Even though we first heard of Ignition Press — the new venture from eternal comic folks in long-time BOOM! man Filip Sablik, editorial veteran Jamie S. Rich, and creator Jeremy Haun as well as movie producer Eric Gitter — in August of last year, that was before we really knew anything about it. It didn’t even have a name, or at least one we knew about. Then when more details arrived, including its name, at New York Comic Con, we still had little sense as to what this new venture entailed beyond some of the basics rolled out at that event and the fact that Sablik would be its publisher, Rich its editor-in-chief, and Haun its creative director. That’s a promising start, but there was a lot more to go.

The good news is it was all part of a larger roll out plan, with the team revealing many more details during (and in the aftermath of) February’s annual meeting for the comics retail trade organization ComicsPRO. That was when the shape of the publisher started to become a bit clearer, as Sablik’s speech clued viewers into what it will entail and which creators will be involved, a list that includes Si Spurrier, Stephanie Williams, Leah Williams, Joe Eisma, Cullen Bunn, and more. More than that, they’re now on the clock, as they revealed that the first comic will come from the publisher in August of this year, a scant five months from now.

Even though a lot came out at ComicsPRO, I wanted to know more about what they’re doing there and how it all came together. So, I did what I could to learn more, as I hopped on Zoom with Sablik for an extended chat to get the story behind Ignition Press. We talked about how its roots, what guided the team’s thinking, their market and marketing strategies, the use of “creator-driven” in his ComicsPRO speech, how they figured out which creators they wanted to bring onboard, their approach to developing those creators, and a whole lot more. It’s a fascinating conversation with someone who thinks deeply about these things, and Sablik offers real insight into what they’re cooking over there. While there’s still plenty more to come, as the comics themselves have yet to be revealed, this chat explains a lot of the thinking behind it. That makes it a real treat.

You can give it a read below. As a note, though, it’s been edited for length and clarity.

Where do you start with building Ignition Press?

Filip Sablik: I’ll answer that question two ways. The first is how once we decided we were doing it and how we approached it. The other piece is a little bit more ephemeral.

When we actually started, which was the day after I left BOOM!, I was the last one to come on board and start working on it. What I suggested to Jamie (S. Rich) and Jeremy (Haun) when we were building the core of Ignition, which was going to be the publishing piece of it, is that we needed to start with “Why?” I’m a big Simon Sinek fan, and I’ve never had the opportunity to build something from scratch. And so, I loved the idea of trying to figure out why the three of us were doing this after all of us had been in the industry for over 20 years. It’s a little bit like signing up for another tour of duty, and it felt like a good moment to stop and ask ourselves, “Why are we doing it again?”

We spent the first three days really trying to find the intersection of what drew us together. And out of that came the mission statement behind Ignition Press, which is at the end of the ComicsPRO presentation I gave. Essentially what we arrived at was that we wanted to build a place that helped creators do interesting and vibrant work, ideally their most passionate, best work, and do it in a way that had integrity and commitment to it. And at the end of the day, try to leave the house in better shape than we found it, which has kind of been a throughline for me and I think for Jamie and Jeremy as well. That was how we spent the first half of the first week we were together, unearthing that and giving ourselves a North Star. And we all felt like if we could figure out that North Star and those first principles, then it made building the rest of it easier because we could check our decisions against those things.

And the other thing was…I think all three of us for the past…certainly for the past five years, probably for the last 10 to 15 years, all had a similar experience that a lot of people in comics have, which is you sit around in small groups at cons after hours talking about the things that you feel don’t work in the industry. And a lot of those things are cyclical conversations. You’re having the same conversation year over year and in this case over a decade. And I think all three of us on the comic side and Eric (Gitter), who comes from a Hollywood background, we’re all kind of asking ourselves the same question, which is, “How do we fix some of those things?” and “Why haven’t they been fixed before?” “What are the roadblocks to fixing them and how do we get around that?” So to that extent, it’s 20 years of thinking about this in the back of our heads and trying to come up with solutions and then putting those together.

That’s where we started.

Part of the reason you were unable to turn those conversations into actuality is you weren’t in a position to do that, right? And so, the idea is you are now in that position.

Sablik: To your point, there are a number of restrictions that tend to prevent people from doing that. If you look at the larger companies, there’s a certain amount of inertia in place there. They have brands that they’re stewards of, either they’re brands that they own wholly or they are brands that they have licensed either from a company or a creator that they need to maintain. And in general, I think larger organizations are not good at coming up with solutions. They’re good at implementing them if there is a game plan. They have the resources to do that. Conversely, small companies, certainly independent comic publishers fall into this camp, typically don’t have the resources to do it.

And in turn, the lack of resources mean they don’t have the time to do it. One of the things that is baked into the cake when you’re talking about any kind of storytelling medium is success doesn’t happen overnight. There are very few franchises or stories that just come out fully formed and are instantly connecting with an audience and a community. It takes time to build those things. And so if you don’t have the resources to put against it, you don’t have the time to put against it. It makes it very difficult to implement change.

One of the things that’s been fun about this process is those were the first questions I had when Jeremy originally approached me about this idea and introduced me to Eric years ago. And my first question for Eric was to challenge him and say, “I can’t imagine you have a realistic timeline and sufficient resources to do this, right? And I’m not going to do it if those things aren’t in place.” And the way that I’ve described it to friends is it’s like playing poker with somebody and they call your bluff and slide a blank check across the table and go, “I’m calling your bluff. You say you’ve got good ideas. Show me. Convince me.”

And that’s a really fun and intimidating challenge when you look at the face of it. It’s exciting, but like those excuses at Bar Con where it’s like, “Well, I would do this if I was master of the universe and could do whatever I wanted, but I’m not, so therefore we’ll just continue having a couple drinks and complaining about it.”

But now you are.

Sablik: At least a small corner of that.

One of the things that I learned at BOOM! was that while smaller companies aren’t…I’ve told retailer friends of mine, there’s no immediate future where Ignition Press is going to be the difference between somebody making their rent or not or paying their staff or not. But one of the things that I found that was powerful at BOOM! was that if you have the right idea and you can demonstrate it works and it captures enough imagination and enough momentum, it can have a positive impact. Returnability is probably the most obvious example that I directly spearheaded, but things like taking a chance on a book like Lumberjanes created and opened up this whole space in the market that wasn’t there before because it demonstrated it was possible. And then other folks start putting energy into that.

I think the greater hope we have is that we can create some examples of positive change that will inspire other folks to try similar things or improve on them.

I wanted to read a part of your speech that I found particularly interesting. It’s about how Ignition Press will have “a holistic approach that considers the various markets as they exist today, not as they existed back in 1985 or even 2019 to meet each customer where they are.” I think that 2019 part is the most interesting part, because obviously 1985 was a long time ago. 2019 doesn’t seem like that long ago. In terms of the direct market, I mean in terms of the world really, it’s a completely different place. How do you view the market today?

Sablik: Well, the reason I specifically referenced 1985 was because essentially that is the blueprint for independent comic book publishers. It’s the Dark Horse model that emerged in the early to mid-eighties where the direct market was central. It was essentially where comic publishers focused 98% of their energy. And I think you can make a strong argument that even in 2019, most North American comic publishers were probably focusing 80% of their time on the direct market. And then these other markets, whether you’re talking about digital book market, direct to consumer, live events, and then if you have enough critical mass, you can start to talk about specialty or mass markets as well…those were almost icing on the cake. If you could establish a strong beachhead in the direct market, then everything else was kind of gravy afterwards. You talked to Atom Freeman about it, 3 but you could tell that filtered into the marketing and the sales approach, which is where we’re going to put all our eggs in this basket and then we’re going to organically and passively capture whatever runoff we get into other markets.

The way that I think about the market now is that the direct market still has a lot of the same strengths that it’s always had, which is it is remarkably resilient and stable. It has the most passionate group of people on the front lines advocating and evangelizing for the medium and for the books. It allows for this environment where even though it’s predominantly Marvel and DC, we have this ability to create independent success stories. But one of the biggest challenges with the direct market is that there is a massive gap between somebody being interested in comics and getting somebody to step foot in a comic shop. It’s, in my opinion, too much to ask any rational person to do what we need them to do to become a fan of comic books, most of the time. And in the meantime, we have all these other channels that can meet customers who are in adjacent spaces or communities that are much more inviting or a smaller leap for those folks to come into the space.

I think Webtoon has demonstrated that. I think even going back as far as 20 years ago, Barnes & Noble and Borders demonstrated that. It’s like an entire generation of comic book readers fell in love with the medium sitting in one of those chairs or on the floor, in-between those…probably back then it would’ve been like four bookshelves of graphic novels. Libraries, direct to consumer in the way that it works with e-commerce, and crowdfunding platforms, these are places that you can engage with communities and adjacent fandoms in their group and say, “Hey, here’s a small step you can take to come into the space.”

My view of the market is that we’ve never been in a place where comics as a storytelling medium has greater awareness and there’s more openness to it. I’ve said this several times. I live in Los Angeles and my kids go to school in Los Angeles, so I recognize that in many ways their experience is not the experience of every middle schooler or elementary school age child. But in elementary school, there were as many graphic novels in those classrooms as there were prose books. That wasn’t the case when I was growing up.

We didn’t have Dog Man or Raina (Telgemeier)’s books back then, but if I’d pulled out a copy of Maus even, I think the average teacher would’ve chastised me for it and had me put it away. My point is we all have this opportunity to connect with people that love different genres and different types of stories and there’s the breadth of content, but it’s the mechanism of getting people from, “I’m casually interested” to “I’ve actually purchased or rented or checked out a graphic novel and fallen in love with it.”

Too often we fall into the trap of “success is only measured by ‘have we converted this person into a lifestyle customer?’,” where they self-identify as a comic fan and they’re coming into a store every single week. My wife is never going to be a weekly comic shop customer. I don’t think yours will either, right? But once a year, maybe twice a year, if something is recommended to them and it meets them where they are, they’re open to reading it. And I think that’s where the opportunity is.

You mentioned Saga in your speech as one of the types of books you’re trying to build. Saga is fascinating because there are people who only buy Saga. That’s it. They’ll buy the single issues, maybe they’ll just buy the trade, and shops will see them once a year. That’s it. They’re a Saga only customer. The interesting thing is, sometimes it seems like that’s almost viewed as wrong. It’s not wrong, it’s just another customer type.

Is it safe to say that if 1985 was 98% direct market oriented and 2019 was 80% direct market oriented, that Ignition Press is looking at a percentage that will be different than those other two?

Sablik: Yeah, I think that’s fair. Thinking about it as our goal, we want to open up our own sales funnel as wide as possible, ultimately measuring success both in how many people we can get to come in through the door and try something, as well as how many of those people eventually make their way down the sales funnel to the point where they are a lifestyle customer, somebody who self-identifies as part of the comic book reading community and says, yes, I’m a comic book reader. I think about it in these terms. How many people growing up did you know that would not have described themselves as a book reader, but picked up every Michael Crichton or John Grisham novel when it came out? And to your point, using Saga as an example, they were the Grisham or Crichton fans. That’s an okay outcome. We were talking about it before we started recording. There are Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips fans that probably don’t read other comic books, and that’s awesome.

The other growing pain we’ve had as an industry as we’ve stepped into these other spaces is often, I think, we end up trying to replicate what worked in that core market in these other markets. And that’s not necessarily going to work. It’s a different customer that’s there. I think that is one thing we have learned is these customer groups may overlap slightly, but broadly speaking, a digital reader is different than a single-issue physical reader, who is different than a graphic novel reader. And one of our goals is to try to figure out, how do we use these different tools in these different marketplaces to work in a way that is complimentary as opposed to cannibalizing each other.

I love a lot of retailers. I talk to a lot of retailers. But I think some publishers almost live in fear of retailers because they don’t want to upset the apple cart and say, “We are pursuing complementary avenues.” Everyone engages with media in different ways. Trying to pretend like we all operate in the exact same way is not a way to grow if you’re looking to grow. Even if you’re looking to grow the business of comic shops, you have to first grow interest in comics.

Here’s good example. The first time I read a manga series was primarily through the library. I didn’t want to buy a million volumes of a manga series because it would just fill up my room, so I was reading Naoki Urasawa’s 20^th Century Boys through the library. Then some horrible person would not let me get the 13th volume, so you know what I did? I bought all of them. People look at these different channels as combative and these different versions of comics as combative, but if positioned correctly, they’re complementary. And I kind of think that’s what you’re talking about.

Sablik: Yeah, absolutely. I think you and I have talked offline about this and then you talked about it in your interview with Atom, but one of the great evolutions in advertising in the last 20 years is the advent of targeted digital marketing, right? It is arguably the most effective form of advertising, as opposed to traditional advertising, which is, “I’m going to go as broad as I can, as wide as I can, and I’m not actually going to be able to correlate any direct impact.” It’s the sum total of I have shouted this from the rooftops loud enough, long enough that there’s a good outcome.

But in order to do that, you first have to get those connective points with the audience. You can’t go to comic shops or bookstores and say, I’m going to be able to target people in your specific geolocation with these interests until you have a list that you’re able to segment. And so, to do that, you have to pull people in first through, in our case, a combination of what we think is going to be value additive content for them and creating a community around each of these creators that we’re working with.

Or people getting The Cold Open, with The Cold Open being the 12-page kind of preview…not preview. It’s going to be an independent story for your new comics.

Sablik: It’s effectively a re-imagined issue zero, for the comic nerds in the audience.

Oh, now we’re talking. I like it.

Sablik: That’s right. But the reason we’re not calling it an issue zero is because we felt like The Cold Open really described what we’re trying to do. It is a 12-page story, and some stories might be a little bit longer if it needs to be, but the idea is it’s a vignette that really establishes the character, the world, the vibe of what the story is going to be in a way that is as satisfying as a reading experience. My favorite example of this are the James Bond movies. Nine times out of 10, those cold opens in a James Bond movie have nothing to do with the main storyline. You just need to know, James Bond, he’s a spy, he likes drinking martinis, he likes fast cars and ladies, and he’s lethal. We’re moving on.

But I think we need something like that to help show an audience that maybe hasn’t read a comic book or hasn’t read a comic book in a long time that this is what it can be. If this is enough to whet your appetite, now as part of the package, we’re going to include educational material that explains to them, “Here’s how you can get the rest of the story. If you’re interested in following it chapter by chapter, here’s how you can find a comic book shop. Here’s how you pre-order, here’s our goals,” and this is where it’s collaborative and complementary, “here’s a list of dedicated stores.” We can say, these stores are part of the Ignition Press network, and you can have confidence that you can engage with them and get this comic there.

But at the same time, we’re not trying to hide from folks that look, if you prefer to read stuff digitally, here’s how you can read those things digitally. Or if you want to wait until it’s collected in a final novel-esque format, here’s what the timeline looks for that for that, and here’s how you can pre-order it.

Our hope is that over time, we will build a community that has a bunch of overlapping fans with a bunch of overlapping interests. If you look at Jeremy Haun and Cullen Bunn, they’re both typically horror writers. Their audiences are going to overlap. And so there’s opportunities there to help grow each of their respective fan bases. But Leah Williams and Stephanie Williams and Jim McCann, they’re all going to bring different types of folks into the space. And then how you connect those dots for people I think will be the path to success.

When I got to ComicsPRO, everybody was doing the thing where they say, “Congratulations!” I’m like, yeah, of course you’re congratulating me now. I haven’t done anything yet. (laughs) This is in theory at the moment, and I think it’s a good theory. We’re really excited about it.

The timeline for Ignition Press is interesting to me. You were having your initial meetings in July, you announced its existence at New York Comic Con in October, in February you went to ComicsPRO and rolled out the idea of it, and the first comic doesn’t come until August. From a marketing standpoint, it’s kind of tricky, right? Sometimes we can be too guilty of thinking within the three-month cycle of the direct market. Some might think publishers shouldn’t roll out until May when solicits first open for your titles. But if you do that, then you would have to be like, this is who we are, this is who we’re working with, this is what the book is. Please buy our comic. That’s a lot.

If you look at it on the surface, maybe it seems like a strange rollout, but it seems like that timeline allows you to be a little bit more intentional when it comes to the marketing rollout while also building relationships and making sure you have all your i’s dotted and your t’s crossed. It adds up when you look at what you’re trying to build.

Sablik: Thank you. I’m glad you can see that, and you are not the first person to kind of go…I had publishing friends at ComicsPRO asking me, “Wait, you’re not announcing any books? You should announce the books. Why aren’t you announcing the books?” I’m like, well, because we’re trying to do it differently. And what I said in the room, in the part where I talked about everybody being stuck in the same two to three month sprint when you’re promoting things on a project by project basis, I told the retailers, the fact that marketing professionals in comics can make anything pop is nothing short of calling lightning from the sky, especially if you’re talking about something that is original. The things that the marketing teams at various original publishers do on a regular basis, it’s crazy. We’re talking about in eight weeks, you announce something, have to drive awareness, and then drive them through this odd pre-order system that only exists in this one market the way that it does.

And it exists within a market where I, as a person who is hyper informed in this stuff, can still go into my comic shop on a Wednesday and see Marvel and DC comics that I’ve never heard of. They’re going to be the highest awareness publishers we can talk about and that’s still happening.

Sablik: Absolutely. Because it’s a firehose of information. You would know it as well as anybody because getting press releases probably by the minute from across the industry. I have the same experience. I go into the comic shop every single week and I consider myself as tapped in as you can get. And every single week I come across a book where I’m like, “I didn’t know that existed.”