draws out the action across multiple days. Even reviewers who dislike the comic for other reasons have applauded its design qualities: Characters Edda van Hoesen (née Burber) – Independent and intelligent with a heroic fantasy life as Superlative Girl, she is a talented, attractive ballet dancer and a skilled piano recitalist who has done modeling for the fictional ladies apparel line Nicolette Cignet. She also holds a black belt in an unspecified martial art. Edda graduated early from her Catholic high school and moved to New York City. Although she had frequently displayed sexual attraction to her ballet partner Seth, she married her longtime sweetheart Amos on September 11, 2017. On December 12, 2019, she found out she was pregnant with twin girls, who were born in the first week of March 2020. Juliette Martine Kiesl (née O'Malley, formerly Burber) – Divorced (from Jack) and the single mother of Edda, she is the daughter of Edna O'Malley. Juliette has a creative fantasy life (her alter-ego is the leopard skin-clad Panther Woman) but is competent at achieving her goals in reality. A Fulbright scholar, after being a biology professor at a New Hampshire university, she followed her dream of owning and operating a farm. She later married Elliott Greene in a ceremony officiated by Thorax, and eventually returned to the school in a part-time position. She learned she is the product of a brief relationship her mother had with an Austrian opera singer, Peter Kiesl, and later took on his family name. She was named after her stepfather's first wife, Martine Juliette. Edna "Edie" Ernst O'Malley/Eva Kiesl – Mother of Juliette and grandmother of Edda. "Gran" is irascible and argumentative, though loving. In her youth she was a beautiful, talented USO singer and spy for Allied Intelligence during World War II. Much of her life is told in an extended year-long flashback sequence, begun in October 2009, that has been described as "ambitious, moving, and still often pungently funny" and "one of the most engrossing and well-told stories from this year". During that time she had a relationship with Lt. Peter Kiesl, an Austrian Wehrmacht POW in England, which they rekindled ten years later in New York City when he was a visiting singer for the Metropolitan Opera; this led to a very brief engagement and the conception of Juliette. Afterward, Edna married Bill O'Malley, with whom she had a second