barbarianprincess

The Challenges Of Zona is good, but not only becouse of little dressed barbarian princess. There are plenty of comics (traditional and WWW ones) with sexy girls kicking butt. List your favourites, and tell something about them.

Modesty Blaise
This comic made debut when first James Bond movies came out. Modesty Blaise, former head of mafia, is in service of British intelligence service. With Willie Garvin, her most trusted aide and friend, she takes dangerous assignments involving typical spy missions (infiltration, intelligence gathering etc.), hostage rescues, and combat against criminals and terrorists. Often old enemies attempt take revenge against her, but everytime they fail only becouse they don't kill her in sight when they could. One of my favourite heroines, just becouse characters and most of the events are very normal without plagues of scifi, magics, and superpowers.

Yoko Tsuno
This is interesting one: belgian comic, where main character is japanese woman. I found it amusing at first, but it really works, and in full color all the way! Yoko Tsuno is electric engineer, who finds employment in Belgium, and later all over the Europe, Asia and other parts of the world and beyond. Most of the serie can be called science fiction: superweapons, enormous devil's organ, mechanic dragons, timemachine, aliens from distant galaxy... Yet despite such extraordinary events, main characters are... very much ordinary people trying to survive through extraordinary situations, just like Mentl and MacGyver.

Yoko Tsuno serie debuted in 1970's, and latest issue came out (or is coming soon) this year. Over the serie house-sized minicomputers have changed to laptops and telephones to mobile phones, but characters don't get older: childrens Poky and Rose stay little girls despite passage of time. Only 6 issues out of 25 have been translated to english, first 3 nearly 20 years ago. I recommend french and german versions for those who understand those languages, most (or all) other localizations are incomplete and have been numbered in wrong order.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yoko_Tsuno

Ghost in the Shell
This japanese comic, generally referred as manga, takes place in near future Japan. Main theme is integration of human and machine. In comic robots, cyborgs, and AIs are almost as daily life as aircrafts are today. There is no one main character, but instead sizeable group of characters: field agents of Public Security Section 9. They are highly skilled cyborgs, specialized for combat, infiltration, and information gathering, which all includes electronics warfare and computer hacking. Leader is pretty but equally deadly major Motoko Kusanagi. In addition of three manga books, there are anime movies, TV/OVA series, and novels. But manga was there first.

Note: in newest manga (Ghost in the Shell 1.5 Human-Error Processor) Motoko Kusanagi is only side character.

The Slayers
This is confusing hodgepodge of light novels, novels, manga and anime. Main character across the series is young sorceress Lina Inverse. Her official title is Lina the Pink Sorceress, and she hates it. At least in anime serie she prefers calling herself as Sorceress of Supreme, which isn't just bragging. Indeed, she masters wide range of magic from enchanting and healing to fireballs and Dragon Slave spells. She can use sword too, but that is usually only fallback weapon when her magic either won't work or it's not needed. Lina doesn't really care about collateral damage, so she may blast away with oversized Fireball and Dragon Slave spells decimating buildings and villages in process.

Lina's early adventures are accompanied by fellow sorceress, Naga the White Serpent. While Lina looks young, cute and innocent, much of Naga's features are near the opposite. She isn't ugly, but breast size is about twice that of Lina's, clothing is revealing and she does her best to look mean and tough. Without explanations they separate ways. Soon after Lina meets mercenary, Gourry Gabriev. Though stupid, which he admits himself, he is excellent swordsman (better than Lina).

Lina's childhood and sorceress training are covered in (light) novels, and I'm not certain which ones. About everything else are here and there among novels, manga and anime. Some stories are in all three formats with some differencies. In most of the anime movies and OVAs Lina is with Naga while in TV series she is joined by Gourry. What ever the format and story, they're all humorous ranging from mild to outright ridiculous.

First 10 episodes of anime TV serie can be viewed on Joost