A Reason Why I Miss Secret Six

I know this book gets brought up a lot, and to be honest, while I miss the characters terribly, I am happy that we got to end the book on a solid note, the way I had always hoped we would. IGN called our last issue the best single issue of any ongoing that year, so we were really pretty fortunate.

And I’m still getting to work with artist Jim Calafiore on our Kickstarter, Leaving Megalopolis, so I am happy about that.

So I have that same longing feeling I get when I have really got characters in my heart, definitely. But a lot of series don’t get to have the ending they deserve, and that is something I feel we were fortunate with in Secret Six.

However, sometimes I’ll see a page of art, or some fanart, or some cosplay, or I will hear from a reader who really loved it, and it will remind me that there hasn’t really yet been a book to replace what it brought to the DCU and to comics.

It’s not about me, it’s about the cast and the kind of book it was.

I was at GeekGirl Con last weekend, one of my favorite conventions of the year, just a wonderful, energizing time. Seeing all those creative, gorgeous, intelligent women expressing their love for geekstuff makes me so ridiculously happy, it’s hard to explain. I am a relative newcomer to comics writing still, really, but even when I started, conventions were WAY, WAY more male-oriented, some had little room for females at all, let alone non-binary folk. Geek Girl is the opposite of that.

And then this happened and made me miss the book’s presence all over again.

I was just finishing my first panel, on Saturday…it was about Batgirl, and was moderated by the wonderful Kyrax2, the famous, ‘Batgirl of San Diego.’  The panel was very busy, and the crowd was lovely and very kind. Topics we cover a lot here on Tumblr came up, and we had some fun, it was lovely.

Then the panel ended, and as happens pretty often, lots of people came up with things to say that they were too nervous to say during the panel, others came up with books to sign, it was a bit of a crush.

There were several cosplayers who said very nice things, and we were being pushed out the door by volunteers to clear the room for the next panel, of course.

One of the cosplayers was a stunning young woman, very very nervous, dressed as Batgirl in a very cool and sleek modified black Batgirl outfit, very striking. And she finally said that (I hope I have this correctly remembered, it was loud and we were being pushed along) she had read Secret Six, and that she was a queer, poly, stripper with red hair, and that she was amazed there was a book for her, with characters like her in it. It clearly meant a great deal to her, and so it meant a lot to me, as well.

That’s a big reason to miss Secret Six, right there. I can’t think of another book in the mainstream publishers that would have another character like that, I mean, she practically WAS Liana.

It was a lovely moment, but sad, also.  I hope to come up with another book to fill the void left by Secret Six, thematically. I’m working on it!