More Than Comics Read Free

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,”