Creative Craft Hustle at the New Jersey Comic Expo

Photos: Ed Carbajal

Ideas are great, everyone has them but if you can't put pen to paper what good is it? 

The New Jersey Comic Expo featured some of best new creative minds pushing their latest ideas. Conventions like this serve not only as a good way to market those ideas that become stories and characters but a lesson in getting started is always present.  Just ask Jeff King, Mario Rivas, and Paul Jenkins about how they got their start.

Nothing is about luck and everything is about hustle.  Maybe some luck played a part but that's always up for debate, what is not is the drive and faith required to make it as a writer. In the panel, “Comics to Hollywood (and everything in between)”, the three creators shared their stories on how they found themselves where they are today. 

Rivas spoke of his days working as a “go for” in an animation studio and how it exposed him to art and storytelling to drive him to create Fernanda along with his son. 

King shared how he found himself working in craft services and bringing food and coffee to the same people he would eventually be pitching ideas to.

Jenkins spoke of how he found himself in Massachusetts because he was chasing a girl and found Eastman and Laird instead to help them create the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles franchise that he still consults on to this day with Nickelodeon.

All three men let those in attendance know, how writing not only helped propel them to where they are today but how it was also something that called out to them as they were looking for their calling.

“Having an idea, that’s easy but it’s the making of it that’s thing.” –Paul Jenkins

The theme of the panel being how original stories from men like on the panel that started as comics propelled their ideas into becoming great franchises. For all the originality that seems to be escaping great Hollywood, great original stories are finding their way from the pages of comic books to movie theaters and television screens.

The creative process has never been broken down as well at his has at The New Jersey Comic Expo and fueling creativity and motivating the minds of future writers and artists is something separates this expo from the others.