The mysterious, self-published Secret Admirer shows and tells

LOW OVERHEAD: David Commins lays out an issue of his free publication in his West Philly house.
Neal Santos

Last April, stacks of a sky-blue publication began appearing in cafes and bars around the city. On the surface, The Secret Admirer seems like a relatively conventional collection of brain teasers: There’s a crossword, trivia, “wacky facts” and logic puzzles. But read closer and you encounter smart, irreverent voices and unexpected bolts of eccentricity, like menstrual-themed haikus, koan-like snippets of overheard conversations and visceral flash fiction.

The masthead of the free weekly lists five pseudonymous contributors — David Otter, Lyra Foxx, Leon Wolffe, Miranda Stoat, Wendy Otter — but The Secret Admirer, which bills itself as a “champion of the bored and lonely,” is pretty much the work of one man.

A 31-year-old writer who’s contributed to more established free weeklies, David Commins started The Secret Admirer in February 2010 in the counter-cultural outpost of Athens, Ga., where he ran it for two-and-a-half years.

“I was a little stranger than the other writers usually and I had a lot of my stuff edited in ways that I didn’t like all the time, so I started my own paper to be able to have the creative control that I wanted, and I have it now,” he says.

He left Athens when a Starbucks opened near a cafe he owned and put him out of business. The paper went on hiatus and he traveled around the country in a van until settling in Philadelphia. 

A year after arriving, he resumed publication; when the paper began generating enough ad revenue, he quit his service-industry jobs and devoted himself fully to his passion project, which he thinks has a universal appeal.

“Everybody, even the most normal person you’ll ever meet, has a strange aspect, and I think that that’s the part of any given reader that responds to The Secret Admirer,” says Commins.

On Mondays, he starts working on the new issue shortly after waking up in his West Philly home and dragging himself upstairs to his calamitous office, where every surface is covered with papers, maps, stamps, receipts or illustrations. His meddlesome black cat NoFace likes to saunter into the room and swat at the controlled chaos. By 4 p.m., Commins finishes the layout and moves downstairs.

There, he’ll print 1,800 copies of the issue using a secondhand photocopier. Within view is a Scrabble board with seven bags of extra tiles that he uses to create the crossword puzzle.

The next morning, he loads his touring bike’s front and back racks with papers and delivers to roughly 240 locations. “If I just bust on through it, I can probably do [the route] in five hours,” Commins says. “But normally it takes me seven or eight. I like to sit down, get a sandwich, hang out with people.”

Because he mostly handles everything himself, mistakes and typos are prone to slipping into the paper. But he shrugs it off. “I think people forgive me that because it has that D.I.Y. feel to it, a small-town, wiggly-tooth smile,” he says.

Commins gets help from two contributors: his girlfriend Wendy Gilligan (byline: Wendy Otter), who oversees the Period Pals column, and Marta Sicinska (Miranda Stoat), the reproductive-health advocate behind about 20 Secret Admirer comics.

“I was kind of in a weird place when I got involved with The Admirer,” Sicinska says. “I was working a pretty crappy job that gave me a lot of free time. I felt like I was kind of stagnating, and I wanted to do something with my comics because I’ve been doing comics in my sketchbooks on my own for a few years.”

When she was out to brunch with friends in West Philly, she happened to flip through an issue and noticed a call for comic artists. She had never published her work before, but emailed Commins anyway.

“It was a very weird twist of fate just because that was the avenue I wanted to publish in. It was unpretentious and accessible but interesting and smart,” says Sicinska. Other than being told space constraints, she was given complete creative freedom.

“I can process the world around me through these comics. I think they’re stories that other people would be interested in hearing about and laughing at because a lot of my comics involve me laughing at myself and the stupid things I get myself into,” Sicinska says.

The paper’s other three pseudonyms belong to Commins. “David Otter is me, because I needed to have at least one that’s verifiable,” he says. “I deliver it so I felt like it would be prudent. And it makes everyone else more believable if you give that little tip of the iceberg.”

“Leon is the name of a cat that I lived with in Bloomington, Indiana, with my friend Nick in 2008 when we actually first started coming up with the idea of a publication. And then Lyra is named for Lyra Belacqua from The Golden Compass. She’s one of my favorite protagonists and I always thought, ‘Oh, if I have daughter I’m going to name her Lyra,’ and I never got around to having kids, so I’ll just create a child in my paper.”

When writing certain sections, he’ll adopt one of these personas. “I get into a Lyra mood to make the horoscopes and the advice column. What’s in that section would never be similar to a Leon mood, which is crossword puzzles. For the most part, I like having costumes to put on to write different segments,” he says.

In the fall, Commins plans to launch a monthly 32-page magazine that’s like a grown-up Admirer with reviews, interviews and other in-depth features. Its tentative title is Optimism and Commins hopes his new endeavor becomes profitable, although that’s not really what matters to him.

“I find it very calming. It’s almost medicinal for me to make this paper,” Commins says. “I have trouble holding down jobs. The only time I work really hard is when it’s my own thing.” He pauses. “It’s my best friend, I would say. It’s why I like having the pseudonymous contributors because I feel like writing the paper is hanging out with someone.”

For more info, see philadelphia-secret-admirer.tumblr.com.