Tim Seeleyis known for mixing horror, comedy, drama, and more in his storytelling, and his latest work with Ignition Press is no different.
I sat down with Seeley at San Diego Comic-Con 2026 to get more details on what’s out and what’s coming up.
DEANNA DESTITO: How has San Diego been for you this year?
TIM SEELEY:It’s pretty good. Having the Pavilion as a place you can just go, relax, and have a seat changes pretty much everything. Didn’t know that’s what I needed in my life. But I guess I’m getting older; maybe that’s part of it. But it’s great. And then I think what’s great about this one is you see normal people–not everybody who comes to this one or even to this pavilion is specifically hardcore comic fans. They’re just curious. I’m seeing lots of that, which I think is great. So I feel good about where we are in the biz.
DESTITO: Yes, I’ve heard that random people are coming in and buying their first comics here.
SEELEY:Yeah, it’s crazy. And some of these people, they live in San Diego. The show happens all the time. They don’t go in [the convention center]. But having a thing with comics in it outside makes total sense. They’re like, I’m not paying however much it is to go in there, but I’ll take a free coffee and then get introduced to comics and be into it. It ends up working great.
DESTITO: You’ve worked for a bunch of different companies. How has it been working with Ignition Press?
SEELEY:I think I’ve worked for literally everyone. It’s great.Jeremy Haun told me about this idea for this thing, I think 15 years ago.
SEELEY:Jeremy and I are old friends. We’ve known each other for a quarter of a century, literally 25 years. He’s had this idea for how to do this for a really long time. I’m an early adopter, I guess. So for me, I got to see the plan and then the execution. And then the plan included really good friends of mine, like Filip Sablik andJamie Rich. So it’s just a place full of my friends.
DESTITO: Just hanging out.
SEELEY:Yeah, it’s like, hey, I’m with my friends making comics, which is all I really wanted in life. So yeah, it’s pretty great.
DESTITO: So let’s talk about No Place.
SEELEY:I write that one. It’s a dark fantasy story. It’s essentially about the kids who come back from places like Oz and Wonderland, and their lives are ruined because they saw some wonderful fantasy place. No one believes them. But they’re useful to this agency because they can help stop other things. So, long story short, it’s sort of the characters fromThe Wizard of Oz versus Cthulhu monsters.
Stefano Simeone is the artist. It’s a really beautiful book. I wanted it to look like a sort of kids’ book that had gone wrong. It was poisoned, got dark and terrible. And so I think that we kind of pulled that off with it.
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DESTITO: And what about Everyone Loves a Jewel Thief?
SEELEY:Jewel Thief is a book I worked on with Aaron Campbell. Aaron Campbell is an artist, but he’s got a million ideas. Jewel Thief is one of his ideas, and I helped him sort of turn his crazy ideas into a story. But it’s about a guy who is kind of in middle age. This is gonna sound like I’m basing it on myself, but he’s kind of middle-aged; he’s a college professor, and his career is at the point where he needs to do something to sort of reinvigorate it. So he gets the idea that if he does a jewel heist and writes about his own true story, it’ll reinvigorate his career. And unfortunately, he brings in his old D&D buddies as his heist partners. So it’s all these guys sort of living in their teenage years. They think they can still just go back and imagine up a big scheme, and it’s sort of about where life meets reality. We get to see their sort of flashback to their Dungeons & Dragons campaigns with this sort of grim, hard noir crime story about a bunch of idiots messing everything up.
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DESTITO: So what about the new one that The Beat broke? The 12-foot skeleton?
SEELEY:That is about a killer 12-foot skeleton.
DESTITO: That’s it.
SEELEY:That’s it. If I’ve learned one lesson, it’s that you need to have a really quick pitch on stuff. Neither of these books has short pitches. Tall Skeleton though, yes.
The longer version of it is, there’s these two kids on Halloween night, when a 12-foot skeleton from one of these hardware stores has been reanimated, filled with life, and it’s attacking people who don’t decorate enough.
DESTITO: Oh, I love that.
SEELEY:It’s set up kind of like a Halloween special. For research, Aaron and I watched a bunch of Halloween specials going back to the ’80s and stuff, and just how that was like a kid’s story essentially, but it’s got dark stuff. But we made it about something a little bit more than just the fun stuff. It is about that too.
DESTITO: You tend to mix genres. You have your horror, your crime, but you do have a lot of humor in your writing. At least what I’ve read of yours, I’m always laughing at some point. Do you like to mash genres?
SEELEY:I like mashing things in general, I think. But, you know, I think I’m a horror writer first, but I can’t make something just terrible and grim and bleak. I tend to put humor in stuff, but I also think humor and horror are kind of closely related. You go to a good horror movie, and people get scared, then they laugh right after. There’s a relief to it. So both of them, I think, I like because they get instant reactions, which, in a way, you know, an action movie doesn’t necessarily—or a romance, a rom-com or something—doesn’t have this immediate reaction, which I love about horror and comedy too.
DESTITO: You mentioned that you especially like working with Ignition; you know these guys, you have a good rapport with them. How does that affect you when you’re writing in your collaborations? Do you feel like you don’t have to do as much because they can kind of almost read your mind?
SEELEY:Pretty much. I mean, I think there’s something definitely to be said about making something with conflict involved. Some great art has been made by people who didn’t like each other. I can’t say that that’s not true. But there’s a lot more great art made by people who got along and were in sync with each other. And I think, having done this job for quite a long time, my best comics are always the ones that I did with someone who I had some kind of spark with or some kind of rapport or some kind of relationship already.
Because comics are built around that. I mean, even with the reader, you’re building an intimate relationship. You’re saying, I need you to imagine what happened in the gutter. So you’re trusting them. It’s great when you do that with your fellow creators, that you’re basically in the gutter with each other in a metaphorical sort of way.
Stay tuned to The Beat for more news from SDCC ’26.
