With election season over, Tina Fey has hung up her Sarah Palin impression. But the hysteria surrounding her spot-on SNL skits portraying the folksy would-be veep has earned the 38 year-old comedienne a whole new slew of fans. And those fans demand magazine profiles! Entertainment Weekly, Vanity Fair and The New Yorker stepped up to the plate recently and delivered very different perceptions of Fey, all of which appear to be cribbed from 30 Rock’s character descriptions of Liz Lemon:

1. Ugly duckling turned swan! Maureen Dowd’s Vanity Fair profile goes to great lengths to remind us that Fey was once (gasp!) sorta homely:

“Fey started as a writer and performer with a bad short haircut in Chicago improv. Then she retreated backstage at SNL, wore a ski hat, and gained weight writing sharp, funny jokes and eating junk food. Then she lost 30 pounds, fixed her hair, put on a pair of hot-teacher glasses, and made her name throwing lightning-bolt zingers on ‘Weekend Update.’”

Dowd catches Fey complaining a few times (”‘I don’t like my feet’” and “‘I like to look goofy, but I also don’t want to get canceled because of my big old butt.’”) but Vanity Fair really shoves the miracle-makeover stuff down our throats, even illustrating with photos of Fey in slutty-librarian wear, nibbling on her glasses frames.

“Her makeover is the stuff of legend. The Hollywood agent Sue Mengers warned her pal Lorne Michaels that he simply could not bring Fey out of the writers’ room and put her on-air for ‘Weekend Update.’

“‘She doesn’t have the looks,’ Mengers told him.”

Happily, Fey never seems to put too much emphasis on what the beautification has done for her career, only what it did for her self-esteem and health, telling Dowd that she merely aspired to be “‘PBS pretty’—pretty for a smart writer.”

Two more iterations of the multi-faceted Fey after the jump…

2. Sister doin’ it for herself! The New Yorker portrays Fey as a woman who can hold her own in the writers’ room…

“Fey’s kind of humor…served her well when she became the first female head writer at Saturday Night Live, in 1999, and had to manage a mostly male staff, and that serve her well now, as the top dog of 30 Rock, in case there are any male writers or comedians still out there who find it difficult to work for an assertive woman.”

…but not in front of the camera:

“Fey has surrounded herself with a cast that has one spectacular member and a couple of really good ones, but that averages out to only fair. Her own performance falls into the not-so-great category.”

Blerg. Is this the beginning of the inevitable Fey backlash? Probably not, as Tina’s three steps ahead of us, having already skewered the emotional-working-woman archetype with panache:

3. Do-no-wrong Renaissance woman! Entertainment Weekly names Fey one of its “Entertainers of the Year,” fawning over her myriad accomplishments in comedy, writing, producing and even (suck it, New Yorker) acting:

“[30 Rock] was just one portal through which Fey invaded our collective consciousness. She also proved a box office draw as a go-getter with a ticking clock in Baby Mama, shocked SNL audiences with a Hillary Clinton-defending rant declaring that ‘bitch is the new black,’ and even elevated the commercial form when she teamed up with Martin Scorsese for a self-deprecating AmEx pitch. She marched in picket lines to become the face of the writers’ strike, she signed a book deal. And-oh, yeah-she single-handedly defined out-of-nowhere VP candidate Sarah Palin’s public persona with a dead-on SNL impression that became a phenomenon-folksy accent, cutesy winks, meandering answers, and all.”

Despite interviewer Jennifer Armstrong’s obvious girl-crush on Fey, she gets one of the best quotes from her on controversy, sexism, politics and accidental notice in comedy:

“‘I made a mental note that I didn’t want to do anything like [the Clinton commentary] again. I felt like it had gone farther than I wanted it to by inadvertently becoming an endorsement. To me it was more about sexism we were perceiving. We had two candidates who were apples and apples, but there was this visceral irritation with her. I just thought, ‘Oh, that’s gonna be me - someday people are gonna be like, Get out of here, we want some young male comedian instead!’ I think that’s imminent for women when they get past a certain age. That was more what the piece was intended to be about. So I thought, ‘I gotta steer clear of this for a while.’ Then this, uh, other stuff happened.”

Maybe we can have it all, ladies: