5 Writers Whose Work Was Shaped By Amazing Pre-Comics Careers
The secret origins of comic creators can be just as exciting as their colorful creations.
As with most creative professions, comic creators come from a wide variety of backgrounds and previous forms of employment. Naturally, their past experiences will shape and inform their works. Not everyone can win the lottery of birth by being born a magical master of words and wizardry - not even Alan Moore or Grant Morrison (although the latter was making his own comics as a teenager).
The simple fact of the matter is that, before breaking into comics, the vast majority of creators had to work banal nine to five jobs.
Most of these pre-comic gigs were fairly uninteresting. There were a lot of internships, a lot of people working in comic shops or other forms of retail and a lot of people writing or illustrating in a non fictional capacity. While most of these creators have worked normal jobs like most readers, some of these creators have astonishing and unexpected pasts.
Subjects like a child who can hypnotize adult minds, an unassuming nerd spying on terrorists in the desert wastelands and a charismatic presenter who escapes death-defying bondage would all make for great comic book characters. It turns out they make for even better comic book creators.
5. Cullen Bunn - World's Youngest Hypnotist
Today Cullen Bunn's name is synonymous with spine-chilling horror comics. Though he has had great success writing mainstream heroes like Deadpool and the X-Men, his creator owned work often focuses on the macabre and bizarre. It is the creed of many writers to write about what they know. It just so happens the bizarre is something Bunn knows very well.
In the 1970s, Cullen's father preformed a in a stage show as The Master of Mesmerism, Franklin Bunn. With a title like that, Franklin Bunn would have felt right at home at Xavier's School for Gifted Children. His act was just as uncanny as his name.
During the show Franklin would hypnotize audience members into doing harmless yet comedic acts. At one point Franklin would turn control of the audience over to Cullen, dubbed the world's youngest hypnotist, who would then trick audience members into lighting a carrot as if it were a cigar.
Franklin would eventually retire from stage performances, but he would still put his skills as a hypnotist to good use. At private past life regression sessions, Franklin would guide individuals through previous lives. During these sessions individuals would often speak in strange accents, or languages they didn't even know. This would serve as the inspiration behind Cullen's 2018 Image series, Regression.