12 Year Old Comic Book Creator

by Arion Rashad
(Pembroke Pines, Florida, USA)

My son Arion is 12 years old has has authored and illustrated 5 comic books since October 2010. The comic books are called Mii Toons. The characters are based on real people in his life, relatives, friends, classmates, and even bullies. The characters are inspired by Nintendo Wii avatars and his favorite comic book character, Sonic the Hedgehog. The books are targeted toward a young audience and available for purchase through his website, and a comic book store called Tate's Comics in South Florida.

Arion started creating stories for Mii Toons comics about 4-5 years ago. He would basically take printer paper from our home computer and staple them together. Then he would spend hours every day drawing the characters and writing his stories. I thought his books were good enough to share on the internet, so I created a website to display his work. I purchased a tablet device from Best Buy that allowed him to save his drawings in jpeg format, making it easier for me to post them on his site. Eventually, it became his goal to have his books printed just like the ones he saw in comic book stores.

One day, while shopping at Tate's Comics in Lauderhill Florida, I stumbled across the Independent Artist section. On the back of one of the books was an advertisement from the company that did the printing service for the book, Ka-Blam Digital Printing. I sent the digital files for Arion's first comic book, Mii Toons Action #105, to Ka-Blam. After getting over the euphoria of seeing the finished product show up on our door step, we took the books to Tates's Comics and asked if we could display the books on his Indy shelf. The owner, Tate Otatti, purchased the books from Arion at a discounted rate and placed them in his store. Arion was thrilled to actually see his books on the shelf in a real comic book store. That was in December 2010.

Since then, Tate's Comics has purchased 28 more books from Arion and has sold nearly half of them. NBC Miami did a feature story about Arion and his comics which aired on March 1, 2011. The video, which is now posted on YouTube and Arion's website, www.miitoons.com, has helped to boost sales. There are five self-published comic books in the Mii Toons Action series now and all are available for purchase from www.miitoons.com, Tate's Comics, and even in eBook format for the Amazon Kindle.

Our goal is to see the distribution of the books expand to more comic book stores and even Barnes and Noble. As a former elementary school teacher, I hope that his books will be available for purchase through Scholastic book order forms, which teachers, parents, and students can use to purchase his entire series. Either way, Arion is thrilled about the success he has already had with his books, and with his talent and inspired work ethic, I feel the sky is truly the limit for him.

Dominique Rashad (father)
drashad@miitoons.com