Secret Identity

Anyone who’s worked in publishing will recognize the low pay, deadline whirlwind, and scramble for recognition facing Carmen Valdez, a Miami transplant in New York. Worse, she’s a secretary trying to advance in a man’s world within a man’s world—comics publishing in 1975. Male colleagues sometimes show up drunk and their work is barely passable. Still, Carmen’s boss, whose father started the company, reminds her that “in the real world, we grant jobs based on experience and merit” when she gives him her comics scripts. Then her smoking buddy at work, Harvey, proposes to help by submitting a project by the two of them, but mainly by her, as his, and to reveal her authorship once it’s a success. Things don’t go according to plan, with not only Carmen’s professional future but also her safety jeopardized by a killer targeting her circle. Complementing this puzzling whodunit is a major plus for comics and graphic novel readers: Segura’s insider view of the comics industry and its history, as well as his spot-on chronicling of the too-frequent backstabbing among striving artists. For fans of Zakiya Dalila Harris’s The Other Black Girl, another look at a young woman trying to make it in publishing