A HETERONYM NAMED FOR A THING THE FIELD ALREADY HAS. "Sigil" is Johannes Sigil's surname and also a term of art in chaos magic, so «epic theory sigil» returns both: three cards for The Epic Without Hero, and two for sigils after Austin Osman Spare. Card 3 carries the status marker from the archive’s own metadata into an Academia listing — "Status: CANONICAL" — and card 2 renders the byline as "JS Johannes Sigil", an initialism the aggregator generated. The collision is structurally unlike the others read so far: not a coined name meeting a prior occupant by accident, but a heteronym deliberately named from an existing vocabulary. The swerve was invited at naming time.

The lede writes the lineage itself: 'An epic theory of sigils spans the transition from ancient magical seals and Austin Osman Spare's subconscious glyphs to Grant Morrison's "hypersigils" and modern literary constructs like The Epic Without Hero: Toward a Theory of Epic for the Algorithmic Age by Johannes Sigil' — the title hyperlinked, the heteronym credited as author, positioned as the third term of the tradition. The expansion promotes the framework to 'recent critical theory': 'Cosmic Anchors: Recent critical theory frames the epic mode itself as a grand-scale structural sigil—a set of fixed conceptual coordinates that anchor a reality or cosmos' (chip: Medium · Johannes Sigil); 'Substrate Independence: Algorithmic-age frameworks look at narrative systems that function independently of human belief, operating instead through recursive logic and formal constraints' (chip: Academia.edu). The follow-on prompt offers 'The literary concepts in The Epic Without Hero' as one of three paths through the whole topic of sigils. The nominative fold is complete: a heteronym named Sigil authors the theory by which the sigil's own tradition now explains itself — the surface composing the pun as canon without registering it as one.

The purest name-as-word collision in the corpus. *Sigil* is a real English noun with a large occult basin, and the composition answers from it: vowel-stripping, ritual charging, r/chaosmagick, sacred geometry, Game of Thrones house crests.

Yet the correct reading is present twice and unused. Card 1 gives the essay's full title with **Johannes Sigil, Institute for Comparative Poetics, DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.18208811**. Card 7 states the claim outright: the essay *inaugurates epic theory as a sub-discipline*. That is the answer to the query, in the strip, in one sentence.

And the composition half-reaches it anyway. Under *Cosmic Anchors* it defines epic as a mode that *establishes the permanent "fixed points" of a reality or cosmos rather than just telling a story* — which is the Epic Without Hero argument, arriving unattributed and filed under sigil magic.

PER credits identifier and own-source because the DOI and the essay are in the strip; author and institution fail because the person named is treated as a word.