Lots of guys should say, “my wife is a superhero,” but Ryan Drost put ink to paper and created a superhero character worthy of his real-life wife, Jami. Stealth Hammer, now in its second issue, tells the unique story of this husband-and-wife team, both in real life and the universe they’ve created in the book.
The Origin Story
Drost describes Stealth Hammer as an all-ages superhero adventure comic. Protagonist Jami Taylor is an average teenager starting college when she gains superpowers through an act of sabotage in her father’s lab. Suddenly she not only has amazing abilities but is part of a family legacy of guardians in a world of high-tech gadgetry and supernatural mythology. Imagine a superhero thrown into a world of Mega Man meets Jim Henson’s creature shop.
“I’ve always been a storyteller,” explains Drost. “I like to think of all the different possibilities in life. That’s a skill that works well when creating characters.”
Drost lives in Strongsville, Ohio. He graduated from the University of Toledo with a degree in Psychology, but also took creative writing courses. Always a huge fan of comics, he created Star Joe’s Podcast, which has been reviewing and discussing comics for 12 years. The next logical thing was to create and write his own comic.
The inspiration for that first comic came from his wife’s nickname — “Stealth Hammer”— which she got while working as a graphic designer. As Ryan tells it, “She swooped in with a single submission for a concept for a client and the client chose it. Afterward her boss dubbed her Stealth. At another job, her boss said she was the one who had to lay the hammer down. The combined nicknames, Stealth Hammer, were a family joke as a cool superhero name.
“A few years ago, I had her (Jami) drawn as a superhero as a birthday gift. After seeing the drawing, I knew this could be something. Once I decided to create this character and her world, I was flooded with ideas. Almost all of those initial ideas made their way into the bigger story we created.”
Building a Universe
Through his podcast, Drost met and became friends with several comic creators. Joel Jackson, the book’s main artist, has a style that is perfect for Stealth Hammer, and everything started to click.
“Joel has this incredible cartoony yet detailed style that I wanted for this project,” Drost said. “He does a lot of research for every character to get the right look and feel. He also loves to throw in a lot of extra details that often later become story elements.”
Getting it out there
“We decided to use Kickstarter as a crowdfunding source to create the first issue. Our first attempt was unsuccessful, but I learned a lot, so when we went to launch again in 2020, we surpassed our goal. Our first issue got a lot of great attention locally. My local shop sold over 120 copies, which is more than a lot of Marvel and DC titles. We sold out of our first printing of 500 issues through other sales, so we printed 500 more,” recalls Ryan.
Find Stealth Hammer here
