Alex Segura got his first comic book—an Archie’s Double Digest that his mom bought him at a grocery store—when he was five years old. He was immediately hooked.
“The combination of words and art was really eye-opening to me, and the sequential narrative was really cool,” he says via Zoom from his home in Queens. “I loved the characters, and the sitcom structure was really good for that age because as long as you knew the characters, you understood what was going on.”
That issue of Archie was the start of a lifelong passion that sparked both a career in comics and crime fiction. At 44, Segura is a comics industry veteran, having worked as a writer on everything from Superman and Green Lantern to Dick Tracy and Archie; an editor at Dark Circle Comics; and a publicity and marketing executive at DC Comics and Archie Comics. He’s also written his share of crime novels, including the popular Pete Fernandez series. But it was with Secret Identity (2022) that Segura first combined his two obsessions, creating a crime story centered on comics, a medium famous for its colorful depictions of criminal activity and the heroes who fight it.
Set in the 1970s, Secret Identity, which won a Los Angeles Times Book Prize, tells the story of Carmen Valdez, a comics writer who helps create a bold new female superhero named the Lynx for the upstart (and shady) publisher Triumph Comics. But Valdez soon finds herself in trouble when one of her collaborators ends up dead. Segura’s latest novel, Alter Ego (Flatiron, Dec.), a sequel of sorts, picks up the story in 2023, when comics artist Annie Bustamante is chosen to relaunch the Legendary Lynx for a revamped Triumph Comics. The only problem: she can tell there’s something wrong about the whole deal.
Born and raised in Miami, Segura fell in love with crime writing shortly after he discovered comics. “My introduction was stuff like Sherlock Holmes,” he says, dressed in a shirt emblazoned with the logo for EC Comics, a publisher known for graphic, pulpy stories set in the 1940s and ’50s. “I remember reading those classic illustrated books as a kid, with prose slightly watered down for younger readers with spot illustrations. It had that same combination of illustration and text as comics.”
Soon he moved toward paperback fiction—Mario Puzo’s The Godfather was an early favorite—and then masters of the genre including Raymond Chandler, Chester Himes, Laura Lippman, Ross MacDonald, and Walter Mosley. He especially liked morally conflicted detectives, like Mosley’s Easy Rawlins, Lippman’s Tess Monaghan, and George Pelecanos’s Nick Stefanos. “They were messed up people,” Segura says. “They made mistakes. They were flawed, and they didn’t necessarily do the right thing. And that really spoke to me as a reader.”
After studying English literature at Florida International University, Segura moved to New York in 2006, where he lives with his wife and two children. Segura still values his roots—not just those in Miami but also his parents’ connections to their native Cuba. And this finds its way into his fiction. In Alter Ego, Annie adopts Carmen Valdez as an early role model largely because of their shared Cuban American heritage. “I hardly ever see names like ours in the credits,” Annie tells her childhood best friend. “I never see people like us, well, in the comics. Like the heroes.” The Lynx—and her alter ego, Claudia Calla—represent the kind of Latina superheroine Annie aspires to create.
Segura can relate. He remembers buying the first issue of Spider-Man 2099 in 1992 and noting that this futuristic version of the webslinger was a Mexican Irish kid. “The idea that there could be a Latino Spider-Man was huge for me,” he says. “As a Cuban kid in Miami, I was like, ‘Wow, I could be Spider-Man.’ ”
He had a similar epiphany discovering the crime novels of Carolina Garcia-Aguilera, the Cuban American writer who created private investigator Lupe Solano. “I read those books and I was fascinated, because you feel seen, you feel like you’re not alone,” Segura says. “I think it’s important not only to see that in the characters you read, but also to open other people up to these different stories and show them that there isn’t just one kind of character or one kind of narrative. We live in a very complicated, diverse world with different viewpoints, different cultures, different backgrounds, different identities.”
In Alter Ego, Annie faces an extra set of biases as a woman making her way in a field with no shortage of misogyny. Though she is excited about the prospect of rebooting the Legendary Lynx, Annie, who is in recovery from alcoholism, must contend with Bert Carlyle, the new Triumph head and son of the publisher’s founder (who takes credit for creating the Lynx); a chief collaborator with a tarnished reputation who’s very nervous about their corporate overlords; and the ghost of Valdez, who disappeared under mysterious circumstances. But when Annie starts looking into who really created and owns the rights to the Lynx, it leads to murder.
Zachary Wagman, VP and editorial director at Flatiron and Segura’s editor, points to the author’s savvy treatment of a central idea in Alter Ego: creative ownership. “He wrestles with that a lot in the novels because it’s true to the life of comics publishing,” Wagman says. “It speaks to people being erased who are important in the genesis of characters and cultural institutions that we love. I think Alex is a great person to shine a light on this sort of thing, because he’s worked in so many different parts of the industry. He’s been a publicist, a sales executive, a marketing person, and an author.”
As a comics industry veteran, Segura knows how painful it can be to come face to face with prejudice and entrenched ideas about comics. “I wanted to show that there’s room for improvement, and that we still have a way to go,” he says. “The fandom can be great, because there’s a love there, but it can also be overpowering. If you’ve been a fan for a long time, you can have this very definitive perspective of how things should be.”
Segura, of course, isn’t just a writer. He’s a fan as well. “Comics is my love,” he says. “It’s the thing that I grew up on and have this special connection to. And I wanted to put that on the page.”
