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This spring, a new superhero landed in comic book pages. The sinewy Stingray Man battles his nemesis Personality Man to save a damsel in distress. As Stingray Man faces his foe, he bellows, “Nothing is going to stop me. Nothing!”
The superhero has a lot in common with his creator, Ryan O’Connor, who works in the paper recycling program at the Shamrock Companies, a distributorship in Westlake, Ohio. O’Connor, now 21, was born four months prematurely. Hospital staff were unsure of the fate of the 1 pound, 2 ounce infant. But O’Connor was a fighter, and he survived.
O’Connor has some developmental delays: Reading and writing are challenging. But he has a vivid imagination, and his creativity was sparked by superheroes. “As a kid, I watched Spiderman on TV and was obsessed with comic book characters,” says O’Connor, who began working at Shamrock four years ago to hone his job skills. A couple of summers ago, he conceived the idea for his own character, a high school hockey player with a secret superhero identity.
“I watched the Discovery Channel and got interested in stingrays—the way they glide and move through the water like a kite flies in the air,” says O’Connor. “I thought that would make a cool superhero.” So Stingray Man was born.
O’Connor dictated the superhero’s first adventure to his aunt, Janie Frustaci, who created a Word document of the story. The two are quite close and see each other everyday at Shamrock, where Frustaci is a project manager. She was so impressed by her nephew’s story that she searched the internet for a comic book artist to create accompanying artwork.
When he heard O’Connor’s story, Ed Murr agreed to work on the project. The artist, a former illustrator with Marvel Comics, penciled sketches for The Spectacular Stingray Man. He convinced two other artists to add the inks, colors and lettering. Then the staff at Shamrock ran with the project.
The distributorship’s creative department generated computer files and downloaded them to Marketing Services by Vectra Inc. in Columbus, Ohio, one of Shamrock’s manufacturing partners. The company printed 200 comic books. “We thought they would just go to our extended family,” says Frustaci. They were distributed within a week, so O’Connor requested an additional 500.
Chris Bakos, an employee in Shamrock’s receiving department, dropped off copies at a comic store where he previously worked. Fascinated by O’Connor, the store asked him to participate in a book signing event in May. He agreed and handed out 250 copies of “The Spectacular Stingray Man” that day.
Since then, the creative services team at Shamrock has launched a website promoting the superhero at www.stingrayman.com. And O’Connor is working on a sequel where Stingray Man teams with Blue Jay Kid, a superhero with extraordinary jumping abilities.
“I like the fact that characters with super powers go out of their way to save other people,” says O’Connor. “They don’t think twice about it.” It seems the staff at the Shamrock Companies go out of their way to help people, too. People like O’Connor, who Frustaci says was saved by science, but born with a big heart. The heart of a superhero.
—Susan Keen Flynn