Oni Press Announces Five New Titles From Open Submission Policy

Last year, Oni Press opened their submission policy to anybody interested in pitching, and was inundated with over 2,500 creators seeking to have their work published by Oni. This weekend at Emerald City Comic Convention, Oni announced five of the books that will be published thanks to this initiative

The first comic to be published via Oni’s open submission initiative was Natalie Riess’ Space Battle Lunchtime, which is released next month. There are plans to publish ten titles in total as a result of the initiative, with four more to be announced at a later date.

In an announcement at Publisher’s Weekly, Oni’s editors talked about the process that went into selecting the comics, and how they'd spent every Friday for months pouring over submissions, whittling down the list to just ten titles.

The new wave of titles will be led by Jonathan Hill’s The Searchers, which is about three Asian-American siblings searching for their mother in the wave of an earthquake and will be released across two volumes in 2017 and 2018. Mat Heagerty and Tintin Pantoja’s Unplugged & Unpopular is about a girl without access to modern technology who is the only person aware Earth is being invaded by aliens, and will be released in 2018.

Daniel Barnes and DJ Kirkland’s The Black Mage tells the story of the first black student at a wizarding school and will be released as a miniseries in 2018. Podi, by Navin Ratnayake, Deshan Tennekoon, and Isuri Merenchi Hewage is about three children who shrink to ant-size, and Pilu of the Woods, by Mai K. Nguyen is about a young girl who befriends a woodland spirit and both books will be released as original graphic novels in 2018.

Oni do plan to do another open submission process, but not for another two years due to the amount of work it takes to go through every submission compared to how many editors they have on staff. However, they are eager to do it again, with Oni senior editor Charlie Chu describing the process as “a brute force way of shocking our pool of incoming pitches and creators”.