Month: August 2026

I’m the writer of “Nandi and the Castle in the Sea”. This is a fantasy steampunk graphic novel.

I wrote it as a movie script. The initial idea was to sell it to a movie studio. I realized if you just have a script, they’re going to put it on their pile of a thousand other scripts and ever look at it again.

For now, my focus is getting it into as many hands as possible, which is why I lowered my price point. Right now, exposure is my primary goal. More than just making my money back for it.

I’ve done a convention almost every week this year. Which is not the norm. I think a lot of people do a lot less. You can’t find it weekly in the tri state alone.

But if you’re willing to expand a little bit, you can pretty much find it every week. I’m trying to go all in on conventions and online sales.

If you’re an indie like me you know this is how you’re going to get most of your sales. It’s how you’re gonna meet most of the people in the industry that you meet.

Regardless of your sales, the connections you make in these places, if you’re willing to be social, are huge.

I’ve been loving comic books since forever. I was a big fan of Spider-Man as a kid. I’m a Marvel DC. I don’t pick. The perfect thing as a strategy as a vendor is always be prepared and don’t be so upset when you don’t make the sale.

Be humble. You know, listen to criticism. Even if you don’t fully understand it or agree with it, that will help you grow. I think the
goal is that you learn from the experience you get people to know who you are.

Get people to understand who you are and more importantly as the years progress people will start seeing you more and more and then that’s when you’ll start seeing things happen.

Just talking. Really that’s probably the number one thing, telling a story they’re really buying you they’re not buying the art.

The art is the secondary part but if they hear a story they understand who you are they know that you’re real, then they’re more inclined to buy something from you because now I want to support this guy who I
feel is a good person.

Click Below to Watch This Video Mini Podcast

Watch above to see Video Mini Podcast featuring J.C.

JC on Founding Bronx Anime and Comic Expo:

It started as a hobby. I started selling and then I’m like, oh, I really enjoy selling comic books. I do a little show here and there myself, and I like it because it’s a hobby that pays for itself.

So that’s how I started. And like, I love comic books, so I always will buy comic books no matter what I do. I will always buy comics.

Since I was a vendor myself, I knew a lot of friends. We started in the banquet hall with twenty five tables and now we’re up to almost one hundred tables.

So it’s, it got bigger, but bigger means more work.

We’re like one big family. Everybody. Everybody helps one way or the other because they want to see this goal and keep going in the right direction. And I’m very lucky that way. I actually met these people and they show me their respect and support. I’m very lucky.

How Mickey Mouse Came to Be as Told by Writer Jeff Ryan in an approximately 1 Minute Filmisode from TAFT Club Video Mini Podcast

Here is how writer Jeff Ryan puts it:

“I love the interconnectedness between the characters and the creators behind them, because their real life bleeds into the characters in ways that you would never imagine. And the characters lives in turn reflect their creators. Mickey Mouse, for instance, there’s two Mickey’s. There’s one who’s citizen Mickey who’s a good public citizen. And then there’s the swashbuckler, and the swashbuckler is what the mild mannered co-creator of Mickey Mouse always wanted to be, and who he saw in his best friend Walt Disney and the Public Citizen was who Walt Disney couldn’t ever be but always saw in his best friend Ub Iwerks. Mickey Mouse is a child of two fathers, and he represents the best parts of both of them.”

The mission of TAFT Club (TAFT is the acronym for True Art For Truth) is creative collaborating since 1982 and has a focus on fostering collaborations and partnership between creative performing artists and businesses in any industry building visibility for the arts and its importance in the world.

In this approximately one minute installment of “TAFT Club Video Mini Podcast” writer Jeff Ryan shares a story of character creation that emphasizes the power of drawing from real human relationships rather than inventing personalities in isolation.

It suggests that memorable fictional characters often emerge when creators blend the qualities, aspirations, and limitations of real people into a single figure.

According to this account, Mickey Mouse was not simply the product of one creator’s imagination but the result of two complementary personalities.

One version of Mickey—the responsible, civic-minded “Citizen Mickey”—embodied qualities admired by Walt Disney’s collaborator of Mickey Mouse Ub Iwerks.

Ub Iwerks (1901–1971) was an American animator, cartoonist, and animation pioneer whose artistic skill and technical innovation played a major role in the early success of Disney animation.

Contradictions create realism. A character who can be both a responsible citizen and a fearless adventurer mirrors the complexity of real people, making the character more believable and enduring.