Oline Cogdill

segura_alex
Alex Segura, left, is a novelist, comic book writer, musician, and journalist whose debuted with Silent City, set in Miami.

Silent City revolves around Pete Fernandez who squandered his once promising career as an investigative sports reporter. Since his return to Miami following the death of his police detective father, Pete spends most of his time drunk, routinely coming to work late and making serious mistakes in his job on the Miami Times’ sports desk. A coworker’s request to find his estranged daughter who has vanished lulls Pete out of his angst.

Here’s what Segura has to say about his career.

Q: Currently, you edit the Archie superhero graphic novels and have written the Archie Meets KISS series. How does your background in graphic novels infuse your crime fiction?
A:
Comics are very visual—and the really good ones are cinematic and almost fluid in how they present a story. You don’t feel like you’re looking at static images. So, if there was any influence, it was about being concise with words but also clear about the visuals and action. I wanted the prose to be easy to follow and effective and a little rough. The latter was probably more because I was new at it than any grand design. I always envision what I write like a movie—what’s the opening scene? How do we cut from one scene to another? Comics are about merging the visual with the mental, and that's what I tried to bring to the book: a prose story you could see in your mind without much prodding or over-explaining. Whether I succeeded or not is up to the reader.

Q: How different is it in writing crime fiction as opposed to a graphic novel?
A:
Comics are much more collaborative. You have a writer, an artist—sometimes more than one—a letterer and a colorist. You have to relay your vision to one person and then, like a game of telephone, it continues down the line. Novels are very solitary. You still have people giving input, but it’s usually an editor or agent and it’s usually after you’ve spent a long time writing a draft. It’s much lonelier and less about brainstorming with someone else. It’s more about creating and fine-tuning on your own and then turning it over to someone to give you notes on a completed thing. Whereas comics are about creating parts and leaving other spaces open for others to chime in. It’s more musical, like jamming. Comics—at least writing them—are more akin to putting a puzzle together: I need to fill 20 pages with X amount of action and I have this many panels to play with on a given page. Novels are more free-form, which is great and also hugely intimidating.

Q: Had you considered making Silent City a graphic novel?
A:
The thought had crossed my mind. But part of me wants to keep the two worlds separate for now. Most of my comic writing has been with Archie—Archie Meets KISS, a few one-offs and I have a few more in the pipeline—which is pretty light, humorous fare. My novels are crime books—gritty, noir, violent, not PG. I don’t want to say never—because who knows, the opportunity may arise—but for now I’d like to keep my crime writing in the prose world and stretch my genre muscles in comics if I can.

That being said, I love me some crime comics. Stuff like 100 Bullets by Brian Azzarello and Eduardo Risso, Fatale by Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips and Stray Bullets by David Lapham inform all of my writing. That's just the tip of the iceberg, too.

seguraalex_silentcity
Q: You also have a background in journalism and started as a reporter. Obviously this played a big part in Silent City.
A:
It did. I think that, plus the setting and a lot of things about Pete, the protagonist, goes back to just writing what I knew at the time. Not because I felt that was a rule, but because I was comfortable doing that. And I also wanted to show a realistic version of Miami and create a person I could see myself hanging out with or knowing back home.

The journalism stuff came naturally because I’d worked as an editor and interned as a reporter in Miami [and in] South Florida. I knew that world and tried to be honest about it. Pete is at a low point in his life, too, so everything is terrible in his eyes. Even though, from an outside perspective, he has a decent job and seems to have friends who care for him. But that’s the case with anyone going through a dark time.

Q: Newspapers have changed a lot since you were a reporter, what kind of research did you do to make your scenes in the newsroom so authentic?
A:
I have a lot of friends still in the business. I did the first draft based off my own memories and ran them by some beta readers. My editor at Codorus is still in journalism to some degree, and he vetted a lot of it. His validation was really important, because I wanted real journalists—not someone who dabbled for a few years and went on to something else—to read the book and not get jammed up by incorrect details or tonal errors. So, when he and a few others read it and agreed the journalistic descriptions were accurate, I was happy.

Q: While you are a Miami native, it has been a long time since you lived in the Magic City. Why set your novel in South Florida?
A:
I’ve lived in New York for almost a decade, but Miami still feels like home. I’m not sure that’ll ever go away. And when I first started writing Silent City, I felt completely overwhelmed by New York. I had no sense of the personality or history of the city and felt wholly unprepared to write about it. That’s faded somewhat since then, so I’d feel more comfortable doing a N.Y. book now. I’ve toyed with the idea of bringing Pete to N.Y., but nothing beyond idle thoughts.

Also, a big reason for setting it in Miami was because I hadn’t really read a Miami mystery that spoke to me—aside from Vicki Hendricks’ amazing Miami Purity. Which isn’t to discredit people who have written about Miami or South Florida. I’m sure there are great books that I haven’t read yet. But I wanted to write a story about my hometown as I remembered it, with the kind of characters that I would recognize and that others would, too, or at least find compelling enough to hang out for a while.

Q: What next?
A:
I’m revising my second novel, Down the Darkest Street. Once that’s locked in, we can figure out when it’ll hit shelves. I’m halfway through a third Pete novel, too, which I’ll shoot to finish once the second one is off. I’m writing some more comics--a few issues of the main ARCHIE title. I also have a short sci-fi story in the upcoming anthology Apollo's Daughters, edited by Bryan Young (Silence in the Library Publishing), and a horror comic short in another upcoming anthology. Those last two are with a co-writer I’ve been friends with for a long time. I also have another Pete short story working its way out of my brain. All tricky to execute with a day job, but so far, so good.

alex-segura-on-silent-city-comics
3657