The Adventures of Superhero Girl (Expanded Edition) by Faith Erin Hicks

Don't get your hopes up the way I did: it's not much expanded. It was also much closer to the original publication date than I expected; I missed that this existed for basically a decade.

Faith Erin Hicks did a series of "Superhero Girl" strips - I think online - more than a decade ago, and they were awesome. (I didn't see them at the time; I don't know where they appeared. But I still know they were awesome.) They were collected in 2013 as The Adventures of Superhero Girl, which was also awesome, and a fine package for the series. (Link goes to a monthly round-up where I wrote about that original package.)

Sometime in the next few years, Hicks did two short comics-formatted stories about Superhero Girl. I'm going to guess they were in comics anthologies; the book doesn't say. And, in 2017, all of that (plus a few pin-ups of Superhero Girl by other hands) was published as The Adventures of Superhero Girl (Expanded Edition).

Superhero Girl is a young woman - probably still college-age - trying to make a life as a superhero in some small Canadian city. She lives with a roommate, she accidentally shrinks her cape in the dryer, she wishes she had a nemesis [1], she complains that this city has lame villains (mostly a flock of ninja). She has an annoying older brother - Kevin. We all hate Kevin. - who is better than her at the superhero thing, nationally-famous, and just plain big-brother annoying. During the course of these stories, she meets another young female superhero, Spectacle, who she low-key resents but also is friendly with.

There are some multi-page continuities, but it's mostly one-off strips. Superhero Girl is a slice-of-life strip about being twentysomething, making a life in a new city, trying to do a job that you know you can be good at, hanging out and hoping for more. Only with more capes and masks and some occasional punching. (Not as much punching as you'd might expect; they are all Canadian, remember.)

I do wish I lived in the universe where this was massively popular, so Hicks had to keep doing these stories, maybe for a month or two a year (I'm not a monster; I'd like to see her doing other work, too), so there was at least a small shelf of lovely fun Superhero Girl books by this point. That is not this universe, sadly. (Though, maybe, if Future Evil Superhero Girl manages to alter the timeline with her attack, it could still be.)

But this book does exist, and there's even this expanded version that's existed for nine years without me knowing about it. So maybe Hicks has made, or will make, more Superhero Girl comics. That would be pretty cool. If not, there's still this book - and, if you haven't read it, you really should.

[1] I've never had a nemesis, which I have to imagine would be tiring, and don't really want one. My wife does have a nemesis - calls her "my nemesis" and everything - but you'd have to ask me about that in person.