” he says. “Emily’s ethos now came out of how punk rock nurtured me.”

Reger learned how to draw by doodling punk-band logos on his skateboards and notebooks. After studying art at the University of California at Santa Cruz, in 1993 he launched Cosmic Debris as a T-shirt company that put his offbeat graphic chops to the test. He tried out more than a dozen characters, from a Pop Art girl named Oopsy Daisy to a biker woman named Angel. When a skater friend showed him a sketch of a goth girl, Reger asked for permission to put the image on a shirt. “It wasn’t meant to be much of anything,” he says, but when his first dozen Emily shirts sold out at a local skate store, he knew he was on to something. “Immediately, there was an energy around it.”

Goth-girl icons had long been outlets and inspirations for girls who stayed up late reading Sylvia Plath and despising the popular crowd at school. The esteemed and beloved lineage ran from Wednesday Addams of The Addams Family through 1970s rocker Siouxsie Sioux and Winona Ryder in the cult film Heathers. Emily managed to tap that power for the MTV generation.