Rocketship Entertainment is taking off!
Seriously, they have been making a lot of moves recently. Yesterday it was announced they would be partnering with Legendary Comics for print editions of two webtoons, Firebrand and ROB.
Legendary, as we learned back at ComicsPRO, is still around and publishing, but teaming up with the Rocketship infrastructure seems like a smart move.
Firebrand: The Initiation of Natali Presano, written by Jessica Chobot and Erika Lewis with art by Claudia Aguirre, began its run in 2016 and wrapped up its tale of a rebellious young witch in 2019. Rocketship’s Firebrand Omnibus will collect the entire run of the series, featuring behind the scenes content and interviews with the creative team in a massive 350-page deluxe hardcover omnibus.
Natali Presano never fit into her father’s perfectly human world: politically ambitious, he turned his back on her just when she needed him most. Losing her mother to tragedy as a young child, Natali fled the safety of home into the arms of her aunt Selena, the mysterious guardian of a magical order waging a centuries-old war for survival in the mountains of Spain.
Natali, now in her 20s, has followed in her aunt’s footsteps, becoming a powerful but rebellious witch in her own right. Returning to Seattle, she finds herself caught between a cruel modern world and the ancient evil threatening to destroy it.
ROB is a modern take on Robin Hood by writer Richard Dinnick and artists Magda Price and Miguel Sepulveda, which ran on WEBTOON in 2021. Rocketship will be publishing the entire twenty-six episode run in a deluxe hardcover edition, as well as a premium trade paperback. The book was originally conceived as a printed graphic novel, so it is achieving its final form.
When war threatens to destroy his nation’s entire way of life, a young squire named Rob knows just the thing to do: steal a weapon from the Timeless Armory. The only thing standing between him and victory is thousands of miles, sinister knights, crooked elites and enemy assassins. Will he make it back in time to stop the invaders, or will he be vanquished along the way?
Together the two series have a combined 5.5 million views on WEBTOON – and both print editions will be Kickstarted later in the year, with exclusive prints, collectible pin sets, and autographed bookplates from the creative teams of each book. Firebrand’s pre-launch page is already up and running.
Interestingly, the two series both launched back when Legendary was experimenting with the scrolling comic format, as Robert Napton, SVP and Publisher, Legendary Comics notes. “Firebrand and ROB were our first two digital comics ever produced at Legendary Comics. With Firebrand, Jessica and Erika found a fresh supernatural mythology and wove the tale with great modern characters. With ROB, Richard Dinnick took the classic mythos and set it in an alternate world both familiar and unknown.”
Rocketship CEO and publisher Tom Akel added, “Firebrand and ROB have earned passionate fans, and we’re honored to give them the beautiful, definitive editions they deserve. We’re thrilled to expand our partnership with Legendary and bring more of their epic new worlds to print.”
Rocketship and Legendary have been partnering before this for a line of line of deluxe graphic novels and collectibles including, Dune: The Official Movie Graphic Novel Part One and Two, Monarch: The Lost Adventures, Pacific Rim: Final Breach, Trick ‘r Treat (15th Anniversary & Witching Hours), Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein starring Boris Karloff, and more!
While that was announced yesterday, that is not all Rocketship has been doing of late! So consider this our big catch-up post.
Just last week, Rocketship announced another team-up: this time with Top Cow Productions, the Image studio headed by founder Marc Silvestri. The partnership will see unique products and collected editions sold through Kickstarter and the Top Cow Store, with Rocketship’s infrastructure once again powering the deal. Let’s go to the PR for this one:
Rocketship is powering Top Cow’s new ecommerce store which continues to give fans new experiences with the titles they love. New exclusives, slabs, and collections will be releasing every month. Recent drops include The Darkness vs. Angelus “I Hate Fairyland” Team-Up variants, The Darkness / Invincible Team Up variants, slabbed 9.8 Batman & The Joker: The Deadly Duo signed copies, and the Top Cow Holiday Special: All Through the House foil variant.
The partnership runs on Rocketship’s proprietary publishing infrastructure, built to handle the full lifecycle of a modern comics launch. Rocketship’s in-house technology stack manages crowdfunding integration, BackerKit pledge management, Shopify storefronts, inventory and fulfillment logistics, and a unified customer data platform across every channel. It’s an end-to-end system purpose-built for direct-to-fan publishing at scale, giving Top Cow a turnkey path to launch campaigns, drop exclusives, and ship product seamlessly.
In the last year, Top Cow and Rocketship have launched massively successful Kickstarter campaigns for titles like Sunstone, Crimson, and Cyber Force, with an upcoming campaign for The Darkness Complete Collection Volume 4 launching in May, followed by campaigns for Freshmen, Witchblade, and Stjepan Sejic’s Letters to the Vampire Queen. The campaigns include access to slab cards, mini-prints, variants, challenge coins, signed bookplates and other exclusive merchandise that’s never been available before.
“We’re thrilled to be working with the team at Top Cow,” says Rocketship Publisher and CEO Tom Akel. “It’s an honor to work on such seminal titles, and we’re beyond excited to elevate the fan experience with them.”
“Top Cow has always been about connecting with fans and pushing how comics are experienced,” said Marc Silvestri, founder of Top Cow Productions. “Partnering with Rocketship gives us the infrastructure to take that further than ever—delivering premium editions, exclusive content, and new ways for readers to engage with the worlds we’ve built.”
Rocketship ALSO recently announced a partnership with 11 Bit Studios, the publisher behind games like This War of Mine, The Alters, and the Anomaly series, for a graphic novel based on the upcoming Frostpunk 1886 game.
Entitled Frostpunk 1886: The Graphic Novel, it will be written by Harvey Award-nominated Justin Jordan (The Strange Talent of Luther Strode, Green Lantern: New Guardian) with art by Eisner nominated artist Ryan Benjamin (Batman Beyond, Vampire Hunter D).
Originally released in 2018, Frostpunk was a massive indie success, highly regarded for its unique blend of city-building, survival, and intense moral storytelling within a frozen, post-apocalyptic setting. In 2024, the highly anticipated sequel Frostpunk 2 garnered huge sales and even more critical acclaim, and recently, 11 Bit Studios announced that in 2027 they will release Frostpunk 1886, a ground up remake of the original game in Unreal Engine 5.
The Frostpunk universe’s story begins like this:
In the summer of 1886, the snowstorms began. Crops failed, people starved. Millions fled south. They met only chaos, famine, and death. In the farthest reaches of the resource-rich north, the British Empire began construction of heat-bearing generators, where a chosen few could survive safe from the chaos of crumbling civilization. They ran out of time. An apocalyptic ice storm came from the south, devouring all in its path. People fled in panic. Some managed to cross the seas and reach the site of a generator only to find it frozen solid. The generator was designed to power a city capable of weathering the end of the world… It falls to us to build it.
The Kickstarter for Frostpunk 1886: the Graphic Novel launches this summer featuring exclusives and will be followed by retail distribution through Simon and Schuster and Lunar Distribution.
There’s more coming from Rocketship, but we’ll leave that for another post, because how much news can you take in one sitting?
