Cullen Bunn is busy. The writer’s list of credits runs the gamut for publishers such as Marvel and DC to Dynamite, Oni Press, and more. Now, Bunn has found a home with Ignition Press.
We chatted with Bunn at the Ignition Pavilion at San Diego Comic-Con 2026.
CULLEN BUNN:Every time I come to San Diego, I tell myself this is the year I’m gonna relax at San Diego Comic-Con. I’ve just got to accept that I lie to myself every year when I say that.
This year is different for me because I’ve been mainly with Ignition Press. In the past, I’m always bouncing around, but yeah, I’ve made the Ignition Pavilion my home, so that’s nice, but it’s still no less busy.
DEANNA DESTITO:How has that been different for you though, having that home base?
BUNN:I mean, honestly, it’s strange. It’s a good feeling, and it’s also a scary feeling, right? So in the past, when I came to San Diego Comic-Con, I had an agenda, like a piece of paper that’s like, okay, I have to go meet this editor at DC, I have to track down this editor at Marvel, Dark Horse. And now, I mean, Ignition is my home for my next several series. It’s set, so I don’t have to do that. I don’t have to do all that bouncing around, which is nice. But when you work in comics, that’s also a scary feeling because, should I still be bouncing around? You get to meet so many people outside of the con floor, too. It’s not like I’m completely dissing all those folks. I’m still meeting everyone. It’s just at a different pace.
DESTITO:So we at the Beat have a joke about how prolific you are.
BUNN:Everybody’s got that joke.
DESTITO:It’s a loving joke because we love you, but we’re like, how does he have the time?
BUNN:Five pages a day.That’s all it takes. Five pages a day. But it’s every day. And five pages a day is not comfortable to me anyway. I mean, that’s a very slow pace for me.
DESTITO:Really?
BUNN:I know that if I can just do five pages a day, I can make everything work. But I don’t like that pace. It’s too slow. I think I am probably faster than a lot of writers, although I know a lot of writers who are much, much faster than me on a single issue. But I think the thing is, I don’t ever want an aspiring creator to think I’m encouraging someone to work at my pace, because your pace is your pace. It’s what makes you feel comfortable, right? But I get up at 5 o’clock in the morning, and I go to work, and I work until 6 or 7 at night every day.
Now I’m lucky I work in comics, so I’ve got flexibility. My wife wants to go to lunch? Sure, we’re going to go to lunch. I’m gonna spend some time with my kid. We’re gonna do that. But I make that time up somewhere. And it’s just, that’s the pace. I just don’t feel good if I’m not doing it. It’s what I like to do; it’s what makes me feel comfortable. And that’s what you have to find, I think, is what’s gonna make you feel comfortable. I genuinely just love to sit and work on comics.
DESTITO:There’s a bit of a discipline, too. Like you’ve conditioned yourself to get up at this time and put this time in. Did it take you a bit to get there?
BUNN:It did, but what helped was I was working as a director of marketing for a company while I was breaking in. So my first several series that I was working on, I was doing those at night. But I learned that the job I had was demanding, and I was there a lot. So I was like, this is my pace, and this is my schedule. When I went into comics, I just said, I’m not going to treat it as a hobby. It’s not a hobby. I’ve got to treat it as my job. I just kept sort of an aggressive schedule, and honestly, I blew it out a little bit more because suddenly I’m really enjoying what I’m doing.
DESTITO:So it’s work and fun.
BUNN:Yeah, it’s work and fun. But also I know with clarified certainty that one day this all goes away, and I want to do as many stories as I can until it goes away. I’m gonna work like hell to make sure it doesn’t, but I’ve always kind of had this feeling, and I’ve seen it happen to many other creators who have long and storied careers, and then suddenly they’re gone, and that terrifies me.
I think the drive will keep me working. And then also when it does go away for whatever reason, which I hope it never does, I’ll at least look back and say, hey, I did my level best, and I told all the stories I could up until that point.
DESTITO:Do you consider yourself a genre writer, or do you feel like there are stories in other places that are still brewing?
BUNN:There are definitely stories in other places I like, but— and I used to avoid that whole, I’m a horror writer. I used to avoid it because I didn’t want some publisher who had a science fiction story not to consider me or think of me.But these days, yeah, I’m a horror writer. That’s what I do. I’m a horror writer, and sure, I’ll do some other things that maybe aren’t full-on horror, right? But, you know, I think about like Deadpool Kills the Marvel Universe, for instance. That’s a horror book. It’s Deadpool in a horror setting, so there’s a lot I can do that’s horror or horror adjacent. If the opportunity arises and something I love comes along, I’m gonna maybe pursue something that’s not horror, right? But most of my stuff’s going to be horror or horror adjacent for sure.
DESTITO:I mean, the good thing about horror is that there are so many subgenres and it does lend itself to that mashup.
BUNN:I love all the different flavors, right? There’s stuff I like about all of that.
DESTITO:So let’s talk about what you have with Ignition.
BUNN:So Deluge, that was my first Ignition Press book. It was one of the first two or three books they published. It is about a women’s correctional facility that is built on a floodplain, and it floods, and it floods so rapidly that they don’t have time to get the inmates out before the waters start rising. So as they are evacuating the inmates and the guards and they’re ferrying them out on boats to get them on buses, something really awful comes up in the water, and it turns into a survival siege story as they’re trapped in this building that is made to keep them inside. It was a five-issue— well, five issues plus a zero issue.
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DESTITO:How was it working with Marika Cresta?
BUNN:She’s great. I feel like Deluge was a big, sort of unexpected challenge in that what I wasn’t thinking about was everybody in the prison all wearing the same clothes. She had sort of a challenge of having to figure out ways to differentiate the characters, and it’s a big cast. So it was definitely sort of a challenging series, I think. But she just nailed it. And in fact, we’re working on our next Ignition Press book together right now, which I’m not allowed to— I got the stink eye when I almost mentioned it a few days ago. But yeah, she’s deep into the next series, and I think she’s great. She’s one of those artists, like so many artists, they just get better and better and better every issue.
DESTITO:What about Ripcord?
BUNN:Ripcord is a grindhouse horror adventure. It is the story of a woman whose sister vanishes in the Australian outback. She sets out to find her sister. She runs afoul of addicts of this new drug called Ripcord that is just turning people into rage-filled mad people. Very violent. But she also runs afoul of the drug dealers who are producing that drug. She goes on a very, very violent adventure in order to find her sister, and somewhere along the way she finds a Gatling gun that shoots railroad spikes, and she puts that to good use.
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DESTITO:That seems like it’d be handy in that situation.
BUNN:Yeah, she finds it. It’s sort of this strange quasi-mythic weapon that she finds, this giant Gatling gun that shoots spikes that are that long. And if you can imagine the kind of violence that would inflict on a human body. It’s drawn by Aneke who is known in my mind, when I first was introduced to her, she’s known for drawing these beautiful people and beautiful stories, and she has just gone all in on the violence and the grotesquity of this story. Awesome.
DESTITO:What about Cult-de-Sac?
BUNN:So this is my newest series. It comes out in a couple of weeks. The first issue comes out, but Ignition has released the zero issue here at San Diego Comic-Con. This is a story I think a lot of people will understand or can get behind. It’s about a family of four who move into their dream house in a quiet neighborhood, but they start to wonder if their homeowners association might be evil. And in this case, they are right. Their homeowners association is a demon-worshipping cult, and their experiences with them start uncomfortable and small, but they get progressively more awful and horrible as it goes along. The first two series are very serious. And Cult-de-Sac is a very dark story, but it’s got a little more of a humorous edge to it.
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DESTITO:Okay, how many issues is this one?
BUNN:It’s gonna be a five-issue series. Yeah, and it’s drawn by Fico Ossio.I worked with him years ago on a story with the Transformers and the Micronauts and G.I. Joe. This is a very different story, and he’s just so great at it. I’m like, this is really where you just need to be. It’s a quieter story in a lot of ways until the moments where it’s not. But he does so much great acting with the characters and things like that.
DESTITO:Do you find being a horror writer hard, especially when trying to get those jump scares right?
BUNN:They’re near impossible.
DESTITO:It really comes down to the page, right? How do you get yourself and work with the artist to make sure that you’re not losing any of that horror when you do it?
BUNN:Well, it’s really all about setting a mood, setting a pace, and really embracing and not rushing into it. Sometimes it’s easy in a comic to want to rush to a monster, let’s rush to the violent moment. But it’s really about taking your time, setting that pace, giving the reader time. This next thing is, in any kind of story, giving the reader time to fall in love with the characters.
Someone years ago told me, you know, you can make just awful mistakes in a comic, but if you can hook the reader on an emotional level first, they’ll forgive almost all of them. So it’s really giving the story time to unfold until the whammy comes, and getting the reader to buy into the world and really connect with the characters, even if they don’t like the character, connect and understand what the character might be going through, or connect in a way that, oh, I hate that person, and they really hate them, but connect on that level.
It can be a challenge, and it’s like I said, with Fico, for instance, just the acting he does with the characters goes a long way to getting you to that point. And the color schemes can help. The atmosphere, everything to build a mood. If I can get the mood set up, that’s the thing. Because I want the story to scare the reader, but it doesn’t have to scare them on a boo level. I want it to scare more on the level of after they’ve read it.
DESTITO: What can you tease about upcoming projects?
BUNN:There is plenty of hush-hush stuff. But you know, I tease. So I am working on another book with Marika Cresta for Ignition. I’m also working on another book with Aneke for Ignition.
Those are not the only two books I’m working on with Ignition. I’m working on a lot of very cool, very different stories with them. I’m also doing another Marvel book that I definitely can’t say anything about, but I’m working on a new Marvel series right now that I don’t know when that’ll even get announced, to be honest, but it’s underway.
DESTITO:Okay, so you’re going to continue the rumor that you’re very prolific?
BUNN:I mean, I know that I’m prolific. I feel like I’ve dialed it back over the years, but yeah, right now my home for creator-owned stuff is Ignition, and thankfully they’ve been very open to me bringing them lots of different ideas, different weird ridiculous stories.
DESTITO:These are all very different stories, which is awesome.
BUNN:Yeah, and the next few are also very different. Some of them have surprised even me that Ignition is willing to take a chance and let me do that. And that just speaks to them. They’re just very open. They’ll tell the stories you want to tell. And it’s easy to say that, but they’ve walked the walk so far with some of these. And I think everything I’ve worked on so far, I get more and more excited about because there are so many different kinds of stories and, like we said earlier, flavors of stories.
Stay tuned to The Beat for more news from SDCC ’26.
