As cliché as it sounds, with great power comes great responsibility. Aiming to fill a void in the female nerd and nerds of color space on screen, filmmaker Cheyenne Ewulu followed the bat signal. Created by Ewulu, The Comic Shop is a workplace mockumentary YouTube web series that follows the shop owner Stephanie Okeke (Ewulu) and her quirky crew of employees Keith (Zeno Robinson), Dominique (Shanae Cole) and Connor (Grayson Niles) as they work to keep their Los Angeles-based indie comic book shop afloat in an era that favors digital access over physical copies. Hijinks ensue as they have to deal with customer satisfaction, rodent infestations and keeping the lights on all to avoid the landlord whose most ardent wish is to turn the store into a lucrative dispensary.
The series, which features a theme song sung by viral sensations FLYANA BOSS, has made the rounds at San Diego Comic Con alongside being selected for the Micheaux Film Festival, the Atlanta Film Festival and the Black Girls Rock Film Fest.
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Here, Deadline speaks with the multi-hyphenate about her Kickstarter campaign, the challenges of creating a series and representation in the nerd space.
DEADLINE: Talk about your journey into filmmaking.
CHEYENNE EWULU: What really sparked this career for me was in college. I had a Canon camera and a dream of, “I want to make a documentary.” So, I ended up making my first documentary, called Shades of Cosplay, which followed four Black cosplayers and their experiences within the community, highlighting both the ups and downs of that community. I directed, edited and distributed it all on my own. I think that was the moment where I was like, “Hey, you know, this is kind of fun. I would like to do this on a grander scale one day.”
DEADLINE: What inspired the idea for The Comic Shop?
EWULU: The Comic Shop was an opportunity to make a mockumentary. I always loved that format and style of comedy. At first, I made a scrappy mockumentary short where I would have used characters that weren’t my own. Meanwhile, I had been sitting on the characters in this series, Dominique, Connor, Stephanie, and Keith, for a while, along with another plot idea I had written, which was a dramedy at the time. I just loved those characters so much, but I just wasn’t feeling where the story was going with the pilot. To make a long story short, I frequent comic stores. I always thought the idea of doing a nerdy workplace comedy would be cool. And I was like, “Well, wouldn’t it be so hilarious if we based a comedy in a comic book store? I feel like there’s so much that could happen in a comic book store, and what if we had young folks running it, and just all the shenanigans that could possibly come with that idea?”
So, I just transferred those characters that I had originally written to this idea. I think it worked out for the best. I just wanted to write characters that I could relate to, because I feel like in a lot of nerd media, there aren’t a lot of characters that look like me, which was pretty much what I wanted.
DEADLINE: I think I remember seeing The Comic Shop on Kickstarter in the early stages. How did the idea go from there to being a thriving show on YouTube?
EWULU: In late 2022, I had written a plot script for The Comic Shop, and I remember sending it to my friend Matt [Smith], who is the cinematographer for the show, and him just being like, “OK, yeah, we need to do something with this. This is funny. People running a comic store with hijinks included, it’s just funny.” So, we ended up doing a proof of concept, which was a 12-minute short in 2023, and we ran that through this festival circuit. We noticed it was getting a lot of buzz, and a lot of folks were showing it a lot of love, and they were wanting more. Then we started thinking, “Oh, wow, this might be something that we should probably take seriously.”
I tried to pitch it to different studios to get it through the door, but I don’t think they understood the vision, and then we’re all new faces, I’m sure that also played a factor in it too. And so, in 2024, I decided to try to fund it myself and see what came of it. I decided to do Kickstarter because I had seen so many of my friends have such success with Kickstarter. And I was like, “Well, why not me? Let me see what I can do if I really lock in and try to make this a reality.” I think it was November 2024 when I launched it, and it ended in December 2024. We ended up reaching 30% past our goal.
DEADLINE: Wow.
EWULU: Yeah, which was amazing. We had originally planned to raise $160K, but we soared past that with like $207K or something like that. And at the time, I think we were the sixth most funded TV series on Kickstarter, which was really cool.
DEADLINE: There’s so many options for creatives to put their work out there. Earlier this year, there was data about YouTube emerging as a big competitor for TV streamers and even movie studios, because that’s where most of the eyeballs are. With your show on that platform, do you want to explain why you think YouTube is perfect for your series?
EWULU: For me, the decision to put The Comic Shop on YouTube was the fact that I really just wanted folks to see it. I didn’t want it to be another journey where it’s like, “OK, now the show is made and now we have to go through the gatekeeping process again with all these meetings and the yeses and the nos.” It felt like we had such a good body of work that I just wanted people to see it, by any means necessary. I felt that the easiest way to do that would be to post it on YouTube under my own production company, Awkward Virgo Productions. I wanted to build an audience and be able to interact with them. I feel like that’s something you can’t get on a bigger streamer. I love being able to see what people are thinking in the comments, whether positive or negative, and I appreciate the opportunity to interact with them.
I also feel like people are craving authenticity and new stories. We are in an age of reboots, and I think execs are afraid to take chances on new stories, which is unfortunate, but people are craving new stories. We’re going back to the days when Issa Rae‘s The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl and Felicia Day’s The Guild and all these other amazing web shows on YouTube blew up. We’re going to be seeing a renaissance of indie creators really carving their own paths and building their own fan bases on YouTube. It’s more easily accessible, I feel. It’s not like you have to have a subscription.
DEADLINE: You play Stephanie. How much of Stephanie is you and how much is fictional?
EWULU: Oh my God, I would say 99% of Stephanie is me. The other 1% is fictional. She’s a grade-A crash-out. I adore Stephanie so much. She’s me for sure, but it’s so funny because when I was writing the character, I knew I wanted to base her off me, but I didn’t know if I wanted to play her. I didn’t even know if I wanted her to be the main character until a friend of mine, Dani Fernandez, was reading the pilot and was like, “Is there a reason why you’re not centering the women nerds in this show? That’s a unique perspective that we don’t see a lot of in TV or film.” Keith was the main character at first. So, Dani was like, “It’ll be a great opportunity, and maybe you can play her.” And I was iffy about playing her, but then I thought, “I can bring Stephanie to the forefront and push everybody else to the back.” I cherish that character so much, which sometimes made it so hard to write her because I had to take myself out of it so many times.
DEADLINE: Stephanie’s relationship with her mom is so funny. When the mom walks into the comic shop for the first time, the first thing out of her mouth is, “Where’s the financial security?” Talk a bit about their relationship.
EWULU: Anyone can relate, but especially those born to immigrant parents. I’m Nigerian, so in my culture, success is the only way of thinking. If you’re not thinking of being a doctor, a lawyer, or anything that’s a high-earning position, then you might as well have failed in life. And as harsh as that is, that is just the reality growing up for folks like me. And so now imagine you have a daughter who was supposed to be a software engineer, supposed to go back and get her master’s, and she decided, “Well, no, I’m not going to do that, actually. I really want to open up a comic book store.” She’s choosing herself for the first time, so it’s applause to her, but her parents still can’t see how that’s a logical decision. Like, “What is that going to do for the future? How are you going to take care of me, us in the future?” Sometimes, it’s really about that, you know. “How are we going to be taken care of in the future with this comic book store?” And of course, they don’t get what that is. They’re just seeing all these crazy cartoons around the store, and they’re just like, “This is just not our culture.” And so, Stephanie is just, much like me, stepping out of the norm in her culture.
And with me, I’m in entertainment now, you know what I mean? And I had originally been a computer science major, and I decided that I really loved entertainment. I loved being on camera, I loved being in front of the camera. I’ve found a newfound love for writing, but these aren’t things that you often see Nigerian Americans pursuing. So, it kind of was up to me, much like Stephanie, to choose myself and be like, “OK, this is what I want to do. This is what I know I will need to do if I want to be happy for the rest of my life. And it’s no longer about impressing anybody else. It’s strictly about just making sure that I am satisfied and happy with my life and making the best decision for me.”
So that’s basically Stephanie’s story that I was trying to bring across for my own life. And in the end, you can see her mom being like, “OK, this is your life. Do what you want.” But still, in the back of her brain, she’s like, “Oh, my daughter, she’ll come around eventually. There’s no way that this is the end game for her, not in my family.”
DEADLINE: Generally speaking, it usually works out that if you like math or STEM-related fields, people don’t tend to be keen on the more artsy creative side of things and vice versa. But you like both?
EWULU: It’s funny because I was an art kid growing up. I was not the most math-savvy, but I also didn’t care for reading or language arts. I drew a lot, and I love to paint. And then I found theater arts and found a love for acting. So, I was very artsy farsty, which is so funny because I remember my family tried to put me in basketball, and I literally had a Troy Bolton phase from High School Musical. That life was literally my life. I was forced into basketball, but I wanted to do theater arts. And so, watching High School Musical, I know he’s a white man, but I was like, “Wait, this is my life.” I felt so seen [laughs].
DEADLINE: You might need to make a phone call.
EWULU: That’s what I’m saying, somebody stole my life! I’m coming for you, Disney [laughs].
DEADLINE: How are your actual parents holding up since you’ve pursued your career in entertainment?
EWULU: They are so excited. My mom, to show how far she’s come, played herself in the proof of concept for The Comic Shop. She stepped on camera to act for the first time. And of course, she was offended that I didn’t ask her back for the actual season [laugh]. But they’re both so supportive. Even when we were doing Kickstarter, my dad was sharing it to everybody in his office, like, “Look, look. Look what my daughter is doing.” They were proud when I eventually raised the money, and they actively watch episodes when they have time. My dad follows me on Instagram. So, he’s always seeing all the cool stuff I’m doing and rapidly liking everything. So, we’ve all come a long way. Anybody with strict immigrant parents, it is possible to turn them around. John Boyega and Yvonne Orji did it. You can do it too.
DEADLINE: Talk about writing these characters. Who is the most challenging to write for?
EWULU: I would say Stephanie is the most challenging to write, just because I have to learn to take myself out of the character and let her be free. The funnest to write is Keith because I feel like all of the characters pull from my personality in some shape or form. Keith is my more chaotic side of, “I’m just going to do it. What if I woke up and decided I was going to do what I was going to do today?”
Connor, although not difficult to write, is the token white character. So, we had a mission to make him likable. Originally, it started out with three Black characters, then we just snuck in this white character, and it could have gone any way. If he was a waste of space of a character, it would’ve been over. So, we really wanted to make sure we made him likable, but still very much authentic to his white boy nature. It was interesting, finding that balance to make Connor likable or not, or sometimes not likable, but I think we did a pretty good job with that balance. Conner means well, but he’s so white to his core. I feel like a lot of times when there is a token white in a cast of Black characters, there’s always a mission to make the white character super woke and super progressive, and I love that. That’s great. I hang out with a lot of progressive white folks. Amazing. But I’m just like, “What if he was just kind of [annoying sometimes]?”
Connor’s lore is so weird. He comes from a wealthy family that disowned him because he flunked out of college, and he’s a D&D lover. His lore is so strange. I just feel like he would learn to be progressive over time. We’re seeing his journey towards being progressive, and it comes through in many of his jokes. There’s this joke in the season finale that I’m just like… I almost didn’t write in because I was like, “I don’t know, it might be too spicy for y’all, but this is Connor.” But yeah, I love me some Connor.
DEADLINE: Stephanie’s love life is funny too. She has a petty ex-girlfriend who is a journalist who stops by from time to time. Then there’s the Black girl that Stephanie has a crush on, but once she finds out that her crush only likes white celebrities, she backs off. These scenarios are too specific. Where are you pulling inspiration from?
EWULU: I’m queer and I date predominantly women, and so I knew I wanted Stephanie to be the biggest lesbian ever. I didn’t want there to ever be a reason why people think they should ship her with any guy on the cast. And what better way to step into lesbianism than to have a toxic love story? I feel like every queer woman has a strangely toxic love story. It’s like a toxic yuri [laughs]. It’s very much from lovers to enemies. It’s not that I’m pulling from anything specific, but it really just felt like a widely relatable queer experience.
Then, in that episode with Kiera Please’s character, where she’s listing off all these white women who are her type, Stephanie, of course, has to be like, “OK, I’m not her type.” I feel like in the nerd space that it’s a very common thing to do, be like, “I hope they like Black. Do you like Black? You don’t? Well, OK.” But we’ve all been there. It also shows how she handles rejection because she doesn’t call her out or anything. She just walks it off.
DEADLINE: What are some comics that inspired you?
EWULU: Robin War, We Are Robin and Red Hood and the Outlaws. I love DC Comics. I am a huge Bat family fan. If it weren’t for DC animation to start, I would not have entered the world of superheroes. I was a kid watching the WB shows, like Batman: The Animated Series, Superman: The Animated Series, Batman Beyond, the Justice League, and Justice League Unlimited. That was my childhood and my introduction to superheroes. Of course, I was too young to go out and buy comic books, but once I got adult money, my collection is massive. It’s great that I get to enter the world of this show through my love of comics.
The Comic Shop is working with Lifeline Comics to publish our own comic book. It will feature the show’s in-world stories. So, fake superheroes that you hear in the show, like Edible Man, places like Rat City, those are coming to life with amazing writers like Stephanie Williams, who wrote Nubia, also, Cody Ziglar, who does the Miles Morales run. There’s so many other things in the works. We’re currently funding on Kickstarter to bring it to life, but when the finale airs, you can still have a piece of the show to look forward to.
The Comic Shop Season 1 is now available to stream on YouTube
[This interview has been edited for length and clarity]