Award-winning journalist Heidi MacDonald hosted a lively panel on the LitRPG phenomenon during the ICv2 Insider Talks at New York Comic-Con on October 9, 2025. Matt Dinniman, author of the best-selling Dungeon Crawler Carl series, joined Vault Comics EIC Adrian Wassel and Aethon Books owner and President Steve Beaulieu to talk about the genre, which they expect will bring new readers into comic shops (see “Vault and Aethon Execs on LitRPG“).
The audience is already there: Dinniman said that Dungeon Crawler Carl has sold 4.5 million copies in the last two years alone, and the crowdfunding campaign for the Dungeon Crawler Carl: Crocodile graphic novel, which will be published by Vault (see “‘Dungeon Crawler Carl’ Graphic Novel“), has over $1.7 million in pledges so far, with 19 days left in the campaign.
LitRPG, also known as progression fantasy, is a genre that weaves gaming elements into the narrative. Many isekai manga and manhwa have gaming elements, but outside of Asia, LitRPG is found chiefly as novels (particularly ebooks) and audiobooks. Now Vault and Aethon are teaming up to produce LitRPG comics. Vault signed a deal with Aethon in 2023 to bring their novels into comics form and vice versa (see “Vault Partners with Aethon“), and in June 2025, Aethon acquired a majority stake in Vault (see “Vault Sells Majority Stake“). In addition, Webtoon and Tapas have made deals with Aethon to adapt their novels into vertical-scroll comics (see “Webtoon Inks Deal with Aethon” and “Tapas Makes Deal with Aethon“).
While it takes inspiration from RPGs such as Dungeons & Dragons, LitRPG books are narratives, not games. “You actually get to watch the character progress tangibly throughout the series, as opposed to just reading that it happens,” Beaulieu said. “We get to see things like stats, we get to see things like levels up, we get to see the tangible changes in the character. And that ends up being really fun for the reader.”
Dinniman gave an example: “Imagine a story where there’s a character, and he is a level one warrior,” he said. “He knows he’s a level one warrior, he can mentally pop up a stat sheet that says he’s a level one warrior, and his town is being attacked by a level 10 monster, and he’s level one, so he can’t do anything about it. So he goes on an adventure, he gets into fights, levels up when he fights a certain number of monsters, and by the time he’s a level 11, he’s strong enough to go back into town and beat the level 10 monster. The book is that journey, and during that journey, we get to see these things. A lot of people think they’re like Choose Your Own Adventures, and they’re not. They’re straight stories told with those progression elements added into the text.”
Wassell pointed out the appeal it has for comics readers as well. “I fell in love with the genre because it offers expansive universes, much like the universes I fell in love with in comics,” he said. “It was such an easy port for me as a fan and reader of comics who loves these expansive universes filled with brilliant villains and brilliant heroes to fall in love with LitRPG precisely because it offers the same sort of long-form storytelling, where you get to follow multiple characters through thousands and thousands of pages, the equivalent of many, many issues. If you have long-form comic book readers, it is one of the easiest sells imaginable to get them to fall in love with this.”
Dinniman believes that LitRPG is bringing new readers, not just to genre fiction but to books in general. “There’s tons and tons of other LitRPG books out there that are just doing gangbusters,” he said, “and I think one of the main reasons for it is so many people come up to me and say, ‘I haven’t read anything since high school, since I was being forced to read something.’ We’re capturing so many new readers, as opposed to existing readers. And that’s a big thing, because you know how readers are: Once they find something that they love, they become voracious. That’s what’s happened with LitRPG. Now that we’re finally expanding western LitRPG into the comic space, I think it’s just going to blow up.”
Beaulieu explained why audiobooks are an important part of the LitRPG phenomenon: “Every LitRPG Aethon does also has an audio book, because it’s acted out, it’s performed,” he said. “You can do crazy shit, like a talking cat named Princess Donut, and people fall so in love with these characters. And the translation from those characters to the physical, visual format of comics is seamless.”
What’s more, Dinniman pointed out, many new readers come to the genre through audiobooks. “A lot of these people are people who you don’t think of as readers,” he said. “They’re truck drivers. They’re people who work in construction and they’re allowed to have headphones on. A lot of the audio listeners are people who, you know they’ve been listening to podcasts, or they’ve been listening to music, and they finally gotten the chance to listen to listen to something else, and then they fall in love with it.”
“And now they read a book a day,” Beaulieu added.
Dinniman himself came to the genre through audiobooks. “I read comics constantly and edit millions of words of comic scripts a year,” he said. “It’s difficult to find time to sit down and read novels, but I can listen constantly. I can listen when I’m doing dishes. I can listen when I’m doing laundry or walking the dog. That is where I found LitRPG initially, and it was a breakthrough for me, because suddenly I was able to devour as many novels as I was comics. And now, of course, I read them in physical and I’ve made more time.”
Aethon releases the audiobook and the ebook on the same day, something Beaulieu said had never been done before. “Because of that, we were able to gather all the people that had been reading these books, because they were waiting five, six months, maybe a year, sometimes, for the audio books to come out,” he said. “And now I would honestly say that sales are 50-50, 50% readers, 50% listeners, different people, same people. A lot of people buy the same book twice.”
“When Steve and I first started working professionally,” Wassell said, “he talked me through the slate of books, which I then devoured, and explained as we were dreaming up our vision of taking them to print publishing that across our first four seasons at Simon and Schuster, where we distribute to the book trade in the book market, we would be selling books that had sold over 25 million copies combined in ebook and audio. That number is staggering for anyone who works in print.”
“Rewind the clock and imagine three people talking about romantasy and saying, ‘This is an opportunity to bring a voracious fandom and provide them books that they’re screaming for across mediums,'” Wassell said. “That’s what we’re sitting up here and saying about LitRPG.”
Wassell also addressed the impact that the Aethon deal is having on Vault as a publisher. “We get to access a new audience, and who doesn’t want to bring new readers into shops, right?” he said. “I think a constant conversation we have in comics is how do we get new readers in the door, and here is an opportunity to do exactly that – get fans, get kids who grew up reading comics and then stopped and are now reading Dungeon Crawler Carl back into a shop, buying the DCC graphic novel, and then falling in love with comics again.”
As for the company itself, Wassell said, “We’re no longer solely publishing comics and graphic novels and in print. We are also publishing novels, and that is a massive opportunity for Vault… What we see with Vault is a broader horizon as a publisher moving forward that is a publisher of novels, graphic novels and comics. And for me again, the excitement is getting readers to cross over from medium to medium. I think that the contemporary landscape of fandom in 2025 is fans, when they fall in love with a story, they want that story in as many mediums as possible. They want to see it visually. They want to listen to it. They want to watch it on a screen. They want to read it in a chair. And we get to actively build that, for lack of a better word, ecosystem that fans get to live in and love.”
Read more at this site