Micronauts
Robot Roulette | Cullen Bunn
Welcome back for another round of Robot Roulette, where creators spin the virtual roulette wheel and let Lady Luck determine what questions they’ll answer. We’ve got 36 possible questions, and each week I will select at random which of those questions our guest is subjected to.
This week our guest is Cullen Bunn, who is having a really great weekend at the New York Comic Con. You know him from comics like The Damned (coming soon to Showtime), The Sixth Gun (coming soon to NBC, with a spin-off miniseries coming next year), Deadpool Killustrated (coming from Marvel) and Helheim (coming from Oni Press).
My thanks to Cullen for answering my questions … now let’s get to it. He asks for music recommendations at the end, so be sure to leave yours in the comments section.
Comics A.M. | Belgian court won’t ban Tintin in the Congo
Tintin in the Congo
Legal | A Belgian court has rejected a five-year-old bid by a Congolese student to have the 1946 edition of Herge’s Tintin in the Congo banned because of its racist depictions. “It is clear that neither the story, nor the fact that it has been put on sale, has a goal to … create an intimidating, hostile, degrading or humiliating environment,” the court said in its judgment. Bienvenu Mbutu Mondondo, who launched the campaign in 2007 to ban the book, plans to appeal. [The Guardian]
Publishing| John Rood, DC’s executive vice president of sales, marketing and business development, discusses the results of the New 52 readership survey, noting right of the bat that it’s “not indicative of the actual system wide performance,” which makes you wonder what it’s good for. He has some interesting things to say about bringing back lapsed readers and the demographics of DC readers in general, though. [Publishers Weekly]
Six by 6 by Sixth Gun | Cullen Bunn’s six nostalgic dream projects
Editor’s note: In our continuing series of posts by the creators of Oni’s The Sixth Gun, writer Cullen Bunn shares his creative side and his childhood in today’s special edition of Six by 6.
by Cullen Bunn
This is an exercise in nostalgia for me. My collaborator on The Sixth Gun, Brian Hurtt, suggested this topic, and he said he could probably guess the projects I’d mention. Anyone who talks to me long enough will have a pretty good idea of the books that meant a lot to me during my formative years. Hell, you might think most of my comic book influences came out of one of those Whitman 3-packs so prevalent in Piggly Wiggly and Stuckey’s in the 70s. Well, you might be right. I think every comic creator has a list of a dozen or so books they’d love to work on. Here are just a few of the titles I’d love to take a crack at reinventing or re-imagining. I could easily create a second (and maybe a third) list of six projects I’d love to tackle. Rom: Spaceknight … Scare Tactics … Blackwulf … Warlock 5 … The list goes on and on … but the following list are the dream jobs that pop most readily into my skull.
Keep in mind, this isn’t about blowing anyone away with these notions. It’s about daydreaming.
The Micronauts
Easily my pick for favorite comic book of all time. I credit The Micronauts with getting me into collecting comics … not just reading, but really collecting. I can remember the first day I stumbled onto an issue of the book very clearly … from picking it up at the grocery store to reading it a dozen or so times in the back room of my dad’s office. For a comic about a line of toys, The Micronauts (like ROM: Spaceknight) tore past its humble origins into something really special. Of course, I would almost kill to write their story.