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Shadow Man's Cullen Bunn talks about becoming a comic book writer

Shadow Man: Remastered scribe Cullen Bunn talks about his journey to comic book writing and what it means to work in the industry today.

Ozzie Mejia

May 12, 2021 5:30 PM

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The writing world is a crowded one and can be difficult to break into. Comic book writing can be seen as a path into over avenues, but just getting into that alone can be a struggle. What does it take to dive into the realm of writing comics? Shacknews was fortunate to get to talk to Shadow Man writer Cullen Bunn, writer on such titles as Deadpool, Venom, and Sinestro, to learn about he got his start in the industry.

"Comics is a collaborative medium," Bunn told Shacknews. "You're always going to rely on other people, unless you're one of those very, very lucky and talented people who can do it all themselves. But, you know, networking's important and, for me, I didn't have the money to travel to a lot of conventions. I was painfully, painfully introverted to the point that even if I were at conventions, I couldn't speak to anybody. And I didn't know how to approach these people about getting into comics. My real break came, I was working at a comic shop and one of my co-workers was an apspiring artist named Brian Hurt and we started talking about me telling stories, and him drawing stories, and we talked about doing comics together. While we were working together, we were talking about doing our own comics. It took about ten years or so to make that actually happen."

Bunn goes into his partnership with Hurt and how it lead to the creation of The Damned and The Sixth Gun, while later diving into his time working with DC, Marvel, and other major comic publishers. He also goes into some of the differences between working with smaller publishers, compared to the big two comic makers. Bunn also goes into the challenges of conveying decades' worth of big comic stories, especially in a landscape where people can more easily see their favorite characters in other mediums.

This is the second part of our recent conversation with Cullen Bunn. Be sure to catch the first part of our interview, which talked about his work on the Shadow Man series. Shadow Man: Remastered is available now on PC. For more interviews just like this, be sure to subcribe to Shacknews and GamerHubTV on YouTube.

Ozzie Mejia

Senior Editor

Ozzie has been playing video games since picking up his first NES controller at age 5. He has been into games ever since, only briefly stepping away during his college years. But he was pulled back in after spending years in QA circles for both THQ and Activision, mostly spending time helping to push forward the Guitar Hero series at its peak. Ozzie has become a big fan of platformers, puzzle games, shooters, and RPGs, just to name a few genres, but he’s also a huge sucker for anything with a good, compelling narrative behind it. Because what are video games if you can't enjoy a good story with a fresh Cherry Coke?