Spencer Shefts
Retail Operations & Merchandising Consultant
New to Contra
Spencer is building their profile!
The Round-Headed Beneficiary is a seven-page graphic memoir combining psychedelic fable, noir sequential art, disability narrative, and fiduciary satire. Inspired by Harry Nilsson’s The Point!, I developed the concept, script, characters, dialogue, page structure, and visual direction from my lived experience with epilepsy, hidden workplace accommodations, displacement, and trust administration.
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For years, Jerry’s Artist Outlet built a temporary home inside New York Comic Con. The booth took days to assemble, survive, and tear back down.
But the convention floor was never the part I remembered most clearly.
The real memory began after the crates were sealed.
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The Analog Master in a Digital World is a personal essay and visual narrative about adapting decades of relationship-based retail experience to a world increasingly governed by algorithms, apps, automation, and databases.
My father, Allen Shefts, taught me to pay attention, remember people, read a room, recognize when somebody was selling and when somebody was telling the truth, and build trust face-to-face. I carried those lessons into Jerry’s Artist Outlet, where I learned inventory, vendors, customers, product numbers, and relationships by being physically present in the business.
This project examines what happens when valuable analog knowledge stops being rewarded in the same way—but does not become worthless. Its central argument is that the future belongs neither entirely to analog experience nor digital efficiency, but to people capable of carrying human judgment, memory, intuition, and trust into modern systems.
I wrote the original essay and adapted it into a visual narrative. I developed the concept, structure, narration, page composition, and creative direction. The artwork was produced with generative tools under my direction.
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THE UNDERSTUDY is a visual memoir created in memory of my father. It traces an inheritance from the segregated New York poolrooms of the 1960s, where my father learned beside billiards legend Cisero Murphy, through my own decades at Jerry’s Artist Outlet, and finally to an empty clubhouse pool table in Orange, New Jersey.
The central idea is that my father taught me more than pool. He taught me to read a room, understand the people sitting at the table, notice relationships others overlook, calculate the angles, and find the shot where everybody wins.
I wrote the original 800-word essay and adapted it into a twelve-part graphic narrative. I developed the concept, structure, narration, visual direction, and recurring imagery. The artwork was produced with generative tools under my creative direction.
This project combines personal memoir, local history, retail experience, and the business philosophy my father expressed in one sentence: “Everybody goes to the bank holding hands.”
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