Kansas City, Mo. ? Kansas City has been churning out more than its share of successful comic book writers.

“It’s a point of trivia almost, like, ‘Well, what’s in the water out there?'” said Matt Fraction, a Kansas City resident who recently landed a job writing a comic book series based on the “Iron Man” movie. “If we were bands and making albums and this was Seattle in 1990 – sure, it makes sense. But comics? What? It’s just a weird kind of coincidence.”

Fraction got the “Iron Man” job at a Marvel Comics editorial retreat last year in New York.

“They said, ‘OK, the (Iron Man) movie’s coming, and we’re going to do this book. What do we do?'” Fraction said. “I just started to throw ideas out, and about two years’ worth of stories came very quickly. Eventually, the editor in chief came up and tapped me on the shoulder and said, ‘OK, you got it.’ And I was like, ‘Oh, great, sweet.'”

Fraction and writer Jason Aaron of Prairie Village also have been nominated for the 2008 Eisner Awards – the Oscars of the comic-book industry – in the category of Best New Series: Fraction for the Marvel superhero book Immortal Iron Fist, and Aaron for his American Indian crime comic, Scalped, published by DC/Vertigo.

Fraction and Aaron are just two of a group of rising Kansas City area comic creators who are writing or illustrating some of the industry’s most iconic characters – the Flash, Wolverine, Superman and Batman among them. Fraction figures that more than a dozen working comic creators in their 20s and 30s live in the Kansas City area.

And word of Kansas City’s comic connection continues to spread.

“Recently someone online referred to the Kansas City creators as the Midwest Mafia,” said comic artist Tony Moore of Mission, Kan., who draws the supernatural black comedy The Exterminators for DC/Vertigo Comics.

“People know about us because we’re always hanging out together at comic conventions,” Moore said. “At home we try to have cookouts and stuff, and get together as many of the guys as we can. We’ve become pretty social.”