At the Oneida Middle School in Schenectady, students are falling in love with reading thanks to art teacher Walter Mahoski's comic book collection. He has about 8,000 comics in a library set up at the back of his classroom.

“It’s enticing, it brings you in, it hooks people right away," said Mahoski about people being drawn to comics.

Nana Valentino, 13, likes reading about strong women.

"She just looks tougher," Valentino said about Wonder Woman's current story.

Leon Williams, 12, wants his characters to be funny, athletic and nosy, just like him.

"Sometimes I want characters that act like me," said Williams.

Craig Rippon is familiar with the way comics can draw a kid in. The 56-year-old knew he wanted to be a graphic artist in high school.

“I marched into the Marvel Comics office and I refused to leave until I met Stan Lee, because I wanted to show him my work," Rippon said.

He now lives in Rensselaer, and he's working on a documentary with his kids about the contributions people of color have made to the comic book world.

"There are a lot of things that black people are doing that need to be focused on," he said.

He's halfway done with the documentary, titled Black Ink, but he needs more people to back his Kickstarter to finish. They're using the funds for travel to interviews across the country.

“I would like to see more cultural differences in stories, a diversity, real diversity," Rippon said about comics.

He believes black people have a responsibility to tell their own stories, but the main character in his graphic novel is white.

“If I’m being absolutely honest, when I first started this story, I was concerned that the characters at the time be white, because I had an understanding that, well I’m going to try to sell this, and I didn’t want to run into anyone looking at the characters or looking at the story and saying, 'well, that’s a black thing; I don’t want to be bothered with it,' " said Rippon.

His opinion has changed, and he hopes telling this story will help change other minds too, so every kid has a superhero that looks like them and acts like them.