With her 2016 comeback, Faith finally seems to exist in the right time, and readers seem to agree: The miniseries has received the fastest third, fourth, and fifth printing in comic history. Instead of hearing more fat jokes, readers see Faith lounging around her apartment in her underwear or going to her job as a writer at a celebrity-gossip site. And she’s not as ditzy as she was in 1992 and 2012; here, she comes off as whip-smart, effortlessly kind, and supremely confident as she navigates the transition to adulthood. It also doesn’t hurt that she appears to be the consummate Millennial, a woke member of the Tumblr generation working at a BuzzFeed knock-off. Faith’s return to the comic-book landscape represents twin achievements for the medium: an increasing willingness to tell stories featuring heroic women, and a tendency to celebrate the ways in which those women to deviate from (or challenge) gender norms.

Female characters, of course, have always been in comics, but there’s been a notable shift in the way they’re represented. More women and people of color are working behind the scenes on comics as writers and illustrators, which has led to the development of more dynamic and diverse characters: There’s Ms. Marvel, or Kamala Khan, a Pakistani American girl written by the Muslim comic writer G. Willow Wilson. And indie hits like Bitch Planet, a feminist comic introduced in 2014 that features women of all shapes, sizes, colors, and gender identities. And on television, formidable female superheroes star in their own shows: Supergirl, Jessica Jones, and Agent Carter.

Valiant

And then there’s Faith, who has been covered extensively by media outlets for defying the aesthetic of the typical comic-book heroines audiences usually see (like the slender, raven-haired Wonder Woman). And yet the most compelling thing about her weight is that it’s a non-issue—one that has no bearing on her plotline or her abilities. Faith doesn’t talk about dieting or make self-deprecating jabs about her body. In the miniseries, the artists Francis Portela and Marguerite Sauvage have made her unabashedly large on the page and wholly unselfconscious in the way she carries herself. She doesn’t even destroy enemies with her strength like the vintage Marvel character Big Bertha, whose power is changing from a supermodel into an obese woman before literally crushing her opposition. Instead Faith’s powers defy gravity entirely—she flies gracefully through the air, stopping only to rest on a telephone wire and write a quick blog post.

For Houser, the fact that Faith’s size is seen rather than discussed is completely intentional. “That [Faith] represents a group of people not featured in comics very often is important, but it’s not the most interesting thing about her,” Houser says. “People want to see themselves in comics, but they don’t want to see a character who is just one aspect of themselves—they want to see a fully fledged person.”