Hey, my name is Carmen. I live in a tiny apartment in New York City, but I’m from Miami. My parents came over from Cuba right after Castro took over. But that’s the backstory, you’re here for more than that.

I moved up here to New York to work in comics. I want to write them. Create stories with artists and put together adventures featuring heroes like the ones I grew up with – Batman, Spider-Man, The Dusk, Black Canary and Wonder Woman – you get the idea. Comics are special to me. I grew up reading them with my papi, who’d take me to the local store weekly to scan the newsstand for anything new and interesting. It became a language between us, and I promised myself I’d one day get up here, to New York, and make comics of my own.

Easier said than done. So, good news? I did get a job in comics. Bad news? It was for this company, Triumph Comics, that isn’t exactly known for hiring widely or opening doors to new talent. Plus, my job wasn’t exactly high-profile. I got coffee for the boss, a man named Jeffrey Carlyle. I was an executive assistant, and while it’s great to watch a comic company move from my perch outside Jeffrey’s office, that’s pretty much all I do? I watch. I learn. I listen. But every time I ask for a shot – every time I share a script or suggestion – I hit a wall.

I left Miami to work in comics. That sounds clean and simple. Life is rarely that simple. I don’t talk to my papi anymore. I dwell on things that went wrong before I moved, too. But life is messy, like I said. You push forward and keep going.

That’s me in a nutshell. I work at something until I can get there. I don’t believe in “no” and I certainly don’t give up easily.

Jeffrey says he has a line of friends outside his door he’s gonna give comic writing work to before I ever get my shot.

So I’ll have to find my path in another way.

Secret Identity
Genre: Traditional
Release: March 2022
Purchase Link

From Anthony Award-winning writer Alex Segura comes Secret Identity, a rollicking literary mystery set in the world of comic books.

It’s 1975 and the comic book industry is struggling, but Carmen Valdez doesn’t care. She’s an assistant at Triumph Comics, which doesn’t have the creative zeal of Marvel nor the buttoned-up efficiency of DC, but it doesn’t matter. Carmen is tantalizingly close to fulfilling her dream of writing a superhero book.

That dream is nearly a reality when one of the Triumph writers enlists her help to create a new character, which they call “The Lethal Lynx,” Triumph’s first female hero. But her colleague is acting strangely and asking to keep her involvement a secret. And then he’s found dead, with all of their scripts turned into the publisher without her name. Carmen is desperate to piece together what happened to him, to hang on to her piece of the Lynx, which turns out to be a runaway hit. But that’s complicated by a surprise visitor from her home in Miami, a tenacious cop who is piecing everything together too quickly for Carmen, and the tangled web of secrets and resentments among the passionate eccentrics who write comics for a living.

Alex Segura uses his expertise as a comics creator as well as his unabashed love of noir fiction to create a truly one-of-a-kind novel–hard-edged and bright-eyed, gritty and dangerous, and utterly absorbing.

About the author
Alex Segura is the SVP – Sales and Marketing at Oni Press and the author of Star Wars Poe Dameron: Free Fall and the acclaimed Pete Fernandez Mystery series. He has also written a number of comic books, most notably the superhero noir The Black Ghost, the YA music series The Archies, and the “Archie Meets” collection of crossovers. A Miami native, he lives in New York City with his wife and children.

All comments are welcomed.