Mary Sue

Cassie spends most of her online time writing vampire fanfiction for her favorite show. Her stories star a glamorous original character she invented herself, and she keeps the whole habit secret.

Then the secret gets out at school. The embarrassment is bad enough, but it turns strange fast: the character Cassie wrote walks out of the page and into her actual life.

Cassie and her friend have to deal with the fallout, which is both social and supernatural. Their trouble leads them into "Mary Sue World", an odd space built from the archetype that fanfiction writers love to mock. There they meet the original Mary Sue herself.

This is a comic-format miniseries, written by Meghan Fitzmartin and illustrated by Lisa Sterle. The tone is warm and funny, and the story is a coming-of-age tale about fandom rather than a romance. The fantasy premise is a way into the stigma around self-insert characters and the friendships that online creative communities can produce.

The question running through it is what happens to a writer when her private creation is loose in her real life, and who stands beside her while she sorts it out.