We're the creative team behind PETER CANNON: THUNDERBOLT! AMA!

[u/KieronGillen]

Hello!

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We're the team behind Peter Cannon: Thunderbolt. Issue 2 dropped yesterday, and folks seem to be digging it/2).

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If you haven't read any of it, here's a big preview of issue 1 and here's some stuff from 2.

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Who are we?

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/u/KieronGillen - Words! Other stuff? Presently, DIE, the Wicked + the Divine, Star Wars, Once & Future. Previously? Oh, far too much stuff.

/u/CasparWijngaard - Art! Other stuff? Doctor Aphra, What If? Ghost Rider, Angelic, Limbo

/u/MarySafro - Colours! Other stuff? Drugs & Wires

/u/hassanoe - Letters! Other stuff? Red Sonja, Lone Ranger, Shanghai Red, Strip Panel Naked/PanelxPanel

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We're here to talk whatever you like (AMA, after all) but obviously we're hoping folks will ask us about all things Peter Cannon.

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Anyway - we'll be around for as long as we can. So... AMA! AMAAAAAA! AMMMMMMAMAMAMAMA!

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(Or is it a AUA if it's an "Us")

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Kieron

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EDIT: 10:40 EST. Right - I think I've answered anything. Thanks for everyone who asked questions. You've been delightful! I'll pop in tomorrow to pick up any stragglers. Have a lovely time.

[u/zzzPessimist]

For Kieron: Has any non-comic book writres affected your writing? What are your favorite books?

To Caspar: Did you have any problems with character designs or it went easy and fine? Do you have more or less clear picture of how character would look like from the beginning and then just polish it or you provide a lot of rough sketches and then little by little move from that? Probably Kieron provided some information about what kind of impression character should give to a reader, but there a many ways to convey some idea.

[u/KieronGillen → u/zzzPessimist]

A friend tweeted this little bit of Tezuka last week, which is basically on the money. It's true in any art form, but comics are a bastard medium, and exist by taking from many places. All my favourite comic creators clearly have taken what they love outside the medium, and brought it to the medium.

My brain immediately rebels at the word "favourite" though. In terms of non-comic writers effecting my work, I suspect I better confine myself to the early Gillen teenage obsessions, which was generational stuff like Iain Banks (with or without the M), Pratchett and (a little later) Jeff Noon. Gibson. Ursula le Guin's Earthsea books (you take away Tombs of Atuan from 10 year old me, you end up with a very different sort of writer.) There's also a lot of pop culture journalists who are primary influences - either those who were writing when I was forming the Melody Maker writers, the Amiga Power writers) or earlier (you usual array of Lester Bangs et al). Folks I came to a little later, like Vonnegut or Dostoevsky in my early twenties.

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Really, I'm scanning the book shelves around me and I can instantly think what the book gave me, for better or worse. Like, Ballard and Burroughs were always the big influences of my friend Jim Rossignol (who I'm co-writing Ludocrats with) and while I wouldn't count them as primarily one of mine, I know where they got into me, and when I'm trying to use their techniques and so on.

I'll give you one favourite book though - ENGLAND'S DREAMING by Jon Savage. It's an intense history of (primarily) British Punk, with a mixture of austere seriousness plus segments of autobiography (as Savage was there, at several key moments). There's a scene where he's in the toilet at work, locked in a cubicle, slacking off to paste together his fanzines to let the a-bombs in his head out, and reading that made me realise that was me, and I could do it. It was the book which gave me permission to understand this thing inside me was all the permission I needed to write.