By day, Michael Sarrao works as a career education and training specialist at Brooklyn College’s Magner Center, but by night, he’s a comicbook superhero — or at least the creator of them.
Sarrao, a Bay Ridge resident in his 30s who creates his own series such as “S.I.D.: Special Intergalactic Detective” and “Unmasked,” has been writing his own comics for nearly a decade — and will attend his sixth New York Comic Con at the Jacob Javits Center as an exhibitor Thursday through Sunday. There, he networks with industry insiders, meets publishers for his series and, most important, interacts with the fans who make the event possible.
Sarrao’s journey began in 2002, after he graduated from Brooklyn College with a film degree. He wanted to break into screenwriting — science fiction and
action-adventure films were his forte — but discovered limited networking options in the pre-social media days.
“The media industry isn’t just what you know, it’s who you know,” says Sarrao. “It’s an incredibly fun industry, but it’s tough as well. It’s hard to break in.” Needing stability and wanting to feel grounded, Sarrao accepted a job at Brooklyn College as a communications associate while he continued to write screenplays on the side.
But his passion ignited in 2007, when Sarrao met TV executive Vinnie Favale at a Brooklyn College panel. The vice president of CBS late night programming for the East Coast suggested creating comic books as an effective way to visually pitch screenplays and get eyeballs on his projects.
“That advice literally charged my career,” says Sarrao. “Comics gave me an outlet to tell my stories . . . and they gave me more visibility to build an audience.”
By creating visuals for characters in his comic book series — such as “Unmasked” characters Dagger II, the leader of the murderous New Age Heroes, and Paige Cruise, the reporter dedicated to unmasking them — and collaborating with an illustrator he met through a mutual friend, Sarrao launched multiple successful Kickstarter campaigns to self-publish his creations and build a fan base stretching as far as Australia.
Of course, all of that work doesn’t begin until he’s completed his day with the students at Brooklyn College, where he helps students with resume reviews, job search strategies and conducting mock interviews.
‘Comics gave me an outlet to tell my stories . . . and they gave me more visibility to build an audience.’
- Michael Sarrao
But at night and on weekends, it’s a different scene: “When I get home, I jump back onto my laptop to start writing notes for projects. I’ll even plot out pages of scripts before I get to the actual scripting process,” says Sarrao, who is single. Overall, he works on his comic books at least four times a week.
Sarrao’s secret to pursuing dual career paths without burning out? “I try to balance it all as much as I can,” he says. After seeing 20 or more students a week, he finds the writing relaxing, and tries to stick to it consistently after hours.
“I also schedule time to meet up with friends and family — that’s done in advance. Photography on the weekend helps me unwind as well.”
With such dedication to both of his careers, his boss and colleagues at the Magner Center have known about Sarrao’s creative aspirations for years — and many have even contributed to his Kickstarter projects. “They’ve been incredibly supportive,” he says.
While Sarrao has always been drawn to superheroes, especially having grown up watching Christopher Reeve as Superman, his story aspirations go beyond the Man of Steel genre. His plans include a gritty supernatural series and a horror one, and he hopes to connect with an agent to someday use his screenwriting background to develop series for Netflix — and also dreams of writing part-time for Marvel or DC Comics.
And not only does Sarrao create his own superheroes — he finds that he and his colleagues at Brooklyn College are superheroes in their own right.
“We’re always thinking of others [and] we’re always trying to help students achieve and build a future for themselves.”