Chuck Bunker (1956-2026)

Chuck Bunker has passed away. He actually passed away on May 24, but news of his death only made it into small press comics/zine social media because of the internet sleuthing of United Fanzine Organization Chair Rob Imes.

You can read Chuck’s obituary here.

These passings hit hard on this end, and I hate making these posts about “me”, but I’m no historian. I don’t know what Chuck was up to between 1989 and 2023 (when I wasn’t active in comics and zine making). But I can share what I know of Chuck.

Chuck was a prolific and impressive cartoonist “back in the day”. Here’s a link to his bibliography as compiled by Rick Bradford of the Poopsheet Foundation. It’s probably an incomplete listing as the fractured nature of social circles in our hobby makes a single, authoritative list an impossibility…but Rick’s work is by far the most comprehensive. And you can see a healthy swath of his creative output by skimming the listings. I strongly suggest you check it out.

Chuck was a fundamentally kind person. He liked to draw. He liked to tell stories. He LOVED classic cartoons, especially of the Warner Brothers-era work of Tex Avery and Chuck Jones. He filled his work with these influences and inspirations. He was a true member of the scene. He never saw a jam that he wouldn’t join, but it might wait a moment or two because he was doing a collaboration with some other cartoonist creator at the time. Point is, he was really, really active. He was a cornerstone of the Mass Press project that I spearheaded back then.

And he was, for our hobby, reasonably successful. When Tim Corrigan decided to make the leap into direct sales comics with his C&T Graphics in 1987 at the height of the (TMNT-fueled?) black and white boom, Chuck was one of the creators Tim turned to. Chuck’s publishing of Geriatricman was a key moment of his cartooning life. More on that in a few.

Chuck was one of the best. When Corrigan decided to run an “annual” (not sure if he did this more than once) year-end awards program in Small Press Comics Explosion, look who was at the top of the heap:

Chuck had his quirks. He was ALWAYS active and wanted everyone else to run at his pace, on his time. He communicated…a LOT…something that wasn’t bad in the era of snail mail but was exhausting with email. He knew he had challenges, and he was working on them right up until the day he passed. Chuck was aware that his personal style was off-putting for some, and he openly mourned the loss of friendships with those whom he pushed too far. But his pushing wasn’t a sign of malice…it was kindness, it was love in its own way. If you knew him over time, you appreciated that and just smiled while he blasted you with emails and phone calls.

Back to me. I lost touch with Chuck, like I did with just about everyone in the small press. And I honestly don’t recall how (maybe through Jeffrey Wood, one of his closest cartooning friends toward the end?), but I found out that he was in a “rehabilitation facility” in Cambridge, Massachusetts. We started corresponding, and it was increasingly clear that Chuck wasn’t rehabbing in the classic sense. He wasn’t going home. He also wasn’t cartooning.

Well, let me have him tell that story. His return to the hobby came in my Strange Times #4:

And so he returned…quickly getting busy as only he could, given his physical limitations.

(I actually have a Pieman #5 video about two-thirds complete and would have released it had my computer not decided to give me grief right before I left for my most recent trip with my son. I’ll work on it and see if I can share a complete product soon.)

Chuck didn’t have the professional tools, nor the physical wherewithal, to make comics and zines look like he used to. That said, his storytelling was still light and fun; his mind clearly was running at 110 miles an hour, like those who knew him could expect. And again, all credit to Jeffrey Wood for helping Chuck make his creative dreams a reality upon his return to cartooning in his final years.

Chuck died on a Sunday in May of 2026. It took a chance internet search three weeks later to learn his fate. I had no idea. In fact, I had sent him an email 10 days before he passed, one which never received a reply.

I should have figured something was up; he never gave me a month between communications.

Nobody else knew, either. Nobody on social media, none of his cartooning creator friends and acquaintances, for whom I forwarded the obituary. Some, like me, had been sending mail as if Chuck was just doing his thing.

Comics/cartooning clearly was a compartmentalized part of Chuck’s life. His caretakers apparently didn’t know of or appreciate his social connections in our hobby. I’m so glad that Rob took the initiative to look.

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As I reflect on Chuck, the thing that keeps popping up is his friendship. He always started emails by calling me his “creative friend” or “enterprising friend”. It made me chuckle, just as the guy who ran Chuckles Productions would have probably liked. Chuck wanted — no, NEEDED — friends in comics, and he kept making more and more of them.

Comics, cartooning, and zine-making can be a lonely calling. We sit in our homes, slaving away at the keyboard, the drawing board, the tablet. We take orders from places unknown, slap stamps on our product, and send them off. There are few real, tangible connections.

But there ARE connections to be made. Cartoonists find ways to congregate. I strongly urge everyone reading this to make sure that you take the time to make those connections, too. Whether it’s a zine fest or comic con, a periodic community gathering (which I’m SO bad about attending here in Columbus thanks to my kids’ crazy schedules), getting together with a creator friend, sending an email or text or making a phone call…make those connections. They’re good for your soul, and they enrich other souls as well.

Chuck Bunker was a good man, a religious man, a kind man, a creative man. And he was a friend to all who knew him.

Let us honor the memory of Chuck in the best way possible – making comics, being kind, making friends.

Rest in peace, Chuck.