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Kieron Gillen

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Kieron Gillen

Biographical information

Nationality

British

Career

Occupation

Writer

Official website

gillen.cream.org

"I've always been interested in how the antagonists and villains work, and what makes people bad, and all these kinds of things."

―Kieron Gillen^[1]

Kieron Gillen is aBritish comic-book author and former video game and music journalist.

As a video game journalist, Kieron Gillen is most famous for being the co-founder ofRock Paper Shotgun,^[2] and authoring the "New Game Journalism manifesto."^[3]^[4]

Gillen's first comic-book project was the2006 Image Comics seriesPhonogram, drawn by regular collaboratorJamie McKelvie. In2009, Gillen began writing for Marvel Comics. He has written forThor (volume 3),Uncanny X-Men (volumes 1 and 2) andIron Man (volume 5). His most popular work for the company wasJourney into Mystery, focusing on the misadventures of Kid Loki, and the subsequentYoung Avengers (volume 2), drawn by McKelvie. Gillen and McKelvie are currently collaborating on another creator-owned comic published by Image,The Wicked + The Divine.

Biography[]

Star Wars: Episode VThe Empire Strikes Back was the first film Gillen ever saw at the cinema, and he compared its impact on him to that ofTolkien.^[1] As a journalist, Gillen wrote a highly enthusiastic review ofStar Wars: Knights of the Old Republic,^[5] which he described as reigniting his love of the saga, having played mediocreStar Wars games that were given more positive write-ups for simply beingStar Wars, or fans who were "cursingGeorge Lucas' name only to—a handful of months later—go out and buy the DVD anyway 'for the extras.'" He later wrote, "Star Wars isn't great because it'sStar Wars.Star Wars is great because it is Great. AStar Wars that isn't Great isn'tStar Wars in any meaningful way."^[6]

OnJanuary 9,2019, Gillen revealed that after the May 2019 release of thesixty-seventh issue of theStar Wars comic-book series, he would leave theStar Wars universe to embark on other projects because he had told all the stories he desired.^[7]