Kieron Gillen, comic book author (Star Wars, X-Men, Iron Man, DIE).

My guest today is an award-winning creator and writer of comic books. Born into a Staffordshire working-class family, he was a student of Applied Biology at Bath University when he started contributing to the prominent computer games magazine Amiga Power. Upon graduation, my guest joined the staff of PC Gamer, then left the magazine to go freelance in 2003.

The following year he published a highly influential manifesto calling for a new mode of first-person, subjective writing about video games that he dubbed New Games Journalism. Two years later, he published his first comic book, Phonogram, which described music as a kind of transformational magic. After founding the PC gaming website Rock, Paper, Shotgun in 2007, my guest left journalism for good to work on comic books, including X-Men, Iron Man, and Star Wars, a series for which he also created the character, Doctor Aphra.

He has continued to work on his own projects, including Wicked + the Divine, Once & Future and DIE, a horror series about tabletop role-playing games for which he received four of his six Hugo Award nominations.

Play the console:

• Dark Sceptre
• X-COM: UFO Defense
• Outcast
• Thief: Deadly Shadows
• Boiling Point

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