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 Thank you for listening to My Perfect Console. Please consider becoming a Patreon supporter; your small monthly subscription will help to make the podcast sustainable for the long term, and you'll receive bonus content, and access to the My Perfect Console community: https://www.patreon.com/myperfectconsole Become a My Perfect Console supporter and receive a range of benefits at www.patreon.com/myperfectconsole Take the Acast listener survey to help shape the show: My Perfect Console with Simon Parkin Survey 2025 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.