Independent work · Ongoing

Monomyth Comics: the system I built so the side business would run itself.

A comic resale operation with a custom automation stack and a public app, built solo with AI assistance, because doing it by hand didn't scale past one person's evenings.

The problem

Reselling comics profitably is about 20% sourcing inventory and 80% keeping track of that inventory. What actual comics do I have? How many copies do I have, how much did I pay for them, what condition are they in, are they signed or unsigned, graded or ungraded? And what comics have I sold, and for how much, and what did I actually make after fees and shipping?

I tried tracking this by hand in Excel and it quickly got out of control. I moved all of my records to Airtable and started working with Claude to automate some of the workflows.

The system I built

  • Comic Bundle Finder. A public web app (Next.js, deployed on Vercel). It uses the eBay developer API to solve a real problem for collectors: a lot of comics only cost a couple dollars but the shipping can be around $8, turning a $2 purchase into a $10 one. But most sellers will offer to bundle shipping and every additional comic doesn’t change the cost of shipping much. Comic Bundle Finder takes a list of comics the user is looking for and finds sellers that have more than one of them and ranks them by how many they have, allowing users to cut down on shipping costs.
  • Cataloging and listing. My Airtable inventory system uses the ComicVine API to fetch bibliographic data about each issue I own, which then gets referenced in another table where I build and publish my eBay listings with the eBay API.
  • Airtable automations. Every night, my Airtable system uses the eBay API to check my seller account for any recent sales and then records them in a table, using the listing ID to reference my own inventory and track ROI.

Why it belongs here

I’m not a software engineer, and I won’t pretend the AI-assisted projects would survive a take-home interview without the AI. Here’s the honest claim, and it’s the one that matters for a marketing operations team: I can understand a real problem, design a system that solves it, ship working software against a live API, and fix it when it breaks. A marketer who builds his own tools instead of waiting on a developer is a different kind of generalist. This is the project that proves the “marketing ops” line isn’t a stretch.