Who is Cat? She'd tell you she's nobody special, that she's just like you. Just an average, Irish-American girl in her early twenties; a cop's daughter, studying in the big city. Sure, she did OK at sports, she's always got along with people pretty well, she's happy enough with how she looks.
She'd tell you that the city's special, not her: Gloria City, with its vibrant little communities, its bright lights, grand architecture and Broadway shows. And most of all, its larger-than-life personalities. Gloria has a cast of celebrity superheroes, from corporate boss The Major to the shadowy Misper, from independent operator Sekhmet to the self-appointed armoured vigilante, Urbanite. Gloria is a theater where these big figures fight, posture, pose and self-promote. And if you're not in a costume and a mask, you're just little people.
All her life, Cat's been taught to be little, learned to keep herself small, tried to avoid attention. Don't be too full of yourself. Don't show off. And most of all, don't let people know how smart you are, because they don't like it.
But Cat really is someone special. Cat is the smartest person in Gloria City. She remembers everything she reads; she knows how everything connects. And she's getting tired of pretending, of hiding, of acting dumb to save other people's feelings.
And if they won't take her seriously as Catherine Abigail Daniels, the student and cop's kid, maybe they'll take her seriously in costume.
ABOUT MY SO-CALLED SECRET IDENTITY
My So-Called Secret Identity is what happened when internationally-acclaimed Batman scholar and popular culture expert, Dr Will Brooker, decided to stop criticising mainstream comics for their representation of women, and show how it could be done differently; how it could be done better.
Working with professional illustrator Susan Shore and PhD in superhero art, Dr Sarah Zaidan, Brooker assembled a team to build a new universe, close enough to the familiar capes-and-cowls mythos to offer critical comment, but distinct enough to strike out in a whole new direction and offer a story unlike any other superhero title.
The costume designs and character sketches for My So-Called Secret Identity were created by established names and fan favourites, from Lea Hernandez to Hanie Mohd. These very different artists offered very different takes on the characters and their styles, but they had one thing in common. In a deliberate reversal of mainstream industry conventions, almost all the creative team behind MSCSI are female.
