Meet Casey Caruso

We recently connected with Casey Caruso and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Casey, really happy you were able to join us today and we’re looking forward to sharing your story and insights with our readers. Let’s start with the heart of it all – purpose. How did you find your purpose?

From a very young age, I wanted to be creative and different. When I entered the world of fine arts in my undergraduate studies, it was clear to me that I had a drive that my other classmates did not. However, at the time I lacked the business and marketing skills to get my work out there. I got so frustrated working so hard on my art, just to have it go unseen or undercut in value.

In my twenties, I worked on solving this problem one step at a time. My design and printmaking knowledge grew to the point where I could start solving the equation but I was still missing something. That something was vulnerability, confidence, and persistence.

I always thought that if I learned the right technical skills, it would take me the distance. However, it didn’t occur to me until my thirties that “the right stuff” needed to come from deep within myself. All of my fears and insecurities needed to be faced head-on and with radical compassion.

Once I started to forgive myself for my shortcomings, I vowed to learn from them and give into how they made me human. Being an artist is a never ending internal struggle with all we experience in life. Everyone makes mistakes and we all need a voice to help us keep going. This is the voice I wanted to give other artists.

Supporting artists both monetarily and compassionately, as an editor and publisher, seemed essential to the practice of art everywhere. Combining that with my passion and knowledge of comic books, naturally, became my purpose.

Thanks for sharing that. So, before we get any further into our conversation, can you tell our readers a bit about yourself and what you’re working on?

I have always loved comic books. The stories told with both visuals and words just blew me away as a kid. It took me a long time to realize that comic books were books. I didn’t like reading as a kid but I loved reading comic books and was led to believe they didn’t count as literature. Thankfully that perspective has changed and I’m excited to reinforce it as an entrepreneur.

Stoop Shop Comics is built on a system for publishing that radically supports our artists while infusing the business with strategic and smart design. We are crunching the numbers and producing quality books that have a return on our investment.

Our publication is an ongoing magazine style format that mashes up aspects of Shonen Jump, Heavy Metal Magazine and Dark Horse Comics. Each 26 page issue contains 2-5 serialized stories from multiple artists that span across a number of issues.

We are planning to release 2-3 issues of Stoop Shop Comics and 1-2 stand alone graphic novels each year. Fall 2025 will be our first time touring these books across East Coast Cities, like New York, DC, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Richmond and Boston.

Stoop Shop is also a retail and distribution side of the business that sells a variety of small press comic publishers and back issue comics of major publishers like Marvel, DC, and Image comics.

There is so much advice out there about all the different skills and qualities folks need to develop in order to succeed in today’s highly competitive environment and often it can feel overwhelming. So, if we had to break it down to just the three that matter most, which three skills or qualities would you focus on?

1. Print
2. Design (web and print)
3. Leadership

These are my most useful skills but I would say everyone needs Leadership and a well honed skill that you personally can execute with precision and haste.

Thanks so much for sharing all these insights with us today. Before we go, is there a book that’s played in important role in your development?

“Designing with the Mind in Mind” by Jeff Johnson has probably been the most impactful book to my design and strategy career. Knowing how the brain works within a digital environment is paramount in our time. There are many limitations of the brain that need to be considered when designing anything. Johnson breaks it down very easily into this condensed book.

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