Ignition Press has had a good year, and its successful pavilion at San Diego Comic-Con 2026 was the perfect way to celebrate.
I sat down with creative director Jeremy Haun, who also writes the publisher’s titles Murder Podcast, The Beauty, Airwalker, and the upcoming The Folk of Dooney Hollow, to chat about his work on both the creative and editorial side.
DEANNA DESTITO: How has the pavilion been for Ignition Press this con?
JEREMY HAUN: We worked really hard to get ready for this. We’ve been planning for months. I have a lot of love for San Diego. I’ve been coming for well over 20 years, and as much as I love the convention hall experience, and I unabashedly do, this is something completely different. It just lets us have these kinds of experiences. People come in, they’re having a good time. It’s a break from the chaos. All the creators get to sit here and sign stuff. It’s been a fantastic feeling.
DESTITO: We’re getting such great feedback from the audience and creators about this pavilion. This is such a nice little oasis away.
HAUN: It’s something different, and look, one of the things that is a theme of Ignition and what we’re doing is doing comics differently. I think that it’s very easy to get into the mode where all of this is transactional. Yeah. For us, the importance was story and connection. We’re bringing the story like crazy, but the connection part for us is just something that we keep pushing further and further and making sure that people, whether you’re a fan or a creator, you feel good here.
DESTITO: You have a couple of different jobs with Ignition. You’re on the business/editorial side of things as well as writing. How do you juggle all of that?
HAUN: Uh, terribly. I am maybe the worst (laughs). So I started out 25 years ago, and I was predominantly an artist. And then over the past decade, I’ve written and drawn a lot at the same time. When we started building Ignition, something had to give, so I really haven’t drawn interiors in books in about two years. I did something just recently for the first time in forever, but that was the thing that had to give. So instead of spending my nights and weekends drawing as much, I now have to do the day job part of this, the creative director job. Lots of meetings. Nobody warns you about that. Zoom is not my favorite. Look, it’s a fantastic tool. We have a virtual office, so we are literally all over the country. It allows us to communicate quickly and easily.
DESTITO: Let’s talk about Murder Podcast. Give us a little rundown of what it’s about.
HAUN: Murder Podcast is a love letter to people that love true crime. In this instance, it is about a cursed podcast that shows up next in your feed, and if you hear it, it makes you inexplicably brutally murder everyone around you.
DESTITO: It’s like a twisty Ring, right?
HAUN: Exactly. It’s definitely that Japanese horror curse kind of feel, but you talk along with the podcast as you’re murdering people, so you’re like, “Ah, that’s cool.” It goes on until you are either stopped or the podcast ends. So if you aren’t stopped, you’re gonna keep breaking stuff and people.
DESTITO: How many issues is this?
HAUN: Eight. All issues are out now. We just wrapped up the series. It feels incredibly good to have it out there. Murder Podcast was our launch title. We actually dropped the cold open, which was the first 13 pages. A cold open conceptually is kind of like a Bond film: that first little bit where you kind of get the idea of what the vibe is, and then you move into the main story. So we dropped that last year here at San Diego. Now a year later, all eight issues are out, the first trade paperback just came out, and it feels amazing.
DESTITO: Do you plan on doing anything more with this, or is this done?
HAUN: I like to approach things in a way that there’s always the possibility of more. I’m a big believer that no ending should be so pat that you can’t do something else with it. But I kind of also leave it in a way that, you’re like, it could be a complete story.
DESTITO: Let’s talk about The Folk of Dooney Hollow. What’s this one about? I just have to say, this cover reminds me of the horror/thriller books I read when I was like 12.
HAUN: I love that. I grew up in the Ozark Mountains of Missouri. There’s that kind of band that runs through Arkansas and Southwest Missouri, and I live like an hour from Branson, and it’s a very old, beautiful, strange, haunted place. A lot of hills and hollows. I grew up on a farm there, and we would run through the woods and just see strange things. There was always this inexplicable presence. Sometimes though, you would be running through a hollow, and it would go completely dead silent. I wanted to do something that was very folk horror and kind of dealt with where I live in the Midwest and pay homage to that.
The Folk of Dooney Hollow is the story of a woman who is writing a dissertation on a group of settlers that went missing in the 1800s, traveling from the East Coast out west. A lot of settlers, especially Irish settlers, came out west, and they found the Ozarks, and it reminded them of home in a really lovely way. So often they were like, “Why don’t we stop here?”
These people in this story disappear completely. Over 100 people. So she sets out to try to find some hint as to just what happened. Whether it’s a mass grave or something else, and finds something that she never could have expected. It’s really, it’s dark, and it’s a lot of fun. I love taking someone out of their place and putting them in something really strange, and this is definitely like worlds merging.
DESTITO: I like the Roanoke vibe.
HAUN: I always love those kinds of stories. I’m a big folk horror fan. I think a lot about movies like The Wicker Man. There’s one called Blood on Satan’s Claw that I absolutely love, and I just wanted to do something that was very Ozarks but also very me.
A lot of what I do, and a lot of the work that I’ve done, especially my horror work, started with Red Mother, which I did at Boom Studios a few years ago. There are elements of it in Murder Podcast. Definitely the same in The Folk of Dooney Hollow. I did a project called Hauntology during the pandemic, which is a series of short horror stories, but they all interconnect in kind of a larger mythos that I’ve created.
DESTITO: Would you consider yourself a genre writer then, or do you not like to have that title?
HAUN: I don’t. Look, I love genre, and most of what I write is horror. It’s been my medium since I was a kid. I was terrified of everything growing up, and my fix for that was going and renting every single horror movie VHS at our local shop. I was like 11 or 12 when I started that. I think it creates something in you. Now I seek that feeling again. You realize that maybe the new horror that we take in, maybe you’ll get occasionally something that gives you that. But the best way for me to do it is to write my own stuff where I’m creating scenarios that terrify me.
DESTITO: So besides this, what else can you share with us that’s coming up that you’re working on?
HAUN: We are just releasing Airwalker, which is an original graphic novel written by me, drawn by Danny Luckert, but it is based on an original concept by Stan Lee. Danny is amazing. He took that story and brought it to life in a way that I can’t begin to express. He can do the action beats. He can do all of the big things, but he understands the humanity of the characters in a way that’s just perfect.
DESTITO: Anything else you want to tease?
HAUN: You know, look, here’s the thing. All across Ignition, we are telling the stories that we love in the way that we want to tell them. I’m not going to stop anytime soon. Of course, being a partner in the company and being the creative director, I obviously have a vested interest in making this work. But the reality of it is we are able to enable creators to really invest in story and the kinds of stories that they–I– love.
And I’m just gonna keep making stuff myself and keep helping the creators just tell great stories and have a blast doing it.
Stay tuned to The Beat for more news from SDCC ’26.
