Cullen Bunn on The Hexiles

From Mad Cave

Today we continue with our interview series with Cullen Bunn. We will slowly cover his extremely prolific career. This is our 5th interview together and we will be covering The Hexiles from Mad Cave.

For those unfamiliar: From Cullen Bunn(Harrow County, The Sixth Gun, Night Walkers) and Joe Bocardo (Night Walkers) comes a new tale of Hellish familial horror. Jamison Kreel is dead. Six of his children from six mothers are attending the funeral of a father they never met. Each of the children possesses a different infernal power. These powers, though, come at a terrible price…a price Jamison Kreel has placed upon the heads of his offspring. And the demonic debtors have come to collect.

Austin Allen Hamblin: A funeral is a great story device to bring people together. Was this the way you had originally planned to bring the kids together?

Cullen Bunn: For sure. Not only was this how I always wanted to bring the kids together, but the funeral was also my earliest concept for the book. “A group of young people attend the funeral for a father they didn’t know, only to discover that he had sold their souls to infernal powers” is pretty close to the first words I ever wrote about this series.

AAH: Funerals make most people uneasy. Is that why it worked so well to use in a horror story?

CB: Like most people, I hate funerals. I might take it a step further in that I have a full-blown aversion to them, to the degree that I don’t want one to be held for me when my time comes. I think they are futile attempts to wrap some sort of understanding around something that we are not meant to understand until we’re on the other side of the life/death equation.

Don’t have a funeral for me. Wait until we’re all on the other side and we’ll have a big party as we dance through the flames.

But, yes, I feel like the general sense of unease and guilt and sorrow and discomfort that circles around a funeral heightens the dread of a horror tale.

AAH: The art by Joe Bocardo really sets the tone for the book. How did you end up working with him on this?

CB: Joe and I met while working on another book. When that project wrapped up, I asked him if he’d be interested in working with me on a creator-owned book. I pitched him the general concept, and he loved it, so I developed the full pitch for The Hexiles with him attached.

AAH: The covers for this book really stuck out to me. As a writer how much input did you have on them?

CB: My input on cover images varies from title to title. Sometimes, I might mention something I think needs to be on the cover. More often than not, though (and this is the case with this book), the artist just runs with it. Joe’s covers are striking, and they spring completely from his own twisted imagination.

AAH: I think one of the big things Joe did great was his pacing in the panels. Is that fair to say?

CB: Yeah, I think so. I had worked with Joe on another project, so I knew he was going to do something really special with the panels here. He could

AAH: Making a deal with demons/the devil is something most people say they would never do, but it’s often used in stories. I can totally see why people would make a deal. Was it hard to get inside Jamison’s head and thought process?

CB: Maybe I’ve got morality issues, but Jamison wasn’t difficult to write. In fact, I loved writing him. There’s just something exciting about writing a character who walks in darkness and vileness so naturally.

Now, he does some awful things, the most terrible of which is selling the souls of his own children, so he’s not intended to be likeable.

Interesting, yes.

Fun to write, yes.

Likeable? Never.

AAH: In The Helixes, you again have a large cast of characters, much like many of your other works. Is this something you do intentionally?

CB: I don’t usually set out to create books with large casts. It just sort of happens, I guess. I do like seeing groups of different characters playing against one another, but I’m not trying to make things more difficult for myself! That said, with The Hexiles, I wanted the story to feature several members of a dysfunctional family. I wanted the characters to display unique powers, abilities, and attitudes. That pretty much dictated a larger cast!

AAH: This story gets pretty dark. Was it always meant to be that way?

CB: In terms of subject matter, this story was always barreling toward some dark happenings. There are moments in the book that I thought deserved a trigger warning, and I almost never request such things. When you’re dealing with the demonic, though, it’s bound to turn nasty.

AAH: How can people follow your work?

CB: I have a link tree that will point you to all the places you can follow my work. It is https://linktr.ee/cullenbunn . My website (www.cullenbunn.com) is a great starting point, too. I have a long-running weekly newsletter that I’m pretty proud of. You can check it out at

And I have a video podcast called The Cullenoscopy where I discuss all things horror. You can watch at https://youtube.com/@thecullenoscopy?si=tvCQBDbdkyXZVglQ

AAH: Until next time, reporting from a corn field in Iowa, Austin Allen Hamblin is returning to his cave. Did you know I also write comics? I also do comics journalism for Comic Book Resources. If you are interested in following my work, you can find all that info out here: https://linktr.ee/austinallenhamblin