A scream tore through the office. It was barely eleven and Carmen Valdez already wanted to die.
“Carmen? Where are you?”
Her smile tightened a bit as she turned from the large, noisy copier in the small, overcrowded Triumph Comics office on Eighteenth Street in the Flatiron District. The usual workday bustle seemed to grind to a halt as her boss, Triumph Comics owner and editor-in-chief Jeffrey Carlyle, walked across the space—hands flailing like a young bird desperately trying to stay airborne, nothing but asphalt below. He cut a quick path to where Carmen stood, her expression still calm, eyes wide and expectant. This was their schtick, Carmen had come to accept. Carlyle would hiss and whine about some inane thing—misplaced original artwork, an appointment he hadn’t been told was happening, or just because he felt like it—and Carmen would calmly explain to him why the world was this way. It’d been like this for as long as Carmen had worked as Carlyle’s secretary. Almost a year. It was the dance.
“Right here, boss,” she said, her tone clear and alert. “Copying Maynard’s new script. Just takes a minute with this new machine. Kind of amazing.”
“I asked you to do that hours ago,” he said, his tone somewhat muted. A tiny, fruitless victory.
Carmen caught a glimpse of the two beleaguered bullpen employees, looking down at their pasteup stations at the first sign of conflict. They were probably making a last-minute correction to the art on a book that was running hot. The sounds of Carlyle sniping at someone were a welcome and entertaining distraction.
Carmen raised an eyebrow at them before turning to face her boss.
“That was for Gray Wolf—the one where he battles the Interloper, remember?” she said, handing him a stack of just-copied pages, the fresh ink smearing on her hands. “This is his new Avatar one. Issue fifteen.”
“Right, right,” Carlyle mumbled to himself as he grabbed the pages, his shrug of surrender almost imperceptible as his tiny eyes scanned the top sheet of the script. The book was hot. Len Maynard was Triumph’s top writer, but that didn’t mean he was their best. Or their fastest. Fans loved him for his bouncy, philosophical dialogue and innate, almost instinctual ability to create characters who felt otherworldly. Carlyle hated him for his spaced-out, trippy plots that clearly stemmed from Len’s fondness for mushrooms, acid, and White Russians. Not so much because of Maynard’s literary aspirations, but because in Carlyle’s twisted view, Len’s attempts to elevate his work were seen as an affront to Carlyle, a man with his own lofty literary dreams of writing the Great American Novel.
“Let’s see what kind of cool vibe we get tapped into this time,” he said, spitting out “cool vibe” with unbridled disdain.
Carlyle swiveled away toward his office and Carmen was left alone by the copier again. A brief respite. She took a moment to tie back her shoulder-length black hair in a hasty ponytail. In about an hour, he’d want his lunch—pastrami on rye, lots of mustard, no pickles—laid out on his desk, maybe with a bottle of Coke. Secretarial work was a slog, but Carmen was good at her job. When Carlyle complained, it was never about her. It was at her—usually about the staff or his own family. She kept her boss on a schedule, kept him focused, and, if she wasn’t being modest, kept the Triumph Comics machinery humming. She invoiced talent for work, she made sure artists had script pages to draw, and she coordinated staff time off and the holiday party.
