More Than Comics (2 page)

“Maybe.” The volunteers capped off the line and let us pass, and we chased after Miguel down the long hall. “So when
do
you get nervous?”

Hector glanced over at me. His mouth opened, but then he looked away and scowled.

“Oh no,” I said, punching him lightly on the arm. “Now you have to tell me.”

His eyes dropped to the spot I’d touched him, still frowning. “I was nervous today, but not because of the panel.” He raised those dark eyes to meet mine again. “Because I was meeting you.”

“Really?” Hearing that made me feel a lot better. All those butterflies in my stomach vanished. “I was nervous, too.”

“Yeah?”

I laughed. “Well, you
are
a famous rock star now.”

“Not true. And you knew me long before all that.”

I nudged him with my shoulder. “Then I guess neither of us had anything to be nervous about.”

He gave me a rare smile, making him even more handsome. “No. I guess not.”

CHAPTER TWO
HECTOR

T
ara kept touching me. Normally I didn’t like people touching me, but when she did it I wanted more. Only problem was it made it hard to focus on anything but her.

She was even hotter in person, in dark jeans and a tight
Firefly
t-shirt that showed off her large breasts, curvy hips, and delicious ass. Soft and feminine, yet without being so small I thought I’d crush her. With a body like that it was hard not to stare, but the rest of her was fucking amazing, too.

Her long, golden hair fell around her shoulders and I wanted to see if it felt as silky as it looked. But the thing that rendered me completely helpless was the way her blue eyes lit up when she smiled. No, not just blue, but sapphire. Cobalt. The color I’d use to paint a dark sky.

And the sound of her laugh—damn, I wanted to do whatever I could to hear it again. It was a reminder that she was warm and friendly and everything I was not. I was a dark cloud and she was the ray of sunshine that somehow managed to break through.

Maybe that’s why I’d been in love with her for as long as I could remember.

“Here’s the room,” Miguel said, stopping in front of an open door with a long line next to it. A quick glance inside showed that the room was completely packed, too. It wasn’t a huge one, especially compared to some of the others we’d passed, but there were a few hundred people inside at least.

“Are all those people here for us?” I asked.

“Yep. Great turnout, huh? I asked them to switch us to a larger room, but they couldn’t do it.”

“Oh shit.” I knew our graphic novel had been doing pretty well, especially after my band was on
The Sound
, but I had no idea so many people would come to hear us talk about it. I thought we’d get maybe ten people, tops.

I hadn’t been lying to Tara—I wasn’t nervous before, but now that I saw the massive crowd I realized I wasn’t prepared for any of this. Fuck, what if people asked me questions?

I should have asked Jared for advice or something. As lead singer for our band, he’d handled all the interviews and publicity stuff when we’d been on
The Sound
. At first it had pissed me off when he’d completely hogged the camera and made it seem like the band was all about him, but eventually I’d realized it was better that way. He was good at that shit and the rest of us hated it. And it’s not like I wanted to be in the spotlight either. That’s why I was a drummer and not a guitarist. Well, that and because beating the shit out of drums was way more fun.

“Wow, this is so overwhelming,” Tara said. Her gaze swept across the crowd of people waiting for us, taking it all in—but I only had eyes for her. She turned to me, catching me staring, but I couldn’t look away. I was held hostage by her flushed cheeks and kissable lips.

I’d memorized her face and heard her voice a thousand times, but seeing her up close, in real life, was different. All those feelings I’d tried to bury came rushing back to the surface and made it hard for me to breathe. I’d hoped meeting her would make me get over my stupid crush, but instead it had only gotten worse. The real Tara was so much better than even my best fantasy of her.

Christie, the moderator for our panel, arrived and introduced herself to us. She ran a comics site focused on diversity and was about the same age as Tara and me, with long black hair streaked with pink and a little stud in her nose.

We shook hands and she grinned at us. “I’m so excited for this panel. I begged them to let me moderate it cause I’m a huge fan of
Misfit Squad
. I’m dying for the next one to come out!”

“I remember the feature you did on it,” Tara said. “We’re so grateful for your support.”

We walked into the room together and the crowd hushed. Christie, Tara, and I each took a seat at a table on a raised platform in front of a wall plastered with the Comic-Con logo. Name placards were placed in front of us, each of which had something on the back about watching our language because there were members of the audience under eighteen.

“They’re talking to you here,” Tara said, pointing at the warning.

I gave her my best innocent look. “Hey, I can be good.”

“Uh huh.” She scanned the room again, taking it all in with wide eyes. “I still can’t believe we’re on a panel at Comic-Con. This has been my dream forever and now it’s real. It’s all happening!”

Damn, she was so beautiful it was almost hard to look at her. I loved seeing her this happy and watching all her hard work pay off. “
You
made this happen.”

Her smile got even bigger, bathing me in its glow. “We made it happen together.”

“Nah, all I did was draw a few things.”

“Oh, stop being so modest,” she said, swatting at my arm. More touching. Yes, please.

I wasn’t good with words—I left that to her and to Jared—but I had the strongest urge to pull out my sketchbook and draw the way she’d looked when we’d first seen each other in person, to capture her eyes meeting mine and her face brightening when she recognized me. I never wanted to forget the way she’d looked in that moment. For a brief second I’d thought it possible she could love me back.

And then it was over.

She’d never once hinted that she wanted to be more than friends, and I knew she never would—she’d been dating Andy for the past year and she was about to start a job in New York. Meeting in person wouldn’t change anything between us.

Which is why she could never know how I felt about her.

Miguel propped up the first book of
Misfit Squad
on the table between us, gave us a thumbs up, and disappeared into the back of the room.

“Welcome to the
Misfit Squad
panel,” our moderator said, into her mic. “I’m Christie Yamamoto from the
Diversity In Comics
website. This is one of my favorite graphic novels ever, and I’m so happy to be here with the writer, Tara McFadden, and the artist, Hector Fernandez.”

The audience applauded and all the hundreds of faces blurred together, like when I was on stage at a show—except for four familiar ones in the back of the crowd. Jared sat there in a t-shirt with a bunch of classic villains on it like Dracula, Frankenstein, and The Wolfman. His arm was around his girlfriend Maddie, who was also our guitarist. Next to them was his brother Kyle, our keyboardist, along with his girlfriend, Alexis.

I shook my head at them, but a grin slipped through. I’d told them not to come to the panel because if I messed up royally I didn’t want them to see it, but their smiling faces actually made me feel calmer. I’d never admit it out loud, but I was secretly glad they’d ignored me.

Christie held up a copy of the first book and the room quieted down. “
Misfit Squad
is out now and if you haven’t read it yet, it’s about a teenage girl whose power is breaking things. When she’s rejected by her city’s superhero group, she and some others with equally undesirable or ‘useless’ powers form their own group instead. Together they have to learn to control their powers and resist turning into the villains people
think
they are, while saving the city from the so-called superheroes, who turn out to be the real villains.”

She launched into our bios next, explaining how Tara had worked on different comics at Black Hat before writing
Misfit Squad
. It was pretty impressive that she’d done so much already, considering she’d just graduated with her English degree a month ago.

Next Christie described how I’d also worked on various comics while in art school and mentioned I was the drummer for Villain Complex, which had come in second on the reality TV show 
The Sound
a week earlier. That got lots of cheers and I ducked my head a little, wishing I hadn’t worn my Villain Complex hat. I hoped people in the audience were actually fans of
Misfit Squad
and not just the band, especially for Tara’s sake.

“Tara, let’s start with you,” Christie said. “Where did you get the idea for
Misfit Squad
?”

Tara gave me a wide-eyed look, but leaned into the mic and started speaking. “I always loved comics, but had a hard time relating to them because the heroes in them were so much cooler than me.” That got a little laugh from the audience. “One day I joked to a friend that if I was a superhero my power would be something no one would want, like breaking things. Then I started thinking about how that could actually be a pretty cool power, if you could learn to control it…and began coming up with other powers that at first seemed stupid or useless, but weren’t. I pitched it to the guys at Black Hat and they loved the idea, and that’s how
Misfit Squad
all began.”

“Very cool,” Christie said. “I think one reason
Misfit Squad
has such a huge following already is because it’s a true underdog story. So many people relate to your characters and how they’re outcasts, both among normal people and other superheroes, until they find each other and start their own group and become almost a family. Was that something you wanted to write about specifically?”

Tara relaxed a little, smiling at Christie. “That’s definitely one thing I wanted to emphasize because I think if you’re a little weird growing up, or something of an outcast, like I imagine all of us here are.…” That got another chuckle from the audience. “Then you never
really
feel comfortable around most people. Especially your family, who probably never seemed to understand you. But as you grow up you find others like yourself, people who support you, embrace your weirdness, and love you for who you are—and they become your new family.” She looked at me with this last line, and my heart constricted in my chest. She was killing me here.

“Comic-Con is definitely one big, crazy family,” Christie said, with a laugh. “Hector, how did you become involved in the project?”

Shit, that question was for me. I focused on my band’s faces in the audience—my own second family—and tried to relax. “After Tara wrote the script for the first book she put out feelers all over the Internet, in artist forums and places like that, looking for someone who might be interested in working on it. She had a random page’s script…I think it was page 33 or something?”

I looked at her to confirm, and she laughed. “I don’t think that page even exists in the final version. It got cut.”

“Oh yeah, I forgot about that. Anyway, it was a good way in, with some fun action and dialogue. I loved the premise and the characters immediately from that short bit of script and knew I had to draw it. I put together a full page panel and submitted it.” I shrugged. “I guess she liked it, because she chose me.”

“There were a lot of good entries, but I knew Hector was the one the moment I saw his art. It was just so perfect for what I had in mind.”

“The artwork is truly remarkable,” Christie said. “It really brings the story to life. But tell me about your working relationship. I heard the two of you had never met in person until now. Is that true?”

“That’s true,” Tara said. “I live in Boston and Hector lives in Los Angeles, so we did all our work together online, through video chats and email, stuff like that. But we talk just about every day, so I feel like we’ve been friends forever.”

“What was it like working with each other?”

“Tara’s great to work with,” I said. “She has a strong vision for her series but is also open to any suggestions I have.”

“And Hector has some brilliant ideas, too. The books all changed a lot—for the better—thanks to his input. They became a true collaboration between the two of us. They’re not just my books, but
our
books.”

Tara gave me that brilliant smile again and I wanted to kiss her so bad. It meant a lot to me that she thought that about
Misfit Squad
’cause I loved those books almost as much as I loved her. I’d put a lot of blood, sweat, and tears into them, and it was easily my best work. I was proud of what we’d created together.

“Another thing I love about
Misfit Squad
is how diverse it is,” Christie continued. “There are characters of all different races, queer characters, even overweight and disabled characters. You don’t see those too often in comics.”

“That was really important to both of us.” Tara glanced at me and I nodded. “We wanted to tell a story that had characters who weren’t typical superheroes, and that included some who weren’t white or straight or didn’t have ideal bodies.”

I leaned in to the mic and added, “And we wanted to make sure lots of different people could read the book and see themselves in it. That’s something I never had when I was growing up and reading comics as a Mexican kid.”

“Great point,” Christie said.

Over the next few minutes she continued to ask us about the books and what was next for the series, before opening the panel to questions from the audience. In the middle of the room dozens of people scrambled to get in line in front of a microphone. Who knew so many people would have questions for us?

One of the Comic-Con volunteers waved a guy in a Green Lantern t-shirt to the mic. “Hey,” he said. “Big fan of both
Misfit Squad
and Villain Complex. My question is for Hector. How do you balance being both a successful comic book artist and a drummer in a popular band? Is there one you consider your focus and the other your hobby, or are they both equal to you?”