For 14 years, 12 as manager, Sabrina “Sabs” Cooper has worked at Pegasus Books, uniting customers with the perfect comic, game or book at the longstanding store in downtown Bend.

Recently, a new comic written by Cooper, 31, hit the shop’s colorful shelves. Cooper was among the winners — four writers and four artists — of comic book publisher Mad Cave’s 2021 Talent Search, which granted winning writers and artists an opportunity to tell portions of the limited “Tales from Nottingham” series, a spin-off of the comic “Nottingham” offering a noir retelling of the Robin Hood story. Two volumes of “Nottingham” have already been published, with a third to follow after the six-issue “Tales from Nottingham” has had its run.

“It’s exciting. It’s a learning experience,” said Cooper, who’s more used to working with comic distributors than comic book printers.

Mad Cave Talent Search

Details change from year to year, but winners of Mad Cave’s annual talent searches are always chosen to write a piece of published work, according to Cooper.

“The series ‘Nottingham’ is a really big hit that they have — David Hazan and Shane Connery Volk are the creators of that,” she said. “It’s still set in the Medieval era, but it’s very much like a procedural crime drama that follows the Sheriff of Nottingham.”

“The winners all got to do sort of side stories. Each issue is its own self-contained story, so even though it’s the number three, it has its own beginning, middle and end,” Cooper said.

In the case of the third issue, her story concentrates on Maid Marian.

“(I) got to fill in some of her backstory and how she gets involved at the beginning of the story,” Cooper said. “It was really interesting — and they put a lot of trust in me — to go and kind of flesh out what her motivations are for what they’re still doing in the series.”

Variant cover

The issue dropped in late April, but Pegasus also arranged to have printed 150 copies of the comic boasting a retailer-exclusive alternative cover, which arrived at the shop earlier this week. According to Pegasus owner Duncan McGeary, during the COVID-19 pandemic, comic book collecting came back strong, and it has not let up since. The last few years have also seen the rise of alternative “variant” covers made exclusively for single shops, according to McGeary. “Nottingham” co-creator Volk drew the exclusive cover for the shop.

The standard edition of the comic is $4, but the exclusive cover, available only for fans, is five times that.

“This slightly fancier version will only be available at Pegasus Books, one shop, one location, in Bend, Oregon, and nowhere else,” Cooper said. “It won’t be online, and we won’t be shipping them, as we do not do any online sales or delivery. So they’ll be a bit pricier at $20, because we’ve paid a premium to have them specially printed. Just for the local fans.”

Cooper’s writing

The Summit High alum is a longtime writer and has written for sites including GeeksOUT. She also co-created the well-known comic book “Finger Guns” from Vault Comics with fellow local writer Justin Richards, and has had short stories published in anthologies including “Dead Beats: A Musical Horror Anthology.”

“It remains to be seen if I’ll work with Mad Cave again in the future. I sure hope so,” Cooper said. “Many contest winners in the past have gone on to do their own series. But this was just kind of them letting all of us winners get our names put on something and play around in an established kind of toy box.”

Having in hand the comic book that bears her name and story feels great, she said.

“Sometimes in the process of writing something you just stare at it so long you lose all objectivity, and I honestly wasn’t sure if it was any good. But once I got to see how it all came together, with the art and colors and lettering and overall book design, that’s when I knew it all worked. And that’s when I felt like I could really be proud and excited about it.”