CHAPTER ONE
OCTOBER 10, 2018
She’d been driving for what felt like forever.
Laura Gustines blinked her eyes, trying desperately to stay awake as she pulled her car off the Whitestone Bridge and onto the Van Wyck Expressway. She’d been on the road for almost eight hours—unexpected traffic and her own anxiety conspiring to derail her exit plans, a few nervous pit stops delaying it even further. But none of that mattered, she told herself. She’d gotten what she wanted. The final piece of the puzzle that would make her book truly sing.
She tapped her phone without looking down, her other hand on her battered Subaru’s steering wheel. She squinted to make sure she was going the right way. It was well past midnight. She wanted to go home and sleep, but she needed to do one more thing.
She found the audio file on her voice recorder app. It was huge. The idea of losing it sent a jolt of panic through her entire body. In that file was the interview that would make her book—Secret Identity, a look at the women who had shaped comics but also been ignored—a cut above what she’d first envisioned.
When she pitched it to her agent, it was supposed to be a series of short biographies, spotlighting different women who’d made a meaningful mark in superhero graphic novels and comics. Folks like Karen Berger, Linda Fite, Trina Robbins, Patricia Highsmith, Ann Nocenti, Gail Simone, and Louise Simonson. She wanted to focus on mainstream comics, specifically the capes-and-tights genre, because it was popular, and Laura knew it’d pull in the casual reader in a way that maybe a more comprehensive tome wouldn’t. But she hadn’t expected to find anything newsworthy.
But then she’d discovered Carmen Valdez, a onetime comic book writer and acclaimed—if not bestselling—science-fiction novelist. Valdez had, at some point, not only written an issue of a little-known comic titled The Legendary Lynx—she’d also apparently co-created the character in secret. A character beloved by many hard-core fans, Gustines had discovered.
Gustines had also done the impossible. She’d found Valdez—specifically, where she lived, which few seemed to know. In a world where people routinely listed what they had for breakfast or their favorite bookstores, Carmen Valdez had disappeared completely. Though she ostensibly still worked in publishing, Valdez was a digital ghost—granting no interviews, making no public appearances, and fading into the ether of pop culture. Gustines had felt vindicated by just finding out where Valdez’s home was: in Truro, on Cape Cod. Gustines had trekked out there to see if she could get the reclusive writer to admit that she, along with an editor named Harvey Stern, and artist Doug Detmer (a name only the most die-hard of die-hard comic fans would know) had created the character. It was a tale that had everything. Because this wasn’t just a story of a ghostwriting fan. There was blood on the floor. There was a crime involved. And, if Laura did her reporting right, a lot of it could point to a deeper, more sinister problem involving the company that published The Legendary Lynx: a defunct outfit known as Triumph Comics, their dead CEO Jeffrey Carlyle, and someone named Dan Stephenson.
Stern had been murdered under mysterious circumstances around the time The Legendary Lynx launched, in 1975. Detmer died by his own hand later that same year. Stephenson, a shady business partner who worked with Carlyle, died in prison—serving time for Stern’s death. Carlyle died of pancreatic cancer around 2007. Only Valdez remained, and she’d kept the truth—and her role in creating the Lynx—close to the vest for decades.
Not anymore. Laura had managed to sit down with the writer for a few hours, slowly collecting details that she knew had never been revealed to anyone. Now the story lived on Laura’s phone, desperate to be heard.
Laura tapped the play button on the voice recorder app and watched as the file from her phone started to upload to the cloud. Laura let her tired mind wander for a second—to her, in her comfy pajamas, sipping a glass of pinot noir, listening to Carmen’s interview again. Her only interview, Laura reminded herself. This was her shot. As Carmen’s voice echoed through the car and into Laura’s brain, she knew she couldn’t mess this up.
“I created the Lynx. With Harvey at first, of course—but she was mine before then. The ideas. The biggest parts of her. They were mine. Harvey helped. Then Doug—Doug Detmer—brought her world to life.
“I’m just tired of being in the shadows. I’m old. I’ve done some great work. I’ve taken care of myself, my wife, my family—but I still feel incomplete. I still feel like there’s an empty space on the shelf. And, I just want people to know. To know the character is mine. Well, ours. With Doug—of course. But mine. She comes from me. I created her. I held her in my mind long before I met Harvey Stern, or before our scripts were mailed to Doug. She was in my heart. And she’s been gone for far too long.”
Laura let out a long sigh. She was tired, too. She could feel her eyelids getting heavy. Could almost hear the comforting sound of her key sliding into her apartment’s front door lock.
The car shook violently—the front of the car jerking to the left and slamming into the median, the screech of metal on metal cutting through Carmen’s recorded confession. Laura felt her head swing along with the car, bashing into the driver’s-side window. She heard a slight crackling sound on contact. Before she could start to look around, the car jerked again—this time from behind, as if an elephant were ramming into the right rear side. But it wasn’t an animal—Laura knew that. In the corner of her vision she’d seen it. A large black SUV was now idling behind her. Lights off. Laura couldn’t make out the model or license plate. She squinted as she tried to regain her composure, to push past the ache in her skull that wasn’t a headache, but probably something worse—a concussion, at the very least. She ran a hand over her head and felt a wetness she knew hadn’t been there before. Warm and sticky. Tiny shards of glass embedded in a mix of blood and hair. A brief gasp of surprise slipped out of her mouth.
“I just wanted to have a chance, honestly. A shot. No one at Triumph wanted to give me that. My boss—Carlyle—he had decided what I was. He said he had a plan for me. But he didn’t consult me on that plan. And maybe I didn’t want to be part of it. But he didn’t want to be bothered with anything else. He was in charge, right?”
Laura groaned. She tried to move the car but got nothing in return except a low screeching sound that told her she wasn’t going anywhere. Her eyes, slow and groggy, drifted up to her rearview. Who the hell was driving out here with their lights off? she wondered. Some drunk asshole, certainly. Well, she’d give him a piece of her mind once she found a way out of the damn—
The figure seemed to appear out of nothing—speckles of fog moving closer to create a wraith-like creature that floated toward Laura and her car. But Laura knew that couldn’t be true. She blinked hard, trying to focus her blurry vision, and looked again. But the figure was still there—in black from head to toe: glasses, skullcap, mask, jacket, pants.
What the fuck was going on? she wondered.
This was bad. Laura felt her vision flicker out for a second. Felt a dull ache spread over her entire body. She needed a doctor.
She tried to reach for her phone, her eyes following the white charging cable that had been connected to her car’s USB port. But it was gone. Shunted out of her reach in the bumper-car madness of a few moments before. Laura unhooked her seat belt, hoping she could lunge forward and dig around for her cell—but was frozen by a sharp jab of pain in her side. She screamed—as much from surprise as from pain—and pulled back. She let out a few short breaths, intending to try again, when she felt a dark spot forming in her peripheral vision. She turned her head and noticed the figure again. This time much closer.
Laura lunged—felt her fingers wrapping around the worn white phone cord. She yanked at it roughly and heard it jangle under the seat. It was stuck. She cursed loudly, trying to avoid looking at the shape standing outside her car. But even then she saw the gloved black hand lifting the gun. Noticed the long cylinder screwed onto the end—the thing anyone who’d watched an episode of any crime show knew was a silencer. Laura Gustines felt a howling sob leave her mouth—an animalistic cry she wouldn’t have even considered human if she wasn’t hearing it now. The next sound, a soft schtoop—was followed by a crash, as the window shattered, sending shards of glass onto the empty passenger seat.
Laura Gustines wouldn’t live to hear the second shot, which sent a silent bullet crashing into her forehead. The reporter’s body slumped forward, her bloodied head landing on the steering wheel, making the car horn bleat once.
The figure moved quickly and quietly—opening the door, crouching down, and sliding their hand under the seat. They pulled out the phone and glanced at the display—which asked for an access code. A soft curse. Then the figure slid the phone into their back pocket and left the car. Only Laura Gustines remained, eyes still open and staring out into the rainy Queens evening. The last few seconds of Carmen Valdez’s interview drifted through the destroyed car.
“I guess … I just don’t want to be forgotten.”
CHAPTER TWO
FEBRUARY 9, 2009—NEW YORK COMIC CON
My name is Annie Bustamante and I’m about to get fired.
I was sitting on a panel deep in the bowels of the Jacob Javits Center for New York Comic Con, where I was supposed to talk about my latest comic book work—a series titled The Renegade, produced by a fly-by-night publisher named Blast Radius Comics. Seriously. That was the company’s name.
New York Comic Con was, by its own definition, one of the largest “pop culture events” in the world, even just a few years after its debut. I looked down at my badge, hanging from a lanyard around my neck, the thin plastic card that carried so much weight. It had the word PRO emblazoned on it, a sign to all comers that I, Annie Bustamante, wasn’t just one of the masses. I was a professional. I actually created stuff. Did anyone actually read the comics I drew? Let’s just say I was glad I didn’t have to share sales numbers to get a badge. Lucky me.
The panel room was small, all things considered—but it was packed. About three hundred people. I scanned the crowd in the hopes of finding a friendly face. There weren’t any—mostly old and mostly white, with furrowed brows, quizzical looks, and a few blank faces staring into the void. I was seated between a handful of other Blast Radius creators—also mostly men, mostly white, and all of them older than me—that I’d met a few moments before. My editor, Victor Riesling, was standing behind a podium at the far end of the elevated stage. I felt a drop of sweat slide down my back. My lips felt dry. My vision was blurring at the edges. I took a deep breath. This would be fine, I told myself. Just fine. It ended up being the complete opposite of fine. It was a nightmare.
I’d gotten the gig writing and drawing The Renegade in the usual way—someone I knew reached out asking if I wanted to work on something. The Renegade was a comic book based on the hyper-violent, testosterone-heavy novels of a hack named Tom Gravins—no way that was his real name. They wanted me to take over for Gravins on the Renegade comic with an eye toward becoming the regular writer/artist.
I didn’t really have much choice, all things considered. I was eating a dinner of microwave ramen as I read the email offer. I was desperate.
Plus, the email was from Danny.
Danny.
Danny had been smart. While I’d toiled away on the path of the starving freelancer, my childhood bestie had chosen the more stable route. He got his first break as an editorial intern in the hallowed halls of DC Comics, then parlayed that experience to becoming a full editor at Blast Radius Comics, The Renegade’s publisher. If the email hadn’t been from Danny, I would’ve ignored it. I knew the source material was crap; plus, it was Blast Radius Comics. The name alone gave me hives. Still, it was Danny. I could remember sitting in the spill-out area at Glades Middle School during the summer, frantically flipping through stacks of Marvel trading cards—comparing character attributes, examining the artwork on the front of the cards in the way an archaeologist might look at a dinosaur fossil—and spitballing ideas for our next comic book project. Danny was the story guy, even then. My creative partner.
So I took the gig. I mean, the warning signs were there—the byzantine work-for-hire contract, the insanely urgent, suffocating deadlines that paired nicely with the copious notes from the licensor. I liked to think of myself as a pretty sturdy freelancer, but even I had my limits. Danny had done the initial outreach and had been the big allure on the project. But a few weeks into the job, I was reassigned to Riesling. The kind of comics guy who had more companies on his résumé than still existed. It went downhill fast. Just like this panel.
Things started to go sour as we hit the home stretch—the final ten minutes, when fans take turns sauntering up to a faulty mic to ask questions. Though I’d done my fair share of these before, I felt petrified. I had no connection to the source material. In fact, I hated it. I didn’t want to be up here, defending my work. I wanted to be hiding at home, behind my art table, drawing feverishly to finish another assignment and shunt all of this from my mind. I saw Danny, standing off to the side of the panel, pacing nervously with each slide and comment. I should’ve felt a wave of relief at his familiar, warm face—but it made me feel worse. I wasn’t just making a fool of myself in front of strangers and an editor I hated, but in front of Danny—whom I loved. Who’d known me my entire life. I caught sight of the Blast Radius PR guy, a relatively nice kid named Ron Barajas. He seemed skittish and amped in the way only PR people could be, nodding and smiling as if everything were great, great, a sure sign that things were actually Not Great At All.
I guess I’d been staring, because Barajas gave me a strange, emotive thumbs-up—and I snapped back to reality. I felt dizzy and grimy, regretting how I’d spent the time before the panel. I looked down the table, trying to find a sympathetic face, but I just saw strangers. Men who loved this kind of shit—sitting up onstage pontificating about how they tossed in that character cameo in issue number whatever, or that time they smelled Stan Lee’s deodorant. They lived in the weeds, and this was where that was celebrated most. I was alone, the only woman onstage, which was fairly standard for these kinds of things. I tried to exude confidence, but that was gone. I’d made the mistake of downing a few drinks at the hotel bar before walking over to the Javits and I was starting to feel the dirty side of it—the headache at the edges of my vision, the drag on my voice. I thought I seemed okay when I got to the room, but now I wasn’t so sure. Was I … slurring my words? I prayed for a few easy questions and a hasty exit. I got neither.
To be fair, I wasn’t deluded. I knew my place in the hierarchy of comics. At best, I could be labeled a “rising star.” But in reality, I was scrounging for any kind of work, taking gigs for low-rent publishers like Rampart Comics and Mercenary Press. It wasn’t what I’d imagined when I was sitting in my mom’s living room in Miami—sitting nose-to-nose with my best friend Danny Alvarez, cooking up our own Spider-Man, Batman, and X-Men stories. I liked to think I was pretty self-aware, but at this moment I had no concrete sense of where I stood in this crazy business.
My career, for whatever it was worth, was in a rut after a meteoric start when I took the Renegade gig. I was a “rising star,” according to places like Newsarama and Wizard Magazine: The Guide to Comics. My art was called “dynamic and edgy,” and fans seemed to really enjoy my work, particularly my gritty relaunch of a staid sixties superhero property, T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents, a U.N.-like group of heroes once created by the legendary Wally Wood.
The T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents assignment had taken me by surprise, though. I knew the Agents had been revamped by nearly every publisher over the decades in every which way—with none really resonating beyond the initial news blip. But the appeal of playing with established toys plus a steady paycheck made it hard to turn down. I had never expected it to be more than that. But suddenly it was. Readers were responding. The reviews were good, the sales were steady. It helped that I’d been paired with another “rising star” in writer Charlie Tomlinson, an acclaimed literary novelist looking to make their mark in comics. Tomlinson’s thoughtful and meta story paired nicely with my art style—which owed a lot to masters like Toth, Detmer, and Buscema. We had a hit. For the first time ever, the Agents were giving the X-Men and the Justice League a run for their money. The publisher, a tiny house named New Wave Comics, was unprepared to handle the demand—and soon the bubble had burst, with Tomlinson quitting abruptly, citing editorial interference, leaving me to stand alone as the new “it” creator in comics. My next step was pivotal. But praise like that goes straight to your head. Mix it with a few too many cocktails and your own ego, and the end result is something akin to greed—and I took the next gig that made sense mathematically, not creatively. Enter The Renegade.
I thought I could fix the inherent problems in The Renegade. I thought that, through sheer force of will, I could make these testosterone-fueled stories matter. I mean, we’d done it before, right? I could make this book something special while paying my bills at the same time.
Copyright © 2024 by Alex Segura. Comic book sequence artwork by Sandy Jarrell, lettering by Jack Morelli. The Lynx, related characters, and artwork copyright © 2022, 2024 by Alex Segura.
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