Ignition Press’ pavilion at San Diego Comic-Con 2026 was jam packed with top comic talent. Writer Leah Williams was on hand to discuss Voyeur, the creator’s steamy art heist tale with artistDavid Baldeón, coloristEva de la Cruz, and lettererAndworld Design.
The Beat chatted with Williams during the show.
DEANNA DESTITO: How has Comic-Con been for you?
LEAH WILLIAMS:I don’t like San Diego Comic-Con. I feel like every time I go onto the convention center floor, it’s a sensory nightmare of the hellscapes of late-stage capitalism; people fighting for exclusive Squishmallows is a horror that I never knew existed until I was invited to San Diego Comic-Con. That’s all the more reason why I love Ignition Press for having this off-site location where we can actually have conversations and talk about comics, and there’s air conditioning and stickers and snacks and water. It’s one of the things that I love most about Ignition Press, that they understand humans are humans. We have needs like water, gas, bathroom, food, the usual things.
DESTITO: Well, it’s funny because we were at Hall H last night and they were like, you can leave once for the bathroom. We’d been in there for 6 hours.
WILLIAMS:I mean, there’s better conditions in certain prisons than having a mandated singular bathroom break. That’s insane.
DESTITO: Yeah, it’s a little wild in there. So this pavilion is pretty sweet.
WILLIAMS:Well, exactly as I just discussed, they have a very human approach. And because it’s kind of in the mission statement of Ignition Press to support creators, it is their belief, their mission statement, that by supporting us and encouraging us to thrive in all of the basic ways first, like, you know, a living wage, we’re being paid and feeding us and making sure that we’re comfortable and feel safe. It is their belief that doing this helps us produce better stories, and I think it’s absolutely working, and it’s evident in the line of titles that they have on shelves right now.
DESTITO: You have a pretty expansive career. You’ve worked for a lot of different companies, big and small. What is your preferred way to work? Do you like the smaller books, the smaller stories, or do you like more sweeping epics?
WILLIAMS:Well, I’m drawn to comics because I think working within a collaborative medium is the closest experience to magic that I’m ever going to have. It’s that sort of creative excitement when you’re working with other people who have the same vision of the book in their heads that you do. That’s the high I’m going to be chasing for the rest of my life, and that’s something that I fortunately have been able to find at Marvel and DC and with Ignition Press.
I’ve had the incredible fortune of working with really amazing editors along the way. I will say there’s a distinct difference in the parts of my brain that are being used, like working on my own stuff. The difference— I would compare it to working with work-for-hire licensed stuff, Marvel, DC, Dynamite, IDW, that kind of thing. It is like going to the gym. It’s where I go to get strong. It’s where I work out. It’s where I improve as a writer. And because I have to work under immense pressure, shorter deadlines, and a faster turnaround for the print schedule, being able to pull that off feels like I’m capable of anything.
Whereas working on my own creator-owned comics for the very first time—have you ever seen those viral videos of puppy mill puppies touching grass for the first time, seeing the sky for the first time, and understanding, oh, this is how big the world is? That’s the kind of experience that I’m having telling my own stories for the first time, where it is kind of intimidating. And you freeze out of fear because which direction do you go in when it’s all open to you? So it’s definitely a different learning curve, and having to ask myself questions when there are no guardrails telling me, okay, this is what we do when Superman shows up at a comic, you know, that kind of thing, making those choices on my own.
It’s been a really interesting learning experience in that way, and trying to develop my own voice. But thankfully, I’m working with David Baldeón, who I’ve worked with, I think, seven out of my eight years in comics. It feels like we’ve grown up together. We met at Marvel when they randomly paired us onGwenpool Strikes Back, and we just had such a great time because he’s also a restless tinkerer. We keep improving and improving until we find the one true north of something. We kept requesting to work together again and again at Marvel, then at DC, and now with this book. So I was able to kind of get through my fear and feeling vulnerable telling my own stories for the first time because I was being encouraged by Ignition Press and because I was working with David. He feels like a safe space to me.
DESTITO: So let’s talk about your book with Ignition.
WILLIAMS:So it’s called Voyeur, and it’s a spicy art heist. I wanted to write a crime romance, but kind of the personal statement behind it and why Ignition Press was really rooting for me to tell this story, I wanted to tell a love story between two kind of traumatized people who are learning what their new happily ever after would look like. And the reason why I wanted to tell that story is so that I could start to imagine such a thing for myself.
I used to be in an abusive relationship, and I’m only now getting to the point where I can talk about what happened to me. And it’s like, you know, the bruises fade, the violence of it creates an architecture in your brain that, after a certain time, started to feel like a cage. It was getting in the way of my writing. And I knew, I’m so afraid of telling a kind of steamy love story and being seen writing romance. Nothing terrified me more, and it’s because of that trauma. So I was like, I need to work through this, because if I can provide catharsis for my characters, then I can do the same for myself. And I think that’s why art is so healing. It allows us to model behaviors and imagine new ways of living, new ways of telling stories so that we can reconnect to our humanity.
DESTITO: So this was very much a healing book for you.
WILLIAMS:It genuinely was. Which sounds crazy to say because it’s like a smutty crime book.
DESTITO: Whatever works.
WILLIAMS:Whatever gets you there, right? But I think also just because of the context of Ignition Press, really encouraging us to thrive and explore our voices and that kind of thing, I felt safe exploring it and telling those kinds of stories.
DESTITO: Do you have something coming up that you’re allowed to talk about or tease?
WILLIAMS:Not yet, but we’ve already kind of teased on panels that I am working with them again on my next book for them. It’s going to be a cyberpunk horror book about a headless woman, and it is the darkest story I’m ever gonna tell, but it’s coming from the same place as Voyeur. So that’s what we’re doing now, working through the wrath of it all.
DESTITO: I did a panel a couple of days ago, and we were talking about women in comics and being in this space where it’s always notoriously historically been more male-dominated. How do you feel as a woman coming in there?
WILLIAMS: One of the things that I love most about Ignition Press is, and this was how I was treated from the outset, they didn’t treat me like a man. They treated me like a woman who is their equal. And now that I’ve had that experience, and of course at DC I have the distinct pleasure of working with so many brilliant women at DC, I know what my standards are. I have raised my bar of professional etiquette and how I expect to be treated because I’ve lived it now. And it actually started with Jonathan Hickman at Marvel during our Krakoa and X-Men days, and having a room full of my comics heroes— Jonathan Hickman, Si Spurrier, Gerry Duggan, Zeb Wells, Ben Percy. And, you know, of course, Tini Howard and Vita Ayala, who became my best friends through that experience and now are the other two-thirds of my soul.
DESTITO: I love Vita, by the way.
WILLIAMS:God, I wish they were here. I love Vita so much. They’re just the best. And knowing Vita and knowing how they move through the world and are very community-oriented, that’s how I learned it. And it started with Krakoa and just knowing what it’s like to kind of be in the same room with similarly minded people passionate about comics, passionate about humans telling stories. It’s just been a joy.
Stay tuned to The Beat for more news from SDCC ’26.
