ROKiT Comics made an appearance at San Diego Comic-Con to show off exclusive comics and their upcoming projects. The company covers not only printed media but animated motion comics and streaming as well. ROKiT also opened itself up to pitches at the event, taking ideas from the public during a panel.

San Diego Comic-Con was home to many exciting new comic announcements spanning superheroes, new IPs, and more, and ROKiT was no different. The company has expanded into many different creative areas, evolving off the page and onto the screen. The company's panel was focused on ROKiT Flix, a new free-of-charge streaming service that features a myriad of 2D animation, motion comics, and more. There are several exciting new projects fans can look forward to from ROCKiT, like the animated Holmes & Houdini and an exploration of classic stories that have entered the public domain.

Related: 25 Biggest Movie & TV Reveals From SDCC 2023

Screen Rant sat down with ROKiT representative Jody Bennett, editor-in-chief Charlie Kendrick, and director of VO Zac Cantin to discuss upcoming projects, transitioning from comics to animation, and San Diego Comic-Con.

Team RoKiT Talks Comic Pitches

Screen Rant: We are at Comic-Con 2023, and I'm with Jody, Charlie, and Zac from ROKiT. You guys have a great comic book line that's out.

Jody Bennett: Yes, these are our Comic-Con exclusives. We've got a sampler, we've got The Foil, which is Miles Chamley-Watson, who's an American fencing champion, and that's his Michael Jordan in the '90s cartoon series. And then the Ever Gross Duo written by Eric Phillip Kowski, who does like South Park and SpongeBob and some other weird stuff.

The Duo is about one guy who can become two, but to do that, he literally has to rip himself apart into two. There's blood and gore, and everyone freaks out, and the villains are like, "We're taking over the bank." And so to turn himself, he has to rip himself apart. Super gross.

Charlie, you are the editor-in-chief of these comics. Talk to me about what you're looking for, with new ideas for some of these comics, in expanding ROKiT's comic line.

Charlie Kendrick: Original stories are definitely an important thing, but today there are so many ideas that feed on from each other, so it's difficult to find a completely original story.

What's important to me is a clear story, and if you can write a story clear enough for it to translate to an artist, so a comic book artist, so that they can literally capture what you have in your head, because your words are reliant, they're relying on your words to be able to get everything that you see in your mind onto paper. It's a clear story with a clear and authentic voice. That's really what's important to me is the storytelling.

You guys are also diving into motion comics, and that's where you come in, Zac. Talk to me about how you guys are doing your motion comics. Because you also handle with the help of the voice acting stuff, correct?

Zac Cantin: Yeah, I direct and also act in a lot of this stuff, and it's similar to animations, but we get to use comic books, and just adapt those to the screen to be able to watch. And so that means sound effects and music and voice acting.

Similar to Charlie, I love when people have a good story and good characters because it makes it much easier for us as voice actors to come up with characters to do, and how to bring that to life and really encapsulate what you might be imagining in your head, as you read a comic, but without having to imagine it yourself.

What's the biggest challenge in adapting an actual comic book and making it a motion comic?

Charlie Kendrick: The time and the constant direction. There's so much more that comes into it. It's the VO, and then it's also the actual technology animators taking the layers that have been done, that have been drawn, to motionize them, and I suppose the direction I'm telling them what sound effects to use, how to motionize it, so it correlates properly, and flows on properly as a story.

Because it is kind of creating a little movie, it's making the comic book into a movie. So everything needs to move forward like a movie. And there's so much to that. It's the VO, it's the timing, it's the pacing, it's the sound effects and the music. Music has a huge, huge part of creating the atmosphere.

You guys are doing ROKiT Flix, which is your new streaming platform. You were doing open pitches. Can you talk about some of the pitches you got?

Jody Bennett: Yeah, I think we can. A lot of them were really good. We got a lot of original creative ideas right out the gate. This duo came out with this time travel pitch that started crazy, and it was really hard to follow, but slowly came together, and you're like, oh my God.

And we're all looking at each other. As soon as this girl's done talking, we're going to give her a green card. We had the green and yellow cards. So that was wonderful out of the gate. And then there were some weirder ones.

The thing that I loved was, it was like, you've got these really nervous, quiet people that are like, I feel like, as nerds, we all are at some point, and they're like, they get up to the mic and they're just speaking real quiet, but the idea is really good, and be more confident in that. Yeah, it was really fun.

Can people reach out to you guys and pitch ideas beyond Comic-Con?

Jody Bennett: Yes. We have ROKiT Animation All-Stars. That's our website.

Zac Cantin: ROKiTanimationallstars.com.

Jody Bennett: They can submit anything there.

What can people expect from ROKiT Flix?

Jody Bennett: ROKiT Flix is our sort of big push app. It's got a lot of our public domain comics that we motionize, our original comics that we motionize, a lot of our animation content, for family-friendly cartoons, and all sorts of stuff.

And then our comics and our more adult stuff. We've got some stuff coming soon for that. I don't know if we're allowed to talk... Mike, are we allowed to talk about that? All right, we're going to have more of an adult section for the duo, and we have a Holmes and Houdini, which is like a teaming up of the two, solving murders and stuff, against Jack the Ripper. So there's going to be way more adult content on that, more mature stuff.

You also mentioned public domain stuff. Can you dive into that, and talk about that a little bit?

Jody Bennett: Jonathan Kendrick, our own Stan Lee, our leader, our founder, he loves those classic, Golden Age stories, and so a lot of those in the public domain. So that's how this whole motionize thing started, is we took those comics, and we started motioning them, making them into cartoons.

Because some of them are really fun. Some of them are definitely super weird.

Zac Cantin: Hilariously bad.

Jody Bennett: But we were having a great time. And then we're just like, we can keep doing this.

Submit your pitch to RoKiT here.