The Sixth Gun (series)

The Sixth Gun is an ongoing comics series created by Cullen Bunn and Brian Hurtt and published by Oni Press. There have also been several miniseries published under the title.

Conception
The earliest version of The Sixth Gun, while still set in the Old West, was a dark horror story. Drake was a murderous outlaw that had murdered his own crew to acquire five of the six guns. One had eluded him, and ended up in the hands of a twelve-year-old girl called Becky and her younger brother. In this version of the story, once the guns had taken 666 lives, the Devil would be free to walk the Earth.

At this point Brian Hurtt wasn't the artist on the series, but he was friends with Cullen Bunn and the two of them had spoken about it, which led Hurtt to draw a piece of fan art with Drake, Becky, her younger brother, and a mysterious preacher.



Some time after the original artist departed from the series, a Hollywood stuido came to Oni Press looking for a supernatural western they could develop and The Sixth Gun fit the bill. When Brian Hurtt was brought onto the title, he insisted on being an equal creator, not a cog in a machine. He would have the freedom to pitch ideas to Bunn and develop them together.

Bunn sites this as one of the reasons the title was so much fun to work on. "It’s never as enjoyable to work on a book when the artist isn’t engaged on that level."

While developing the comic pitch, Bunn and Hurtt were also developing the movie pitch. The studio notes pushed that pitch to very strange places, at one point asking for "Kung Fu monks and shapeshifting witches and a train made of solid gold." Although these ideas were never incorporated into the comic, they did inspire some moments in the comic, such as the studio note that they needed a monster fight, like some kind of dragon. This led to the Thunderbird sequence in The Sixth Gun #4.

Stories

 * “Them What Ails Ya” (Prose, 2009)
 * The Sixth Gun (2010–2016)
 * #1–6 Cold Dead Fingers (2010)
 * #7–11 Crossroads (2010–2011)
 * #12–17 Bound (2011)
 * #18–23 A Town Called Penance (2012)
 * #24–29 Winter Wolves (2012–2013)
 * #30–35 Ghost Dance (2013)
 * “The Christmas Story” (2013)
 * #36–40 Not the Bullet, But the Fall (2013–2014)
 * #41 The Grey Witch (2014)
 * #42–47 Hell and High Water (2014–2015)
 * #48–50 Boot Hill (2016)
 * The Sixth Gun: Sons of the Gun (2013)
 * The Sixth Gun: Days of the Dead (2014–2015)
 * The Sixth Gun: Dust to Dust (2015)
 * The Sixth Gun: Valley of Death (2015)