BW Media Spotlight

S.A. Rivera, the pen name for YouTube commentator Literature Devil, has released another graphic novel, though this time it’s not connected to his usual Doctor Alpha series. Instead of an ultraviolent story about a supervillain in a world of crap superheroes, he’s going for the supernatural crime thriller with Lady Midnight: Devils Dwell In Silent Springs. It’s not my genre necessarily, but seeing the uphill battle he’s had putting this out and how dedicated he is to it, I felt compelled to give the guy I wake up to five days a week a chance to really find his audience and get this Indiegogo funded. People seem to like his Doctor Alpha books, while his Lady Midnight tale is something he’s worked on during that. He focused on this in between book two and three, a two-part flashback story about how Alpha ended up in prison in the first book.

What challenges has he had? One place he tried to promote it suffered from the current “girlboss” problem. Girlboss characters have ruined heroines, so too many people assume every female protagonist in a crime or action movie gets the stigma of seemingly every modern female antagonist in most of the Hollywood mindset productions. Given LD’s various commentaries against girlbosses it seems highly unlikely that he would write such a character.

The other is possibly why a few of you came here: a prose novel by author Cassandra Clare by the same name, part of her “Dark Artifices” series. I know when I went looking for the Kickstarter, which turned out to already be my mistake as he’s using Indiegogo, most of what I saw was Claire’s series. My guess is that she’s unintentionally getting all his search results right now. The two properties have nothing in common save the name and being an urban fantasy story. Rivera is forming his own universe, with its own magic system, and is not part of Clare’s universe, nor is he pretending to be. I don’t know for sure if this is part of the problem he’s having but it’s worth noting as a possibility.

So, knowing there’s diversity in my audience for story types and wanting to see a project he’s so passionate about make it, I thought I’d use my dinky little platform to help. So what’s the story about?

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