Acclaimed comics writer James Tynion IV is expanding his Tiny Onion brand into an independent production house. Tynion, who will be CEO and founder of the new venture, is a five-time Eisner Award and 10-time GLAAD Media Award nominee. He’s known for his run on DC’s Batman and a string of hit indie comics series, including Something is Killing the Children, The Department of Truth, The Nice House on the Lake, and W0RLDTR33.
“Over the last 12 years, I've watched the comics industry from the inside,” said Tynion in a statement. “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.”
Joining Tynion on the Tiny Onion team are former Boom! Studios executive editor Eric Harburn (a PW Star Watch nominee in 2023) as director of editorial; Courtney Menard, formerly of Z2 Comics, as director of production; and indie publicist Jazzlyn Stone as director of communications. Together, they will form a full-service independent editorial and design team to help bring likeminded creators to market at comics publishers and beyond.
At Boom!, Harburn edited not only Tynion’s breakout hit, Someone is Killing the Children, but Keanu Reeves Brzrkr series and the Eisner nominated The Many Deaths of Laila Starr. He left Boom to join Tiny Onion, but will continue to oversee Tynion’s titles at Boom!, Dark Horse Comics, and elsewhere.
Speaking with PW, Harburn made it clear that Tiny Onion is not a publisher, although it maintains partnerships with several publishers, including an imprint at Dark Horse and a series of titles with Image Comics. Instead, the company functions more as a book packager, managing Tynion’s creations and working with other creators on their projects.
“We specialize in genre storytelling. Our roots are in comics, but we have plans for the larger media landscape,” Harburn said. “Essentially, we want to take a step back, and look not just at the comics industry right now, but at five or ten years in the future, and support the creators who will be making stories for those audiences.”
Tiny Onion will announce its first projects in a few months, but until then, its team is thinking broadly. “Right now, we can be idealistic and develop these stories for the way we feel they would be most successful,” Harburn noted. “If we ultimately think a property is best for animation versus live action, or even for audio, we have the ability to go do that, rather than trying to shoehorn a story into whatever’s the hottest lane.”
Comics readers are everywhere worldwide, Harburn pointed out, and available in many channels, from print to digital – a development Tiny Onion want to take advantage of. “We want to be able to make stories for those readers wherever they find their stories,” he added. “We’re trying to approach this in a new way and build a new system.”
Tiny Onion is backed by a seed investment from production and development company Lyrical Media, and will be repped by UTA, which handles both Tynion and Lyrical. Someone is Killing the Children, the horror/mystery series cocreated with artist Werther Dell'Edera, is currently in development as a series at Netflix.
