Live from Toronto Comicon 2019 , Aaron sat down with Marvel inker Craig Yeung. Born and raised in Toronto, Craig is best known as the long time inker of Runaways, written by Brian K. Vaughan with pencils by another Toronto resident, Adrian Alphona. Since Runaways, (now a live action TV series on Hulu in the U.S. and Showcase in Canada) Craig has inked other Marvel comics like X-Men: Gold, The Superior Octopus and Daughters of the Dragon. His pencils have been featured on Riftworld Legends 8, Arr...
Apr 01, 2019•55 min
Mark is the managing editor, arts editor and designer of Carousel Magazine – a Canadian arts and literary journal published twice a year. He's also the curator of the 4Panel Project, which began as a back page supplement in Carousel, and the publisher behind Popnoir Editions' comics and zines. Growing up in Windsor, ON. during the black and white comics boom of the 1980s, Mark discovered that some of his favourite comics were printed right in his hometown. Being the enterprising fan that he was,...
Mar 18, 2019•1 hr 5 min
Jason is a Thornhill, ON. native who always wanted to be a comic artist. He could always draw his classmates under the table, but Thornlea Secondary School was the basis for author Gordon Korman's 1985 novel Don't Care High and the moniker was still true when Lapidus went there. The vibe killed any enthusiasm he had for institutional education and that buzz kill continued in art school where he just couldn't connect painting on wood block and philosphizing about art with the practical skills he ...
Mar 04, 2019•1 hr 8 min
It's a jam-packed episode with one returning guest and one brand spanking new one. First, friend of the Show Shane Heron (Morris, Black Have Hunters Club) returns in his capacity as co-editor of Cauldron Magazine to promote the Kickstarter for the Spring 2019 issue . If you haven't heard of Cauldron, this is an adult fantasy-horror comic anthology magazine in the vein of Heavy Metal, Savage Sword of Conan, Creepy and Eerie. The upcoming spring issue has a cover from Toronto's own Adam Gorham (Ne...
Feb 18, 2019•1 hr 37 min
Wes is the cartoonist behind the Prophet of Zoom comic strip on the back page of Zoomer Magazine and he's the president of the Association of Canadian Cartoonists representing some of the finest editorial cartoonists from across the country. Aaron met Wes when the cartoonist moderated a panel discussion featuring the Peter Parker: The Spectacular Spider-Man creative team of Chip Zdarsky and Adam Kubert at the Royal Ontario Museum. Since then, he's been wanting to get Wes in the NSN studios and n...
Feb 04, 2019•1 hr 39 min
Jonathan is one of the most multi-faceted individuals to ever grace Speech Bubble. Not only does he both write and draw his own self-published comics, but he also draws album covers and is the lead singer and rhythm guitarist for local Toronto band Summer and Youth. Aaron traces Jon's artist trajectory from childhood to adulthood, as he goes from making comics with his brother in the 90s (long-haired characters with shoulder pads and pouches) to joining forces with past Speech Bubble guest Jason...
Jan 21, 2019•1 hr 20 min
Jo Lalonde tells Aaron she was an artist since she figured out how not to eat the crayons. First apprenticing as a tattoo artist before learning the chalk art trade under legendary Canadian chalk artist Chalk Master Dave , best known for producing the iconic superhero mural on the outside of Silver Snail's former Queen Street location. Jo tells tales of her own superheroism while dealing with the few pedestrians who don't pay attention and walk over her hands and art. Not to mention dealing with...
Jan 07, 2019•50 min
For this episode Speech Bubble is coming to you live in front of an audience on Halloween Weekend 2018 at Hairy Tarantula's Hairoween Party at their new location at 3456 Yonge Street in Toronto, Ontario Canada. The show is a sort of coming out party for Aaron's guest Attila Adorjany, since a huge re-branding project for a massive corporation took him out of the comic scene for a very long time. Now he's back miking his special effects background with a new custom toy company of his own making ca...
Dec 10, 2018•54 min
William S. Burroughs once said, “Seize control of the reality studio” and Adam “A.G.” Pasquella has been doing that since he was in second grade. Born in Dallas, Texas but now living in Toronto, he started making comics that ended with him getting all the candy in grade school and just kept right on going through middle school when he sold mini comics through the mail. When the small publisher he sold his first book to went out of business just as the ink was drying on the contract, he once agai...
Nov 26, 2018•1 hr 24 min
Our illustrious audio editor Joseph Ianni makes his long-awaited return to the show. Having listened to and edited every episode of Speech Bubble since launch, he's like our own version of The Watcher of the Marvel Universe: always observing, never interfering...until now. He comes to us for the first time, to pitch a comic of his own to the Toronto comic artists he knows are making Speech Bubble appointment listening every two weeks. The project is called Noon, a horror /teen drama comic where ...
Nov 12, 2018•40 min
On this episode of Speech Bubble, we have one of Canada's most fashionable males of 2018 – just read The Globe and Mail, where he was voted best dressed. Aaron and Evan go back a long way, to the days when Aaron first moved to Toronto and was just getting into the comic scene and Evan was part of a long-retired artist collective Sketchkrieg with past Speech Bubble guest Jason Loo where he was peddling his own self-published comics, like Amazing Challengers of Unknown Mystery (starring Avril Lavi...
Oct 29, 2018•1 hr 11 min
Jason Bone was comics' golden boy following his very first professional work. The Toronto artist was nominated for an Eisner Award (work deserving of wider recognition) in 2001 for his first comic Solar Stella. His very next project Alison Dare ( with past Speech Bubble guest J. Torres ) was also Eisner-nominated. Both works drew the attention of the late, legendary Canadian comic artist Darwyn Cooke (DC: The New Frontier, Catwoman) who took J under his wing as his inker until Cooke's death from...
Oct 15, 2018•1 hr 21 min
This week's episode is a twofer. First, Aaron's got a short interview with writer, comics scribe (Star Trek: Waypoint, Jem and the Holograms) and geek girl personality Sam Maggs live from Fan Expo Canada spotlighting the launch of her new book, Girl Squads: 20 Female Friendships that Changed History , which comes out Oct. 2, 2018 from Penguin Random House Canada and Quirk Books. Then, Aaron comes back to the studio and sits down with comic industry journalist and editor Megan Purdy, founder of W...
Oct 01, 2018•1 hr 26 min
As part owner of Comic 1 Books in Stoney Creek, Ontario, Casey Parsons in one of the few artists who can say he has actually sold a comic book he worked on in his own store. Classically trained in art at Sheridan College but disillusioned by the business, it took him until his 40s to really embrace comics as his chosen art form – always reading as fan, but never creating them -- until now. Now, he's figuring out how to balance comic book mechanics with a fine art look, a marriage he showcased as...
Sep 17, 2018•46 min
Mike went to art school at Sheridan College, but was too chicken to pursue a career in comics, so he put his dreams on hold and picked up odd jobs doing menial labour until a work site accident almost crushed his hands. It was the bell he needed to hear and from then on he vowed to dedicate himself to his art or starve doing it. Work with big publishers like Scholastic and Rubicon started paying the bills, but it wasn't until a few local comic shops gave him a chance drawing their store exclusiv...
Sep 03, 2018•42 min
It's our first ever clip show live from a back storeroom inside Paradise Comics at Yonge and Lawrence during a very special fundraiser. Sketches for Pledges was organized by past Speech Bubble guest Shane Kirshenblatt to benefit The Canadian Cancer Society in honor of the legendary Toronto born comic artist Darwyn Cooke (Batman: Ego, Justice League: The New Frontier) and, friend of the Toronto comics community, Brendan Yapp. Local artists including the three guests on this show -- Steve Bynoe, J...
Aug 20, 2018•1 hr 19 min
For his entire childhood Yvan Alagbé wanted to be a pilot, but by the time university rolled around, an eye problem put that future in doubt and he didn't want to do it anymore anyway – he wanted to be comic artist and eventually he became quite a prolific one. Someone who is highly influential in Paris's avant garde bande desinée scene. It started when, while studying physics and mathematics at the Université de Paris-Sud, where he met Olivier Marboeuf. Alagbé and Marboeuf founded a contemporar...
Aug 06, 2018•56 min
In 2005, former Speech Bubble guest and legendary Canadian cartoonist Seth wrote an appreciation of Chris Reynolds' work in The Comics Journal calling him, “The most underrated artist of the last 20 years.” Prior to that essay, Reynolds' distinct heavy black and white cartooning style and indescribably bizarre, but also greatly nostalgic and reminiscent stories remained in relative obscurity as he toiled on them from across the pond in the UK. Now, thanks to a May 2018 reissue of his work in a b...
Jul 23, 2018•54 min
A true renaissance woman, Cecil Castellucci's work spans mediums. The New York-born, Montreal-raised writer is currently best known to comic book fans as the writer behind the latest reinterpretation of the late Steve Ditko character Shade – Shade the Changing Girl and now, Shade the Changing Woman as part of DC Comics' Young Animal imprint, spearheaded by Gerard Way – lead singer of My Chemical Romance. Fitting, since Cecil tells us why making comics is like being in a rock band. She would know...
Jul 09, 2018•48 min
Aaron is live from the Toronto Comics Art Festival 2018 serving as the moderator for a Spotlight Q & A on this episode's guest. If you couldn't be there live, now's your chance to eavesdrop on this sit down with Toronto's own Ho Che Anderson. The writer and artist talks about what it was like to go from an admirer of Jack “King” Kirby and Howard Chaykin to aping Chaykin's style before coming into his own on the definitive Martin Luther King graphic novel, King: A Comics Biography for Fantagr...
Jun 25, 2018•33 min
This time we're blessed to have a cartoonist laureate on the show. Fom Burlington, Vermont best known for his daily autobiographical strips between 1998-2012 called American Elf. He also publishes the superhero frathouse comedy Super F*ckers which was adapted into a cartoon on the online channel Cartoon Hangover. He has also created Monkey vs. Robot and a number of other comic series for kids, including Dragon Puncher and the Johnny Boo series. He's also a darling of college radio fronting his o...
Jun 11, 2018•43 min
Eddie Campbell's Alec series of quasi-autobiographical comics has been called "one of the most important graphic novels of the 20th century" While his fictionalized comic memoirs Alec and later, Fate of the Artist, have become his trademark style where he interrogates his own life through an avatar, he is best known as the artist behind From Hell with legendary comic scribe Alan Moore. Set during the Whitechapel murders of the Victorian era, the story speculates on the identity and motives of Ja...
May 28, 2018•50 min
Kyle is a member of Toronto's RAID Studio along with past Speech Bubble guests Ramon Perez , (Jane, Nova) Scott Hepburn , (Spider-man/Deadpool) Marcus To (Justice League: No Justice) and Gibson Quarter (Undertow). Kyle's past credits include Scare Tales with friend and fellow RAID member Gabe Sapienza and RAID.One, an anthology with contributions from each RAID member. He comes to the podcast to promote his latest project, BlackMouth – a coming of age, horror webcomic featuring a man named Eric ...
May 14, 2018•53 min
Sometimes when an Aussie and a Canadian who has a hardcore love for Aussies get together, magic happens. That's what happened when Caitlin Major immigrated from Australia with her boyfriend for better comic-making opportunity in Canada and met Canadian Kelly Bastow at a Drink & Draw. Kelly is an artist on the rise, having done variant covers for titles like Lumberjanes and Adventure Time and having been nominated twice for an Ignatz Award (honouring small press comic creators) including for ...
Apr 30, 2018•46 min
Willow Dawson is a critically-acclaimed illustrator for comics, graphic novels and picture books for kids and adults. She was a finalist for the TD Canadian Children's Literature Award in 2016 for her picture book about the way wolves and ravens hunt together called The Wolf-Birds. She was also nominated for a 2008 Joe Shuster award for No Girls Allowed, a graphic novel chronicling women who had to pose as men throughout history. Willow comes to Speech Bubble to promote her newest effort White a...
Apr 16, 2018•1 hr 43 min
Andrew is a comic book writer, podcast host and former Eisner award-winning comic industry journalist who came to Toronto by way of Hastings, England. He was the last editor-in-chief of Comics Alliance , shepherding it towards its 2015 Eisner win for “Best Comics Journalism.” As part of the LGBTQ community, Andrew has always championed representation for all minorities in all of his comics work, starting with Another Castle from Oni Press and continuing with his current work on Freelance from Ch...
Apr 02, 2018•1 hr 21 min
Sam Beck is certainly a comic artist to watch for these days, as her career coalesces to its first major apex. At the time of this episode, Songs for the Dead – the comic she draws for writers and past Speech Bubble guests Andrea Fort and Michael Christopher Heron – has just been picked up by publisher Vault Comics and is now available at comic shops everywhere. Her work is also featured in the 2018 edition of the Toronto Comics Anthology , Osgoode as Gold, she also contributed a story to the up...
Mar 19, 2018•48 min
Matthew is the former long-running artist of the Mr.Monitor comic strip in Broken Pencil Magazine – Canada's national magazine for D.I.Y. Arts and zine culture. He and his long-time collaborator Cory McCallum (known collectively as Pier Pants Productions) won a Joe Shuster award in 2013. called the Gene Day award, denoting their Mr. Monitor short comic, The Pig Sleep, the best independent comic of that year. They've also collaborated on a number of other comics, including Errol Dynamic – a scifi...
Mar 05, 2018•1 hr 13 min
Diana is one half of the duo behind From Superheroes – the brand that brought you Texts from Superheroes (funny text conversations between your favourite superheroes and supervillains) and the superhero media review podcast, Talk from Superheroes. She founded the site in 2012 with her boyfriend, Comedian Andrew Ivimey and now they have millions of fans around the world. Diana also occasionally writes comics. She's currently featured in the Secret Loves of Geeks graphic anthology, the much antici...
Feb 19, 2018•1 hr 23 min
Timmins, Ontario native Brendan Montgomery was a Queen's University student who thought for sure that a campus with over 200 student groups would certainly have a club for comic book fans. When it turned out that wasn't the case, he started a club himself. The Queen's Comic Book Legion meets every week on campus to discuss the latest issues coming out that week, they sell comics at an on-campus comic shop and they've even published their own graphic novel featuring Queen's very own superhero tea...
Feb 05, 2018•38 min
