Bestselling comics writer and five-time Eisner awards winner James Tynion IV announced last Friday that he’s expanding his Tiny Onion brand into a full-blown production company. Tynion’s goal as both founder and CEO is to take the independent film studio approach to comics. To encourage a mutually beneficial creator economy.
“Over the last 12 years, I’ve watched the comics industry from the inside. Now I have the chance to take everything I’ve learned and test out every way to make it work even better. Not just for me, but for the generation of creators coming up behind me,” said Tynion in a statement.
No stranger to almost every type of publication in the comics industry, Tynion had begun his career with a run at DC’s Batman in the early to mid-2010s. Afterward, the author created a series of hits including Something is Killing the Children for Boom! Studios, The Department of Truth for Image, and even a Substack deal for The Oddly Pedestrian Life of Christopher Chaos. He also hosts several Eisner, Ringo, Prism, and GLAAD awards and is highly lauded as one of the greatest writers in the industry.
This new venture was undertaken with financial backing from the multimedia development and finance company Lyrical Media, who has staked an initial investment in Tiny Onion at the sum of a low seven figures. Both Tynion and Lyrical’s rep, UTA, will also represent Tiny Onion regarding its media rights across TV and film.
With a brand name based on his very popular substack, Tiny Onion will focus on the business sides of production including comics development, packaging, marketing, and promotion of creator-owned comics work. Working as more of a book packager and production house, the company will be managing some of Tynion’s creator-owned work.
“We’ve had a number of conversations with other creative industries. We’re hopefully going to be making movies, being a film studio, making inroads into animation, maybe dealing with other entities interested in making an artful, beautiful comic,” said Tynion regarding the direction Tiny Onion will take. “The creative autonomy is the core principle of what we are doing. That’s why we lean into the term ‘production house,’ because we’re covering a lot of bases here.”
“We are going to be able to bring in other creators, help them with their titles and help them navigate the system of publishers, which is really the Wild West right now,” he continued. “Comic book companies can be a little rough behind the scenes these days. We want to support editors by making sure deadlines get met, files are sent in the right formats, and creative teams are coordinated. Comics marketing is especially difficult right now. How do you get messages out in a fragmented social media space? We have a system that we are going to build and replicate, by bringing those skills in from the outside.”
Tynion has stressed, that this new venture won’t impact his creative on his ongoing indie projects with other publishers. Although Tiny Onion is not a publisher itself as of yet, it will work with publishers such as Dark Horse and Image comics, with ambitious plans for the company in the future include expansion into publishing, film, and TV in the future.
A number of great talents have already joined Tiny Onion on both the editorial and design team. Boom! studios executive editor Eric Harburn has jumped on as director of editorial, Courtney Menard as director of production from Z2 Comics, and indie publicist Jazzlyn Stone, has signed on as director of communications. Tiny Onion will also unveil its first batch of plans in a few upcoming months.
More animated projects too, hopefully!
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