Cullen Bunn & Brian Hurtt Interview
Cullen Bunn & Brian Hurtt are the writers and illustrator behind the hit series The Damned by Oni Press.
Recently they spoke to us about their influences and the creative process.
BH: You're currently residing in St. Louis. Chicago, Kansas City & St. Louis all were prosperous cities in the 1930's with an entrenched mob culture. In the case of St. Louis and Kansas City, perhaps the 30's is a golden era of growth for the cities that still contain a lot of nostalgia and cultural currency, how did this nostalgia and history influence your creation of The Damned?
Cullen: I wish I could say the culture and history of St. Louis played a more influential role in the development of THE DAMNED. St. Louis has an amazing history, and there are many things I’d like to write about when it comes to the city. However, with THE DAMNED, I wanted to create a setting that was similar to “our world” but stood out as “someplace else”. That’s one of the reasons we never name the city in which THE DAMNED takes place. It has little pieces of Chicago and L.A. and New York and St. Louis thrown into the mix, and you might see some of St. Louis’ history and culture and landmarks if you’re looking closely. But anything like that is mostly subconscious.
Brian: It’s honestly not something I’d thought about before. I think, like most people, I tend to take my city for granted. It is true that St. Louis has a rich history, it was at one time one of the largest and most booming cities on America along with New York and Chicago. That’s ancient history now, the city is a shadow of it’s former self, and we’re left with areas that reflect that bygone era. Lots of old homes and brick buildings with gorgeous ornamentation (my apartment building was built around the time of the 1904 World’s Fair held just a mile from my current location). So even though it’s not at the forefront of the creative process I’m sure that it has seeped onto my subconscious and affected my work.
BH: How is writing a story intended for comic series or graphic novel, differ for you from a more traditional short story or entirely text-based project?
Cullen: In many ways, writing comics is similar to writing a short story or novel. Character, plot, pacing, dialogue – these things need to be strong regardless of medium. The biggest difference (and the thing that makes comics so much fun for me) is the collaborative aspect. I love working with an artist to bring a story to life. Whenever I see penciled pages for the first time, I get giddy, like a kid on Christmas morning, to see what the artist did with my characters and stories. That’s a thrill that is uniquely comic-related.
BH: You got your start coming into Queen & Country, a project that Was already mostly developed. In contrast, your current project with Cullen Bunn sprouted out of a long term friendship, how would you say your style of working with script authors and your concept of your role on projects has changed over time?
Brian: With the first couple projects I worked on I was so happy to just be working in comics that I tended to show extreme deference for the scripts I worked from. Even though once I got to laying out the books I would find certain panels and such that didn’t work as written. I would defer to the writer and do my best to make it work. As I got my comfortable in my role I began to take any concerns or changes I wanted to make to the editor and writer. I would write out these long explanations for why, for instance, I might want to move a character from the left of a panel to the right of a panel. Or maybe split the action in one panel into two panels for better clarity. Then I finally became comfortable enough in my role as the artist/storyteller to make these small changes without having to run them by everyone. Realizing that it’s my job, and that I’ve been entrusted, to make the storytelling as clear as possible and to do what it takes to make the comic work visually. It really is a collaboration between the writer and artist.
With THE DAMNED the process is much different, more freeing, and much more satisfactory. Cullen and I will discuss very broadly what the beats of the story are. He’ll then go off and write the script alone. But, because we are good friends, and because we built this series from the ground up together, it’s much easier to have a back and forth about story ideas and changes. If I want to add a couple pages to the action just because I have a jones to draw a car smashing through an intersection, then Cullen is open to it. A classic example is in the first series when Eddie fights the giant demon down on the docks. At some point I had drawn a picture of Eddie being hit by a giant fist (it became the cover to issue 2) and I showed it to Cullen. He then took that image and built a while scene around it and it became one of the most memorable scenes of the first series. It’s the first really true collaboration I’ve had in comics and it’s kind of spoiled me for all future projects.
BH: Cullen, What story scared you the most and has stuck with you ever since you encountered it? And how does it influence your work today?
Cullen: The stuff that scared me most as a kid still rattles around in my head, although mostly as fragment memories. Countless scenes from novels or movies, bits of campfire stories, half-remembered nightmares that, even 30 years later, I can’t shake.
The preview for the movie version of The Shining, for example, terrified me. Forget the novel or the movie; when I was a kid, watching Danny Torrence run in silence through that icy maze scared the bejesus out of me.
My childhood was full of strange events. I was definitely one of those kids who believed in magic and
ghosts and things that went bump in the night. My older brothers and sisters told a story about a boy who drowned in a small pond in the woods, and they said he climbed out from the depths and wandered around our farm in the dead of night. A vagrant once lived beneath our house for a week or so, and I watched him crawl out from under the house, pick an apple off a tree, and scurry back into the dark. My dad told a hair-raising yarn about a ghostly woman who haunted a local church and played the piano every night at midnight. I was playing outside one summer afternoon when my brother drove up and told me that UFOs were hovering over the Tasty Freeze downtown. It’s no wonder I grew up the way I did.
The first comic story that scared me was in one of those horror anthologies from the 70s. In the story, a young boy saw a smoke creature rise out of his grandfather’s pipe whenever the old man wasn’t looking. The creature would choke the life out of the old man when he was sleeping, but no one believed the boy’s warnings. Scared me senseless. I wish I could track down that story and see how it compares with my memories of it.
Fiction-wise, some of the work that really scared me includes Jackson’s THE HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE, Lovecraft’s “The Colour Out of Space” and “The Dunwich Horror”, Bloch’s “Notebook Found in a Deserted House,” and King’s PET SEMETERY.
BH: Brian, You've described in previous interviews that you work a lot alone, in isolation. How do you manage time and motivation working on projects when you're alone?
Brian: It’s easy—deadlines. I’m also deathly afraid of letting people down. When I know that there’s a writer, an editor, a publisher and eventually an audience relying on me to get the job done it’s plenty motivating. I actually tend to work best when behind the curve a bit. I’ve found that I’ll kill any lead time on a project by laying in bed for days watching dvds and then when I’m adequately scared that I won’t have enough time to do the project I get to work.
BH: Cullen Could you describe the workflow and working relationship you have with Brian?
Cullen: It would be a heck of a lot easier if Brian wasn’t involved.
I’m kidding, of course.
I couldn’t really ask for a better collaborative experience. Brian and I have a lot of the same storytelling sensibilities, and that goes a long way to making this a fun project.
Brian and I typically spend a lot of face-to-face time brainstorming what we would like to see happen with each story arc, and we have a pretty good plan for the future of THE DAMNED that will take the story to a fairly epic conclusion.
Both of us are so excited about the world we’re messing around with that we’ve had to rein ourselves in from time to time. The original rough story outline for the “Three Days Dead” storyline was insane. It was definitely an “everything but the kitchen sink” event, with both of us throwing in all these great ideas that, in the end, would have never worked well together. During a very bittersweet discussion, we paired it back into a much more sensible story.
For “Prodigal Sons,” I essentially wrote a page-by-page outline for all three issues of the series and gave it to Brian before we sat down to discuss the series. It incorporated some of the ideas we couldn’t use in the first series. The character of Morgan, for example, was intended to appear in “Three Days Dead”. Based on a few brief discussions, I had a pretty good idea of the plot elements we both wanted to tackle, so those showed up in the outline as well. Our brainstorming session for the series went a lot more smoothly.
When it comes to scripting the book, I typically don’t show Brian any script pages until an entire issue is complete. I’m too prone to changing things before the end. Once he gets the script and starts thumbnails, I can expect a few phone calls. Brian may have a question or an idea for a slightly different layout that we’ll need to work through. Many times, something I’ve put in the script will give Brian an idea for some future scene or image, and I file those ideas away for future use.
All in all, it’s a rewarding experience, and it makes writing comics much more enjoyable than writing prose.
BH: Brian, One immediately thinks about film noir and pulp fiction looking at The Damned, what were the actual influences on your artwork for the series?
Brian: It’s hard to say. I don’t consciously seek out material to inspire myself for a project. But I’m sure that I draw on old noir films and moody Fincher-esque films, black and white photography, and whatever it is that is already inside me to inspire me in working on the book. Cullen’s scripts also go a long way towards painting the picture for me as well. The book demands to be drawn a certain way.
BH: Any upcoming work or new developments you'd like to make us aware of?
Cullen: At some point after the “Prodigal Sons” storyline wraps up, Oni will be releasing “Daughter’s Danse,” another three-issue series that serves as a companion piece to the current series. Like “Prodigal Sons,” it’s a story about family, but it’s a lot more twisted and dark. It has more of a mystery vibe … the mystery being one of demonkind’s biggest secrets and biggest fears … and because of the answers that will be uncovered, this will be the most horrific arc so far. Beyond THE DAMNED, I’m working on a balls-to-the-walls horror graphic novel titled THE HOLLOWS. I’ve got a few other projects cooking, but I can’t announce them just yet.
Brian: I have plenty of work to keep me busy for quite a while. Unfortunately, most of it is stuff I can’t announce for one reason or another just yet. Somewhere down the line—hopefully sooner that later—is the 3-issue follow up to Prodigal Sons, tentatively called “Daughter’s Danse”. It’s a sister story in many ways to our current storyline. I’m really excited about doing it and I think in combination with the current arc it will be a fantastic read.
