Strong Female Protagonist

Strong Female Protagonist by Brennan Lee Mulligan, art by Molly Ostertag, 220 pages

Alison Green is our titular protagonist, and Mulligan is not kidding when he calls her strong: Alison has super strength, able to leap tall buildings with a single bound, and is pretty darn close to invincible. She's one of thousands of "biodynamic" individuals worldwide and was, at one time, Mega Girl, part of a four-person superhero team called the Guardians. But by the time we meet her, Alison has thrown in the domino mask out of concern that by being a superhero, she's doing humanity a disservice--how will we all learn to fight for a better world if a handful of superhumans are doing it for us?

Mulligan and Ostertag offer up plenty of food for thought here, most of which I haven't really seen in comics before (at least not in the handful of superhero comics I've read). Really, the only thing that bugged me about this book is the glut of footnotey comments at the bottom of each page. Sometimes they're great (particularly when Mulligan and Ostertag offer up their thoughts on the unintentional literary references of the panels on that page), but most of the comments are inane, and pull the reader out of the story. I'd avoid reading them if I were you, at least on the first run-through; save this "director's commentary" for subsequent readings.