Comics boom boom: Ignition Press’ Filip Sablik talks creator relations, personal storytelling, and the A24 model

Calling your newer comic company Ignition Press is a bold move. Because, sure, it carries with connotations of, say, space travel and even the Space Race, legions of brave pioneers breaking through our earthly constraints to explore new horizons. But it also could be an explosion, the detonation of all that boundless hope.

Publisher and co-founder Filip Sablik gets it.

“I think that if you’re not a little bit scared, then you’re probably delusional or maybe not too bright,” Sablik said recently of the company’s start-up. “And I think that goes for starting any kind of business: It is a thing that requires a leap of faith. To quote the cinematic masterpiece Armageddon, I was 80% excited and 20% scared — or maybe it’s 80% scared and 20% excited.”

You can’t deny that Ignition hasn’t at least trended toward the more positive connotations of its name. In the last two years, Sablik and the rest of the team — which includes CEO Eric Gitter, editor-in-chief Jamie S. Rich, and creative director Jeremy Haun — have had genuine success. They’ve released books by established names (like Cullen Bunn’s Deluge , Christian Ward and John J Pearson’s The Patron, and the Aaron Campbell/Tim Seeley project Everyone Loves A Jewel Thief). They’ve also served as home for new/upcoming creators, including Stephanie Williams (Roots of Madness) and screenwriter Olivia Dufault (the forthcoming Prima Apparata). And Haun’s own The Beauty, which he brought over from Image, had that recent, mostly great FX adaptation.

But for Sablik and the rest of Ignition, the outcomes had as much to do with good fortune as lots of carefully-crafted insights.

“What we have at Ignition that I think makes us really fortunate is we have, amongst the co-founders and then the extended team, a lot of experience,” Sablik said. “I like to joke that we’re all old enough to know what we’re doing, but still young enough to have the energy to attempt something like this.”

Gitter, for instance, helped bring films like Atomic Blonde and Scott Pilgrim vs. the World to the silver screen. Rich, meanwhile, had prior tenures at IDW and DC (where he was Batman group editor and head of Vertigo/DC’s Young Animal). And before Ignition, Sablik helped Boom! Studios grow into the indie powerhouse it is today.

And as much as Ignition’s entire existence is about telling good and important stories, there is another, equally important function for the top brass. With each of them having “been in and around the business for a quarter century or more,” according to Sablik, the creation of Ignition was also about doing things differently to also empower their own careers.

“Eric was the one that posed the question to the rest of the three of us,” Sablik said. “He was like, ‘I’ve known you guys for a long time. You’re always complaining about the same stuff. What if you could fix it? How would you do it differently?’ And there are moments where, again, you’ve had those conversations over and over and you look around and you’re like, ‘Is nobody going to do anything about this? I guess it should be us,’ and that’s really exciting.”

So, yes, it’s veteran instincts honed over years (and still a bit of luck, if we’re being totally honest). Because it takes a certain savvy to seize upon what Sablik called an “opportunity” within comics in the late 2020s. A chance, if you will, to recognize the state of your core audience and seize on that in a way that actually means a damn.

“We were betting on the idea that there were going to be new fans who had grown up on graphic novels, who had grown up on manga, who had grown up on the Marvel Cinematic Universe and the DC movies and comics being adapted on TV for the majority of their lifetime,” Sablik said. “That there was going to be this opportunity to engage with that excited new fanbase.” Sablik added that they were focused on people who might’ve thought, “What’s my Batman? What’s my Spider-Man?’ Like, ‘What’s the thing I can get in on the ground floor?’”

With his own children “in the Gen Alpha zone,” Sablik has seen how so many kids “grow up with graphic novels in their literal classroom.” The most successful publishers, then, were going to be ones who actually seized on that dynamic.

“I did feel like there’s this addressable market that was going to be larger, and that was going to be more open to the idea that comics could be anything,” Sablik said. “Because the comics they had been presented with from a young age stretched all sorts of genres and tones and themes. That’s the kind of work that we get excited about doing here at Ignition.”

And, yes, Sablik and company recognize the “downside” attached to this market, adding that there’s a “double-edged sword that is the modern world in digital commerce…we have all these segmented and arguably niche audiences.” Inevitably, that makes breaking through really hard; the trick, then, is to engage folks in a ways both personal and deliberate.

“Your ability to connect with those customers and those potential readers and meet them where they are, that barrier to entry has never been lower – if you’re willing to put in the sweat equity, if you’re willing to do the research and be smart about how you engage with folks,” Sablik said. “So I think all of that really informed why now [that they’d started Ignition].”

That sense of connection really does seem to be at the very heart of Ignition. Sablik said then when he started out, “Diamond was the primary distributor, they held all of the end customers,” adding, “They held the customer data in terms of the retailers, and there was a wall between the publisher and the retailer.” Comics shop owners operated similarly  — “because they’re understandably independent, small business owners in highly competitive market within margins, they held their end customer data really tightly.”

The question for Sablik and company was simple enough: “How do I get the stores to stock [the books]?” Luckily there was at least one solid “case study” for the Ignition team: Isotope Comics in San Francisco.

“It’s still a fantastic store, but in the early 2000s, holy cow, what an amazing place,” Sablik said. “And James [Sime] and Kirsten [Baldock], who co-owned that shop, came from a hospitality and bartending background and really made it feel like you were walking into a cool place you wanted to hang out.”

Sablik added, “Isotope sold more copies of the AiT/Planet Lar graphic novels than any store in America, probably. And it wasn’t because they had a specific customer base that loved what Larry Young was publishing. It was because Larry was there in the store all the time. He was buddies with James, and that store became an evangelist for their books. And that was really the dynamic: the stores were the tastemakers.”

Of course, things have changed from the “heyday” of stories like Isotope. Yes, post-COVID, Sablik said that we’re “living in a world where there are these digital marketing tools, where we have access to information and levels of understanding of who the customers are that we’ve never had before.” At the same time, though, the industry “had this proliferation of content. There are more single-issue comic books being published today than ever before.” It is, for Sablik at least, “not reasonable to ask a comic book shop to keep up with everything and to hand-sell everything.”

That’s where Ignition comes in (if that weren’t already obvious).

“We always tell retailers, ‘Look, if you’re a store that gets behind Ignition, or one of our creators, and you’re hand-selling Everyone Loves a Jewel Thief, thank you; we’re so grateful.’ But our job as the publisher is to create that audience for you,” Sablik said. “And especially with the type of stuff that we do, because we have such a diverse range of genres that we publish, we really want to be making an effort to go out and try to find those horror fans or those romance fans or those fantasy fans, whatever the particular book is, and try to connect those audience members with the books.”

It’s not just good business, but it makes sense for the specific nature of comics. It’s an industry where tribalism is more hardcore than almost any other media channel/bubble.

“Comics are also unusual in that the connections historically that comic fans have made are with companies,” Sablik said. “It’s a very tribalistic thing — ‘I’m a Marvel Zombie or I’m a DC fan or I only read Image or I only read Vertigo.’ I can’t really think of another storytelling or entertainment medium that people do that with the exception of certain subcultures. No one says, ‘I only listen to Sony Music releases. I only read Random House novels.’”

Added Sablik, “Gen Z…what they want is they want a connection with a person. Somebody that is speaking to them in a parasocial way. And so that means the brands are the creators. That’s who we should be pushing.”

At the same time, Ignition are working in an industry where such “simple” logic isn’t always so readily accepted.

“I think one of the wrong lessons that the industry, particularly the so-called corporate comics, took from the creation of Image in ‘92, is that, ‘Well, we can’t get behind the creators because they’ll get so big they’ll leave,’” Sablik said. “And our thought was how about we provide actual support to the creators, and help them build their brands?”

Take, for instance, Stephanie Williams — Sablik said that whether Williams is “getting attention for Street Sharks or Wonder Woman, or because she’s nominated for an Eisner, that helps [Ignition’s] Roots of Madness.”

Added Sablik, “And our goal as a publisher is to create an environment and a working relationship that is so good that they want to keep working with us. If we can’t deliver that, then they should go someplace else. They should do what is best for them.”

In pursuit of these relationships and dynamic, Sablik said that A24 serves as a kind of “aspirational hope,” with the goal being that their own Ignition logo will eventually be seen in the same vein as that beloved production company. Added Sablik, “I’m not always going to like what A24 puts out, but I know that it’s going to be interesting. It’s going to be from a real creative voice and it’s going to be really well done. So it’s probably worth the ride at the very least.”

This kind of familial spin is, to an extent, about countering the old ways of business. Sablik believes that the old models of creator-owned publishing model — “a back-end model, where the creators are having to essentially sacrifice, let’s call it, pay security, in exchange to do their passion project” — flat out doesn’t work. If anything, it’s actually pushing creators away as opposed to creating beneficial business relationships.

Added Sablik, “Or, these publishers aren’t well capitalized enough to do more than one thing. They don’t have enough capital to support that creator on multiple projects. And so I think that’s another reason that you see creators essentially working at a bunch of different publishers because – and I’m not going to use specifics – creator X was working with publisher Y and they had a great experience, [and] there’s no guarantee that publisher Y can give them that second project and finance it. Now that we’re coming to the end of our first year of publishing, and moving into our second year of publishing, we intentionally are working repeatedly with creators.” (Ignition already has at least two titles released/in the works with Bunn, Seeley, Haun, and Ande Parks.)

Whatever success Ignition has achieved early on, it’s not just about one thing, like forging relationships or a keen market understanding. While the company formed on July 7, 2024, they only started releasing books the very next summer/early fall. (And already they’ve dropped two dozen-plus titles.) Sablik said they spent that first year “building the foundation and putting stuff together.” It was a way to not jump into the deep end, but make sure they could actually swim before heading to open waters.

“Jamie and I have had the privilege of being pretty early in a couple of companies, but that is different from literally laying down the first brick and building the house,” Sablik said. “We came to the market with the intention of ‘Let’s not just run the same playbook. Let’s look at what are the things that we can approve.’ Those are the things that we’re essentially running experiments on. And you have a theory of how it’s going to go, and then you run the experiment. ‘Well, that didn’t go quite the way that I expected. What have we learned from that?’”

As a result, Sablik said that there hasn’t been some “major overarching lesson” for Ignition’s core team, adding, “If we can be accused of anything, it’s that we overthink.” Still, there’s at least one small area worthy of study, and something that speaks to the heart of Ignition’s approach and results so far.

In an aim to appeal to “both readers and long-term collectors,” and without actively engaging the “built-in FOMO button with speculators,” Ignition opted to have “one incentive cover on first issues or cover Cs…and we set them at one-in-five.” Of course, that caused confusion among retailers: “They said, ‘Essentially, this is great, but I don’t know how to price these because the logical industry standard for pricing is you price it based on ratio.’ So one-in-10 is $10. They said, ‘Your books are $5, how do I price a one-in-five? And most of them were pricing them at $7 or $8 or something like that.”

The solution? “We’re going to make the ashcans a one-in-five incentive to make sure that retailers could get easier access to that sales tool,” Sablik said. “And we’ll make the C cover a one-in-10.”

And, sure, that perhaps seems obvious or simple enough, but it speaks to something deeper about Ignition, and their mix of youthful exuberance back by real-world experience.

“There are times where the market works a certain way and you’re like, ‘I think it could work better,’” Sablik said. “And then other times you have to just look at it and go, ‘No, that’s the way it works. And we’re not going to be a fish swimming upstream.’”

Added Sablik, “We routinely hear back from our distributor, from creators, from retail partners – ‘Wow, you guys really have your stuff together, and it seems really well thought through, and you’ve got the systems in place.’ I look at all the things where I’m like, ‘I wish I had started on that thing earlier, or I wish we had put that piece in place before we got here.’ It’s rarefied air to be able to have that kind of runway; we’re incredibly fortunate. I think we’ve had a much stronger and more stable launch than maybe a lot of peers in this similar [creator-owned] bracket.”

This dedication to prep work is something Sablik learned from his time at Boom! Studios. Because you can’t just have the sizzle; the steak’s got to be there, too.

“Most founders and entrepreneurs are inherently…there’s an element of frantic energy and enthusiasm,” Sablik said. “You have to believe that you can do this impossible thing. And you have to be willing to do all the jobs. In my experience, most entrepreneurs, most founders, are less interested in building out systems and structure. And that was something that as Boom! grew, I saw become a pain point. Because that groundwork hadn’t been laid early on.

Added Sablik, “And so from the beginning, that’s something that when I talked to Eric and Jamie and Jeremy, I was like, ‘Look, here are the things that I think we need to build out in advance. And we’re not going to need them on day one. We could probably keep this all in our head.’ Like, ‘We don’t need to be this organized in the first year, but it will benefit us if we are down the road.’”

It’s a kind of “superpower,” if you will — an extension of certain lessons facilitated by Boom!’s founder Ross Richie.

“When he was looking at building the company, Ross said, ‘Well, what if I assembled the Justice League or the Avengers of comics’ behind the scenes,” Sablik said. “And what if I put that kind of energy into making sure we had great editors and great marketing people and great salespeople and so on. The team at Ignition is by and large hand-assembled and almost all through people that either myself or Jamie or Jeremy know from the past and admired and really liked working with and thought brought something to the table.”

Of course, Sablik is ever appreciative of his time at Boom!, adding that he was “there on the ground floor as we acquired Archaia and built Boombox.” But he was most interested in building something on his own (alongside a team, of course).

Added Sablik, “It was ultimately still Ross’ company and Ross’ vision for the company. And the opportunity to sit down with three other people that I really respected and liked and build that structure from the ground up was just a once-in-a-lifetime kind of a thing.”

Sablik mentioned that as a result of the team’s ongoing efforts, there’s already been quite a few noteworthy success stories. He doubled down on Williams and Roots of Madness (which is co-created by artist Letizia Cadonici), adding that they feel “really lucky to have gotten in relatively on the ground floor with her and that she trusted us to launch her first creator-owned project.” Or a book like Arcadia, from Roy and Inaki Miranda, where “with every issue they’re pulling back another layer of an onion and showing us something new and expanding this world.” Even Murder Podcast (from Haun and artist Mike Tisserand), which checks a major box for all Ignition books.

“You can pick up an Ignition book, read it on the surface level, and just have a good time,” Sablik said. “But there are all these different layers. They all have a perspective. They all have something to say. If you want to dig a little bit deeper into it, you can unpack that.”

Sablik is also a big fan of the newly-launched Minotaur. (Adding, “[writer Si Spurrier] is unleashed in the best possible way in this series. It’s the same feeling I had when I got back into comics after college and I got my first job at Diamond, when I picked up that first trade of Planetary and it just cracked my skull open.”) He’s also proud of the aforementioned Prima Apparata because it “demonstrated that [Dufault] was going to be an amazing talent in the comic space because she understands the language of comics.”

A lot of it all ties back into the aforementioned role of A24 “benchmark,” and how all of Ignition, from the sales people to the production team and beyond, want to support what truly matters most: meaningful creative freedom.

“It’s a platform and a vehicle for creators to tell the stories that…they’ve been holding back and waiting for the right moment to tell because they wanted to have the right level of support for it,” Sablik said. “Or, the stories that they’ve been scared to tell. And I think if you come at creator-owned comics, or any original storytelling from that place of something to say and passion and a vision, that is the closest thing to a foolproof way to connect with an audience.”

But Ignition’s “wins” aren’t just about what they have published, but also what they won’t (now or maybe ever, it all depends).

“I think there are three things that in the early stages we told creators, ‘Look, if this is the next transformative work in this particular genre, please show it to us,'” Sablik said. “But chances are, we’re probably going to say no.’”

Those genres are “capes and tights” because “that genre is covered incredibly well by a bunch of established publishers who know what they’re doing”; “true middle grade fiction” because “you can’t sell directly to the end customer” and must forge relationships with the “gatekeepers.” (Sablik said that market is a “phase three or four thing.”); and “autobiographical, slice of life material” because that’s “harder to adapt.”

Admittedly, we’ve all heard horror stories about comics publishers that start up as little more than IP farms. But even if Ignition has already achieved success with The Beauty, Sablik doesn’t believe that “everything we do has to be adaptable.”

Sablik added, “It’s just one of the values we provide the creators that we work with. And so we’ve just tried to be upfront with, again, there are established houses that really focus and specialize on that. You’re probably going to be better off going with one of them.”

Having an early “win” like The Beauty, then, was a way to show that Ignition had plans in place, and that their “pipeline” was still about serving stories and their creators first and foremost.

“We knew we had to demonstrate through action relatively quickly what we were promising to creators and to retailers and, to a lesser extent, the audience,” Sablik said. “And when we talk about the traditional independent publisher model of licensed books and creator-owned books, our vision for it on some end…it doesn’t matter to us if somebody who reads the Tyler Rake comic book or The Beauty and thinks it started in the TV show or the movies, as long as they are experiencing the comic books.”

If anything, there’s a kind of bifurcation that happens within Ignition. The team aren’t banking on books being adaptable, but those that are then positioned in a rather meaningful way.

“So, really, the long-term vision is those things that get adapted become the ‘licensed books.’ They become that thing that FX or Netflix is putting their marketing power behind to drive brand awareness and pull people in,” Sablik said. “And, again, we knew that one of the challenges of trying to do this model is that it takes time to build those pipelines. It takes time to build a pipeline in publishing. It takes time to build a pipeline into adapting into film and TV. And so when we went to creators and we said, ‘Look, we think we can offer this additional opportunity for you,’ it wasn’t theoretical…‘This is real and you can judge for yourself.’”

It’s ultimately a recognition of what separates making comics and making films, and how Ignition sees its core efforts in the larger context of the massive media ecosystem.

“Because as collaborative as comics are, I always talk about comics as one of the few garage band storytelling mediums,” Sablik said. “It’s like you and some friends can get together in the garage and make a comic book. And, heck, if you’re driven and talented enough, it could just be you.”

Sablik added, “Film and TV inherently are massive investments for the companies that are funding them. And what I’ve always said is I’m never jealous of them because the work they do, 100 things have to go perfectly correct. Only one thing has to go wrong for the whole thing to not happen. And I get to get up in the morning, and every day I know I’m making comic books. And we said yes to something, and a year later, it’s in stores. There are very few things that can derail it.”

Because not only are comics always going to be the focus, but the Ignition team have a unique way of looking at their place in the industry. It’s a perspective gleaned from years of telling stories, and recognizing what the people really want.

“I think probably the biggest difference is that Boom, like Dark Horse and like IDW, is a publisher that essentially splits its resources between licensed material and original creator-owned material,” Sablik said. “And the thing that [Ignition] set out to demonstrate is that it is possible to be a creator-owned publisher in this space, and just do it in a way that is elevated and successful.”

Luckily, there’s more than ample support for this creator-centric “model”: the ongoing, hugely successful Absolute line over at DC Comics. On the one hand, Sablik recognizes that it’s “an element of right place, right time,” adding, “When I look at things like Lumberjanes and Something is Killing the Children [both during his time at Boom!]…we did something amazing, but also right place, right time.”

However, you can’t deny the Absolute line’s influence, and how betting on your creators is seemingly all you need these days to basically print your own money (to an extent, obviously).

“I think that it is bringing new readers into stores. I think it’s bringing lapsed readers into stores,” Sablik said. “And that energy that you’re picking up on, I think and I hope, will translate to the work we’re doing. Because, again, it’s a similar ethos, where it’s about the creators having something to say. And the company is getting behind that and promoting it and empowering it and finding the audience to connect those stories with.”

This talk of the Absolute line inevitably leads us to the future of Ignition. In addition to those aforementioned books like Prima Apparata, Sablik said that Haun (and B. Clay Moore’s) The Leading Man is also in development at Netflix. But beyond that, Sablik has a few hopes and wishes of varying degrees of concreteness. The first is a little more direct: to be a “staple for comic shops and bookstores,” and for fans to either be “connected on just a pure publishing level” or because “there’s been an adaptation that has pulled in more people.”

But the second, somewhat more philosophical “wish” is especially interesting. It’s the one that speaks to the essence of Ignition’s mission, and how they want to tell good stories while actively supporting creators. How adaptations are part of the formula (and not the focus), and how that further empowers the singular art of making comics. It even speaks to the skill and long-term vision the team employ every day. Truly, it’s the thing that means the difference from Ignition as a daring rocket zooming into the stratosphere and another hunk of junk taking up space on the launchpad.

“My goal five years from now is for folks, whether that’s creators or retailers or the press or fans, to still be talking about Ignition with the same level of optimism and enthusiasm and excitement that we’re feeling right now,” Sablik said. “Because that would, in many ways, be the true testament that we built a thing that we said we were going to build. We have delivered on the promise of what we came into this space with.”

For even more on Ignition Press, head here.