Super powered: with his newest play, the gifted Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa works emotional territory all his own--painful gay romance, the strain of success, and a lasting love of comics.

The marquee at the Manhattan Theatre Club reads BASED ON A TOTALLY TRUE STORY in bold comicbook lettering. Written by Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa, this new play is about a comic-book writer-playwright-screenwriter, his struggles with newfound success, and the ensuing tension it creates between him and his boyfriend.

You may already know Aguirre-Sacasa as a writer of Marvel's Fantastic Four comics--a pursuit that wouldn't ordinarily mesh with off Broadway. How did comics and theater come together? "Professionally speaking, the plays came first," explains Aguirre-Sacasa, who studied drama at Yale and who's won critical praise with such plays as Golden Age and Say You Love Satan.

The stuff of his dramas reflects the comics he devoured as a child. "A lot of the characters in my plays are either comic-book fans or comic-book characters, or they're based on them," Aguirre-Sacasa points out. "So one day Marvel, scouting for writers from different disciplines, read some of my plays that had gotten produced and said, 'Hey, do you want to write comic books?'"

Next question: Which came first, being a comic-book geek or being gay? Aguirre-Sacasa claims no one's ever asked him before. "Judging from pictures I see of myself as a little kid, in Spider-Man pajamas or with a Batman action figure in my hand, I would say I was probably a comic-book geek before I knew anything about being gay or straight," he says. "I certainly loved superheroes before I knew I was gay or even admitted it to myself."

These days Aguirre-Sacasa mines all his preoccupations for his work. The conflicts that occur in his comic books resemble the ones in his plays, which often mirror the ones in his own life. Like Ethan Keene, the comic book writer in Based on a Totally True Story, Aguirre-Sacasa is writing a horror film for Warner Bros. But in Ethan's case, success is wreaking havoc with romance. Apparently not so for his creator. "I am dating someone, yes. And it's going very well," Aguirre-Sacasa confesses. "And this play's not about him, thankfully."

Goldberg writes for the New York Daily News.