If you’re not following a little webcomic called “Strong Female Protagonist,” you really should be.

The bi-weekly comic follows Alison Green, a superheroine who has done the ordinary college-student-to-televised-defender-of-the-world thing … backward.

After spending her early teens fighting crime as part of a Teen Titans-esque lineup, Alison shed both her superhero persona and her secret identity to become a student at a nondescript university nearby. She can leap to her next class in a single bound if she wants, but she’s trying to find her way in between navigating social situations and classes just like anyone else.

The strength of “SFP” is in its world-building – over five long chapters, Alison has navigated everything from term papers to arch-nemeses to ex-teammates gone rogue. The webcomic folds petty crime-handling into college-appropriate themes, such as sexual assault on campuses and unlikeable professors, while maintaining a view of the superhero phenomenon that goes far beyond the constrains of one university or college town.

In short, it’s phenomenal storytelling.

The comic began as a play on the idea of “strong female protagonists” meriting more in the way of character development and storytelling, writer Brennan Lee Mulligan and artist Molly Ostertag told The Mary Sue, an entertainment website, in April.

“A female character will be called a strong female protagonist for crying only a handful of times as opposed to the entire story, when Indiana Jones is not called a strong male protagonist for bullwhipping Nazis and shooting guns at ghosts and stuff,” Mulligan told The Mary Sue. “So it started as an exercise in making a character strong in every sense of the word that we could find, where she’s strong in a literary sense — or so we hope — strong in the sense of conviction and heroism and morality, and then physically, superhumanly strong.”

This idea echoes the sentiment expressed by Neil Gaiman at BBC Radio 4’s look back at “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” in 2013. Buffy has been praised for the “strong” female characters featured throughout the series, but as Gaiman said, the focus should be less on superhuman abilities and more on the character’s internal qualities.

“It’s worth pointing out that people, unfortunately, misunderstand the phrase ‘strong women,’” Gaiman told BBC. “The glory of Buffy is it was filled with strong women. Only one of those strong women had supernatural strength and an awful lot of sharpened stakes. And people sort of go ‘Well yes, of course Buffy was a strong woman. She could kick her way through a door.’ And you go ‘No, that’s not actually what makes her a strong woman! You’re missing the point.’”

Alison is allowed to be funny, smart, focused, uncertain, conflicted and ruthless – so many descriptors besides “strong.”

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