Kat Farrell is a reporter for New York’s Daily Bugle, but she’s tired of her beat covering the Capes. Kat declares that she didn’t graduate from Notre Dame “to chase around men — make that boys — in tights.”
If that scenario doesn’t make sense to you, it’s time to visit a comic book store and reclaim your inner love for Spider-Man. Kat is the narrator of Deadline, a four-issue Marvel Comics miniseries written by Bill Rosemann, a 1993 Notre Dame graduate, and illustrated by Guy Davis. In the Marvel Comics world, Capes are what reporters call the superheroes — and the supervillains — who fill the skies of New York. Kat thinks their costumes are ridiculous and their actions juvenile, and she’s fishing for a big story so she can be promoted to covering such real heroes as police officers and firefighters.
Rosemann, Marvel’s marketing communications manager, wrote Deadline as a freelance project. “I started with a protagonist that I hoped everyone could relate to,” he says. Readers don’t have to know the “backstories” about the superheroes zooming about New York to follow the comic. “Think of it like the recent Spider-Man movie,” he comments. “While amazing things happen in the story, it really focuses on the relationships between empathetic, human characters.”
Rosemann and his wife, Alice Farrell, live in Bronxville, New York.
Notre Dame Magazine, summer 2002