Alison Bechdel has spent decades exploring identity through memoir comics, and The Secret to Superhuman Strength chronicles her lifelong relationship with exercise. From childhood running to adult cycling, karate, yoga, and more, physical discipline has been both escape and practice. This graphic memoir traces how her relationship to her body has evolved across decades, interweaving personal history with the philosophies of thinkers from the Romantics to Jack Kerouac to Adrienne Rich. Bechdel, best known for Fun Home and the Bechdel test, brings her characteristic density of image and text to questions about transcendence, aging, and what we seek when we push our bodies. The book includes illustrations of Bechdel at various ages pursuing various sports, alongside panels depicting the writers and philosophers whose ideas she has absorbed. Coleridge hiking the Lake District, Margaret Fuller practicing Swedish gymnastics, Kerouac climbing mountains: Bechdel places herself in a tradition of seekers who have used the body to approach something beyond it. The book is funny about the obsessive quality of Bechdel's exercise routines and melancholy about aging bodies that can no longer perform as they once did. Readers who appreciated Bechdel's earlier memoirs will find this one characteristically rich; newcomers will discover a cartoonist whose intelligence and honesty illuminate the page.