As far as official government reports go, this one might be a collector’s edition.

The D.C. Department of Forensic Sciences — the city’s crime and public health lab — recently published its annual report for 2017, and it was designed to look like a comic book, superhero characters and all.

More Marvel than municipal, the report — entitled “Super Science, Safer Streets” — is a somewhat dramatic departure from most government publications, where annual achievements are dryly delivered and design is often limited to shaded bar graphs. That break from convention was the point, says Jenifer Smith, the retired FBI agent and former professor of forensic science who took over DFS in July 2015.

“You want your annual report to be read by more than just your mother, and here people have a chance to pick this up and are not put off by all the charts and tables in it,” she said. “The lab here is the city’s laboratory, and we want people to understand what does on here, and that includes the youngest ones among us.”

The report was illustrated by Rachel Mando, who started as an intern at the lab in 2015 and is now a health a safety specialist there. Mando, who declined an interview, first created and illustrated a fictional superhero character to be used for a coloring book and games for the lab’s family day.

“She drew these characters, and it was like, ‘How do we get them out there?’ And then we said, ‘Let’s do it for the annual report,’” said Smith, who asked Mando to create four characters — one for each of DFS’s divisions.

There’s Nya Veridas, an administrative assistant with a “knack for staying organized and getting people to work together in harmony.” Cecil Ruya works in the Forensic Sciences Laboratory, where his self-made bionic eye lets him “see the tiniest striations on a bullet,” and Justin Gyeong is with Crime Scene Services, “where he can use his telekinetic powers to carefully lift evidence without damaging or contaminating it.” Finally, Kati Sloan is at the Public Health Lab, where she uses her ability to control the weather “to support the growth of microbes, viruses, and other biologicals to see how they grow and spread.”

“These characters are very diverse,” Smith said. “Purposely [Mando] wanted to give one an eye that has a special capability because not everyone going into science has to see perfectly. She really worked to give these characters something extra to talk about how we would embrace any person who would work here.”

Especially women. Smith says that 70 percent of the lab’s 200 employees are women, and that more women than men are going into the forensic sciences. That prompted a monthly after-school program at Excel Academy, an all-girls public school in Southeast D.C.

“We talk to them about the science behind fingerprints, or the science we do in the lab,” said Smith. “These kids are excited and bright. We want them to see where they can go one day. If you see it, you can be it.”

Smith concedes that DFS has faced challenges. Created in 2012 to both surveil public health and provide impartial analysis of evidence in crimes, Smith says DFS “imploded in 2015,” when it was forced to halt DNA forensic testing over questions of integrity and independence. And last year it faced questions over some of its ballistics testing as well as criticism over nine botched Zika tests.

But Smith says the lab is now fully staffed and better run; earlier this year, Smith said DFS had eliminated backlogs in its analysis of rape and sexual assault kits.

“The people here have stepped up and have turned this place around,” she said. “They deserve some superhero status for the work they have done to rehabilitate this laboratory.”

And moving forward, Smith says she wants to more consistently publicize the work the lab is doing, largely because it can be critical on a daily basis. And for that, a comic book-style report with superhero characters is a useful tool.

“I want more people to have an appreciation for the very practical science that’s around them,” she said. “We need our citizens to understand this is science they are paying for. And not just crime, but public health.”