My Alter Ego’s Secret Identity

(Another post cobbled together from reviews on my own blog).

I don’t read a lot of non-genre fiction but Alex Segura’s Secret Identity and Alter Ego are mainstream novels set in the world of comic-book creators. So I gave them a shot and enjoyed them, though not as much as I’d hoped.

Secret Identity is set in 1975, at a publishing company that resembles the short-lived Atlas Comics. Like Atlas, Triumph Comics hopes its presence on the spinner racks will draw fans away from DC and Marvel. While that didn’t happen, the second novel says Triumph lasted into the 1980s, a better run than Atlas managed.

The protagonist is Carmen Valdez, a Cuban-American lesbian who’s relocated from Miami to NYC. Carmen wants to write comics but her boss won’t give her the shot. A coworker suggests a workaround: he and Carmen create a new character, the Lethal Lynx, but to fool the boss, he’ll put his name on it alone. Later, once the character is a hit, they can reveal it was written by a girl and the boss will have to admit she’s good.

You can probably guess things don’t play out that way. Carmen’s outraged at being conned but when her collaborator turns up murdered, her situation gets a lot worse. With him dead, nobody can prove she co-scripted — plus she (inevitably, I guess) starts investigating the murder and draws the killer’s attention.

Segura does a great job capturing the energy and vibrancy that drew people to New York despite the city’s financial problems and high crime rate. And yes, he knows people back then smoked a lot. I’m also impressed by some of his obscure 1970s references — very few people will remember the days when Spider-Man had a stomach ulcer. On the other hand, the book is lacking when it comes to the Bronze Age. While he name checks some of the great Silver Age comics and creators, 1975 means we have Steve Englehart on Doctor Strange and Avengers, Steve Gerber on Man-Thing, Jim Starlin on Warlock — it annoys me Carmen seems oblivious to all that.

A bigger problem for me is the book is what’s now called “new adult,” a coming-of-age story for people in their twenties. Coming of age, new adult, midlife crisis — stories of these turning points almost never work for me. Carmen’s character arc — learning to stand up for herself, owning her sexuality, learning how to handle a cutthroat world — left me cold. That is not, however, Segura’s fault

Alter Ego is set in the present with another Latina creator, Annie Bustamante, a comics artist who made the leap into Oscar-winning film directing. Unfortunately the studio shelved her last film for the tax breaks (as you doubtless know, this is a real thing). That leads people to assume the movie was utter crap that would have lost money if released. Annie’s career flatlines.

Annie’s therefore at a loose end when the son of Triumph’s founder asks her for a meet. He plans to revive the comics company and with Annie currently away from Hollywood, wants her to return to comics (she’s good and having her onboard will get attention). If she agrees, Annie can draw and co-write a new Lethal Lynx series. Annie loves the Lynx, partly because reading something created by a fellow Latina made her believe she could break into comics. Once again, however, Triumph proves cursed: people are dying, her co-creator on the Lynx book is a creep and Annie has a strong feeling the publisher isn’t telling her everything …

Segura does a great job portraying Triumph’s new owners, shallow suits who look at creative work and think “intellectual property” — the only value is as an asset on the company’s balance sheet.  However it’s a weaker book than Secret Identity for two reasons. One is that there’s a big subplot — Annie’s backstory and her romance with a guy who dies of terminal disease — that’s fine in itself but doesn’t tie into the rest of the book well. The other is that the bad guys are idiots.

Their master plan is that once the Triumph characters become runaway hits, they’ll leverage the synergy and launch them into the movies — the Triumph Cinematic Universe! They’ll make millions, and that will be enough to pay off the money they borrowed from the Russian Mafia with lots left over! Of course this requires them to have full control of the Triumph characters, hence the murders of anyone who might prove otherwise.

Yes, you heard right. They’re planning to revive characters who haven’t been seen in 40 years, turn them into hits, then duplicate Marvel’s cinematic success. Easy peasy, right — well, except for the murders. I half-wonder if Segura isn’t assuming this is obvious, so no need to point out it’s nuts. Then again, Annie, while she dislikes and distrusts her boss for several reasons, never has any thought balloons (so to speak) about what a moron he is. I kind of thing she would.

A final problem that dogs both books is that the Lethal Lynx (sometimes referred to as the Legendary Lynx) is supposed to be one of Triumph’s successes, a cool, cutting edge Bronze Age classic. Neither the few panels of art we see, nor the stories (as described by Carmen and Annie) seems particularly good. Not dreadful, but nothing that would draw me away from anything by the Big Two. Annie makes a comment that the Lynx teaming up with her best friend’s ghost shows how out there she was — but in an era when Spider-Man teamed up with Brother Voodoo and the Human Torch fought with Daimon Hellstrom, Supernatural Meets Superhero was hardly novel.

While Alter Ego is billed as Secret Identity #2 I don’t know if that means the two novels make up a duology or if there’s a third to come. If option B, I doubt I’ll be back for it.

Covers by Rich Buckler, unknown, Stan Goldberg, Howard Chaykin and Gil Kane.