James Nicoll Reviews

Sarah Kuhn’s 2020 Shadow of the Batgirl is a superhero graphic novel. Comic art is by Nicole Goux.

David Cain had a simple dream: raise his daughter Cassandra as an assassin, in an environment bereft of speech and human contact (save for martial arts). Result: a girl who can read body language but not print, a girl with prodigious skills at killing whose rudimentary speech skills will protect her from any suggestion what she is doing is wrong.

All it takes to ruin this perfect plan is a single word.

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Sarah Kuhn, and Arielle Jovellanos’¹ 2023 Girl Taking Over: A Lois Lane Story is a graphic novel about Lois Lane.

Having surmounted all the obstacles small town America places in the way of Asian-American girls, Lois Lane leaves Macville behind for to the big city — well, bigger city — where she has won an internship at Cat Grant’s prestigious CatCo, where Lois’ journalistic talents will no doubt be showcased. Lois has a plan for her life.

Arriving at her semi-legal sub-let, Lois discovers her mother also has a plan for Lois’ life.

Content warning: comic book minutiae.

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2022’s Holiday Heroine is the sixth novel in Sarah Kuhn’s Heroine Complex series. 

Bea Tanaka’s brand-new life in Hawai‘i is almost perfect. Newly hired by the Demon Research Group¹, she is establishing a life independent of her doting, domineering older sister Evie. Hunky friend-with-benefits Sam Fujikawa has the potential to become something more. Bea 2.0 will be in all ways superior to the old Bea 1.0 back on the mainland. Or so she hopes. 

If only Bea didn’t have a niggling doubt: she might still be a little evil.

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2021’s Hollywood Heroine is the fifth volume in Sarah Kuhn’s Heroine superhero series.

Bay Area superheroes Aveda Jupiter and Evie Tanaka head off on another field trip, this time to Hollywood. Having sold the TV rights to their adventures, they think it would be fun to watch the filming. 

John Godfrey Saxe once said ​“Laws, like sausages, cease to inspire respect in proportion as we know how they are made.” Much the same could be said of television shows that are based on one’s own experiences.

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Sarah Kuhn’s 2020 Haunted Heroine is the fourth volume in her Heroine supernatural superhero series.

Pyrokinetic superhero Evie Tanaka already has enough on her plate, what with pregnancy, worries about motherhood, and problems with her hunky half-demon husband Nate.

But she adds more worrification when she returns to the site of a much regretted mistake. 

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2019’s Unsung Heroine is a side-story in Sarah Kuhn’s Heroine series. 

Lucy Valdez is a multi-competent person. She’s adept at hand-to-hand fighting; she’s a karaoke queen at a local hot-spot, the Gutter. She’s been a sweetheart to half of the city’s lesbian community. Yet one challenge eludes her: how to win the heart of Rose Rorick (which includes keeping said heart once Rose learns what the real Lucy is like). 

Lucy’s cunning gambits to present Rose with an acceptable version of Lucy have left Lucy firmly friend-zoned. Happily, Lucy has a zany scheme to solve the problem: fix up her unattainable crush with someone else. Once Rose is partnered, perhaps Lucy’s obsession will fade. 

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2018’s Heroine’s Journey is the third instalment in Sarah Kuhn’s Heroine Complex series. 

Like her sister Evie and her sister’s best friend, Aveda Jupiter, Beatrice ​“Bea” Tanaka has bona-fide superpowers. However … 

The ten-year age difference between Evie and Bea means that Evie sees Bea as a kid sister. Not only that, she’s the kid sister whom Evie raised after the death of their mother. Evie cannot see Bea as anything but a child and relegates her sister to support roles. 

Evie is also suspicious of Bea’s superpowers. Bea can control other people’s emotions, which is a super-villainous sort of power. (It doesn’t help that Bea once sided with a black hat.) True, Bea can also scream loudly enough to shatter solid objects, but it’s not at all clear that she can use this superpower in an emergency or that it will even be useful when used. 

Bea is afraid that Evie will never accept her as an equal; she is less and less interested in helping Evie and Aveda. 

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2017’s Heroine Worship is the second instalment in Sarah Kuhn’s comedic superhero Heroine Complex series. 

In Heroine Complex ( reviewed here ) superheroes Annie ​“Aveda Jupiter” Chang and Evie ​“No Cool Superhero Name” Tanaka vanquished the Demon Queen and closed a gate to the Otherworld. Since the Demon Queen’s shenanigans were the primary source of superhero-level threats to San Francisco, life has been pretty quiet since that battle. 

That is a big problem for Aveda, because her self-image is tied up in being San Francisco’s premier saviour. She cannot save that which is not being threatened. Even if a threat did materialize, she’d have to share the spotlight with Evie, and Evie’s recently revealed pyrokinesis is much flashier than Aveda’s acrobatic martial arts. Not that Aveda is jealous of Evie, exactly; she’s just used to having the spotlight. 

Many superheroes in Aveda’s position would resort to creating a robotic villain only they can defeat ¹. Happily for Aveda, fate is going to hand her a challenge worthy of her talents. 

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Heroine Complex is Sarah Kuhn’s debut novel. 

An army of demons invaded San Francisco, but turned out to be somewhat fragile; they all died almost as soon as they arrived in our dimension (shades of H. G. Wells The War of the Worlds ). Ever since the failed invasion, San Francisco has endured several small scale incursions … but those attacks are nothing that dedicated volunteers cannot handle. 

Volunteers like San Francisco’s own leather-and-spandex clad superheroine, Aveda Jupiter. And voluntolds , like Aveda’s timid but loyal personal assistant, Evie Tanaka. 

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