Hey Fan People, Speech Bubble is taking a break for the summer. Listen to this announcement to find out the amazing reason why. Aaron's Top 10 Episodes Chester Brown Fabio Moon and Gabriel Ba Seth Cecil Castellucci Paul Soles - The Voice of '60s Spider-Man Willow Dawson Chip Zdarsky Live @ Hairy Tarantula Ho Che Anderson Live @ The Toronto Cartoon Arts Festival Kevin Boyd - Comics Coordinator at Fan Expo Canada (Three-Part Series) Joe Kilmartin - The One that Started It All Sponsors While we're ...
Jun 15, 2020•1 min
Jim Rugg is the Ignatz and Eisner award-winning cartoonist behind Street Angel, (co-written with friend Brian Maruca) Afrodisiac, Rambo 3.5, SuperMag and The P.L.A.I.N. Janes, which is co-written by past Speech Bubble guest Cecil Castellucci. But these days he is best known as one half of the immensely popular Cartoonist Kayfabe YouTube channel with Ed Piskor (Hip-Hop Family Tree, X-Men Grand Design, and the upcoming Red Room ) Though based in Pittsburgh, prior to COVID-19 and the proximity prec...
Jun 01, 2020•1 hr 11 min
This conversation with The Hamilton Spectator 's resident editorial cartoonist runs the gamut. Graeme Mackay (as Aaron learns, pronounced Mac-kai) is "The Last of the Mohicans." He has held his position since 1997 and,pre-COVID-19, was actually still been going into a newsroom when many of his editorial cartoonist colleagues either have been working from home for years or their positions have been eliminated entirely as newspapers tighten their belts. It's actually COVID-19 that forced Graeme to...
May 18, 2020•2 hr 8 min
If you recently watched the mailbag episode of Cartoonist Kayfabe spotlighting Group of 7 off the top or you listened to our episode with Group of 7 artist Jason Lapidus, this is the episode that will complete the Group of 7 trifecta because Chris Sanagan is the writer of Group of 7. Chris lives in Guelph, Ontario but spent many of his younger years as a Bay Street broker in Toronto before persuing a career as a historical achivist. You'll learn from this episode that Chris came up with the idea...
May 04, 2020•1 hr
Al Ewing is best known as the writer behind the critically-acclaimed comic series Immortal Hulk. It's a comic nominated for the Eisner Award for Best Continuing Series in 2019. In the time before proximity precautions and the COVID-19 pandemic, Al Ewing was booked to appear at the Toronto Comicon. The convention was eventually postponed – along with every other public gathering – but before it was, Aaron had this conversation with Al in promotion of his con appearance. As a result, it's a little...
Apr 14, 2020•22 min
In the first Speech Bubble podcast episode during the COVID_19 Pandemic, (complete with social distancing essentials like Zoom) Becka Kinzie joins our show. Becka is directly connected to our last guest Chip Zdarsky and his friend, previous Speech Bubble guest Kagan McLeod, since she was the colour flatter on Kaptara . Becka explains what a colour flatter does on this podcast, but that's not her only gig. She hails from Kitchener-Waterloo where she shepherds the web comic turned graphic novel Ge...
Mar 30, 2020•1 hr 3 min
Chip Zdarsky Returns to Speech Bubble! Last time host Aaron Broverman and writer/artist Chip Zdarsky got together on the podcast it was for a live episode celebrating podcast sponsor Hairy Tarantula's 25th anniversary in 2017. Let's just say...he's done a lot since then. When last we left Zdarsky, he was just about to release the first issue of Peter Parker: The Spectacular Spider-Man in two months. Since then, Peter Parker: Spider-Man has concluded, (and Zdarsky won an Eisner for his trouble) S...
Mar 16, 2020•1 hr 20 min
Born in Kingston, raised in Ottawa and living in Toronto, Michael DeForge is a multi-Ignatz and Doug Wright award winning and Eisner nominated alternative cartoonist. His body of work numbers many web comics, zines, mini comics, graphic novels, anthologies and gallery shows. He's also a prolific commercial illustrator, having done many gig posters, media illustrations, film screening announcements and album covers. He is so prolific that he's often publishing at least two comic works a year eith...
Mar 02, 2020•1 hr 15 min
Te'Shawn Dwyer is the co-founder of the From a Hat Studio artist collective with former Speech Bubble guest Paris Alleyne. Te'Shawn details the origins of the group, which was inspired by R.A.I.D. Studio -- another group of Toronto artists who pooled their resources to great success. On this episode, Te'Shawn talks about how the group was started by he and Paris as they were graduting from Max the Mutt College of Art and Design as a way to stay in touch and keep drawing on a regular basis. Soon ...
Feb 17, 2020•53 min
Kat Verhoeven grew up in Canada's original capital of Kingston, Ontario in a single-parent household that encouraged artistic talents.Thanks to this, both she and her sister Mary Verhoeven grew to push each other in a friendly competition to see who between them was the better cartoonist – a jockeying that Kat says continues to this day -- with each taking a turn in the spotlight. For Kat's part, she put her drawing talents towards an innovative food blog called Drawn and Devoured, which came ou...
Feb 03, 2020•1 hr 27 min
Adam Gorham is a comic book artist on such titles as TMNT Universe, Jughead: The Hunger, James Bond 007, Power Rangers, Marvel's Contagion and Rocket (starring Rocket Raccoon from Guardians of the Galaxy). He is currently drawing Punk Mambo for Valiant. Adam was born in Perth, Ontario but was raised in Mississauga, Ontario and still makes his home there now with his family. On the podcast, Adam goes through his long, strange trip from art school drop-out and disgruntled grocery store warehouse e...
Jan 20, 2020•1 hr 31 min
Fiona Smyth is a legend of the Toronto arts community. A true renaissance woman, she's a sculptor, a muralist, a book illustrator an animator, an art teacher and an independent comic book artist. If you're a Toronto resident, you've probably seen her work without even realizing it. Her murals adorn iconic locations like Lee's Palace's Dance Cave and Sneaky Dee's (which is known to Scott Pilgrim Fans) where she designed their sign and bonehead cow logo. In 2019, she was inducted into The Giants o...
Jan 06, 2020•1 hr 10 min
Mariel Ashlinn Kelly Mariel comes from the world of zines. Those hand-stapled, photocopied and folded masterpieces of the small press that made her a BlogTO Zinester to watch in 2016. Mariel is still setting Toronto on fire with her work, but this time it's as one of the contributors to the Drawn Poorly anthology, published out of Manchester, UK. The project is a zine focusing on stories of mental illness, chronic illness and disability.. While doing small groundbreaking zines of her own like Pi...
Dec 09, 2019•43 min
Jenn is what you get when you cross a love for 80s and 90s manga like Akira and Sailor Moon with a passion for groundbreaking indie comics like Dirty Plotte, Eightball and Optic Nerve with some “take no shit” feminism thrown in. This Brampton-raised Toronto resident is best known for her self-published comics Magical Beatdown Volumes one and two and Marie and Worrywort: Comics About Anxiety. Both works won the Gene Day Award for outstanding self-published comics at the Joe Shuster Awards , as we...
Nov 25, 2019•49 min
Emmanuelle's story is an epic one. Perhaps that's why when she was connected with Ramon Perez (Jim Henson's Tale of Sand, Marvel Two-in-One) and was mentored under his tutelage with an eye to creating comics of her own, she came up with the beginnings of what would become her fictionalized autobiographical masterpiece Queen Street instead of the few drawn pages he requested. Aaron and Emmanuelle go deep on this story (her story) and all the multi-layered implications that as an exceedingly preco...
Nov 11, 2019•1 hr 3 min
Nick Maandag is a straight-laced accountant by day and a Joe Shuster and Doug Wright nominated cartoonist with a bizarre sense of humour by night. Early influences include the gross out humour of Ren and Stimpy and the subversive satire of The Simpsons. In comics, he moved on to the work of Robert Crumb and other underground cartoonists like Julie Doucet, Dan Clowes, Peter Bagge and Chester Brown and through their inspiration, decided to dedicate his life to making comics after a brief foray in ...
Oct 28, 2019•1 hr 20 min
Jay Stephens is a Guelph, Ontario-based and Toronto-born comic artist and cartoonist who joins Aaron for a live episode from The Guelph Comic Jam on the day of the 2019 Joe Shuster Comic Book Awards , which honours Canadians like Joe Shuster – the co-creator of Superman – who make their living in mainstream comics. Jay began his career getting bankrolled by a Guelph comic shop called Collage, under Tragedy Sucks Comics, to create his own indie and underground comic anthology called Sin where man...
Oct 14, 2019•46 min
Comic artist Andy Belanger (Swamp Thing, Vampirella, WWE Comics) is an absolute wild man. His ambition knows no bounds and he's always been a highly competitive person in his field. Maybe that's why he has done so much. From talking his way into a gig drawing Friday the 13th for Wildstorm, and in doing so achieving his lifelong goal of working for DC Comics by age 27, to being the artist on the critically acclaimed Southern Cross for Image Comics and now being a professional wrestler for Montrea...
Sep 30, 2019•57 min
Comics power couple Ken and Joan Steacy ring in their 40th wedding anniversary with a live interview on Speech Bubble during TCAF weekend and a graphic novel each. The first, Aurora Borealice from Conundrum Press made its debut at TCAF and is the first part of a three-part fictionalized memoir from Joan Steacy following Alice (standing in for Joan) and her struggle with illiteracy. As Joan says on the podcast, “I graduated high school functionally illiterate and I knew I had to do something abou...
Sep 16, 2019•35 min
Kagan is a Toronto comics forefather, having founded RAID Studio with Ben Shannon, Cameron Stewart and Chip Zdarsky. He continues to be a fount of knowledge for artists coming up through the local scene, opening his studio for weekly life drawing nights. His latest book, Draw People Everyday from Penguin Random House Canada, comes from these life drawing sessions and the techniques he has picked up after years of drawing the human form. Kagan is probably best known for his magnum opus, Infinite ...
Sep 02, 2019•1 hr 19 min
Mark first came to Aaron's notice on the Cartoonist Kayfabe YouTube channel. The hosts Jim Rugg (Street Angel) and Ed Piskor (X-Men Grand Design, Hip-Hop Family Tree) did an episode showcasing picture books that spotlighted Mark's underrated classic, “Who Needs Donuts?” On this episode of Speech Bubble, Mark explains the bizarre story of how the book got its non sequitor title among other unlikely tales from his life as a prolific cartoonist for The Village Voice, The Washington Post and other e...
Aug 19, 2019•1 hr 13 min
Twin brothers Fábio Moon and Gabriel Bá are international comic book powerhouses whether doing a project together or apart. The two artists have collaborated on comics like the Eisner-award-winning Day Tripper and Two Brothers and the comic book adaption of Neil Gaiman's How to Talk to Girls at Parties. They are equally potent as separate entities (although, they're never really separate since they share a studio). Of course, you know Gabriel as the co-creator of Umbrella Academy with Gerard Way...
Aug 05, 2019•1 hr 12 min
Scott has approached rarefied air that very few Canadian cartoonists have ever reached. His historical graphic memoir Two Generals was nominated for two Eisner Awards, named one of Chapters-Indigo’s best books of 2010, selected as a Best American Comics in 2012 and named by CBC as a “Canada Reads” selection and one of the 40 best Canadian non-fiction books of all-time. Not to be out done, his book Northwest Passage also has Harvey and Eisner nominations to its name. Plus, his young adult comic T...
Jul 22, 2019•56 min
You probably don't know Ben by name, but if you live in Toronto and you've had ice cream at the Sweet Jesus Ice Cream Parlour you've definitely seen his work. He's the artist behind the original look of Sweet Jesus and now he has launched his first graphic novel, Apologetica . Published by past Speech Bubble guest Mark Laliberte's publishing imprint Popnoir Editions , Apologetica takes the state of the world to its environmental extremes. Ben talks about what influenced his vibrant, kinetic draw...
Jul 08, 2019•43 min
Winnipeg's Jamie Michaels is arguably the best self-promoter we've had on the podcast and what he's promoting is a graphic novel about a little known happening in Canadian history at the height of fascism's march across Europe in the years before WWII. Christie Pits is a graphic novel detailing the little-known happenings behind Canada's only race riot – when Nazi sympathizers unfurled a Nazi flag during a public baseball game and Jews and Italians united to throw down against them in Toronto's ...
Jun 24, 2019•31 min
Mrs. Zubkavich's baby boy is the busiest Canadian comic book writer not named Jeff Lemire. His credits include Rick and Morty vs. Dungeons and Dragons, Thunderbolts, Glitterbomb Skullkickers, Wayward, Champions, Uncanny Avengers, Avengers: No Surrender and Avengers: No Road Home, but that barely scratches the surface of his illustrious career. As if writing comics didn't take up enough of his time, Jim is also the animation program coordinator at Seneca College where, as he told our host Aaron B...
Jun 10, 2019•57 min
Richard Pace is a long-time veteran of the comic book industry, having either been written or drawn for every major comic company in the industry. Career highlights include his mainstream comics art debut on Terror Inc. for Marvel, writing Pitt Crew and the last few issues of Dale Keown's Pitt and co-writing Batman: The Doom that Came to Gotham with Hellboy creator Mike Mignola. He also had the honour of bringing the legendary Alan Moore's songs to life as one of the artists on Alan Moore's Song...
May 27, 2019•1 hr 19 min
Jason Kieffer Jason Kieffer was recommended for this podcast by the legendary Chester Brown and it's with good reason. The young cartoonist is best known for his self-published graphic biography of Toronto street legend Zanta and is one of the only people to ever get the full story straight from this muscle-bound mystery wearing a Santa hat. His penchant for chronicling the characters and oddballs that populate Toronto's has won him equal parts acclaim and scorn. However, at the end of the day, ...
May 13, 2019•1 hr 7 min
Recorded live at the Toronto Comicon 2019 , Salgood talks to Aaron about his colourful father Lionel who inspired him to create the upcoming, Bastards Tale to be serialized in his self-published comic RevolveR. They then move on to how he went from having artists like George Perez fawn over his work, doing sample pages for DC Comics from Neil Gaiman Sandman scripts and being offered to draw his own series for Marvel at 20-years-old under his real name Max Douglas, to drawing one comic issue in n...
Apr 29, 2019•59 min
Jahnoy Lindsay Jahnoy is what one might call a comic artist who was never really that into comics. The Brampton, Ontario product is an alumni of the From A Hat Studio collective with Paris Alleyne, (Haven) Jamal Campbell (Naomi) Matt Simas, Te'Shawn Dwyer, (Desert Messiah) and Dylan Burnett (Cosmic Ghost Rider, X-Force). From there, he has gone on to draw for Marvel, starting with a back-up story in Totally Awesome Hulk and then becoming the main artist for She-Hulk's “Jen Walters Must Die” stor...
Apr 15, 2019•1 hr 18 min
