Speech Bubble – Details, episodes & analysis

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

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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 precautions that come with it, Jim was scheduled to attend The Toronto Cartoon Art Festival in May 2020 in support of Street Angel: Deadliest Girl Alive from Image Comics and The P.L.A.I.N. Janes from Little Brown and Company, but formerly published by DC Comics' now defunct Minx imprint. There, he was going to surprise attendees with his latest project, Octobriana 1976 -- the world's first black light comic book -- with AdHouse Books. In light of the pandemic, Jim has switched gears and he is now funding Octobriana 1976 on Kickstarter from now until June 18, 2020 at 5 p.m. EST.

He comes to Speech Bubble in support of Octobriana where we talk about Octobriana's strange and controversial origin story, why Jim decided to print this comic with fluorescent ink and why rebellious women are characters he keeps coming back to. We also talk about his collaborators: Shelly Bond, Cecil Castellucci and Brian Maruca, while tracing his journey from self-taught comics fan to a professional cartoonist who has taught others at the School of Visual Art.

For all you Cartoonist Kayfabe fans, we talk about the way the channel has suddenly become important to the larger comic book community and some very high-profile creators. We get behind what fans of the channel know as "The Cartoonist Kayfabe Bump" and Jim talks about his strategies for back issue diving and he speculates with Aaron about what the comic industry may look like post-pandemic.

This episode is sponsored by Hairy Tarantula, which has supported us from the beginning. Please buy something from them in their time of need at their online store. Please also support Speech Bubble through our Patreon Page where for $3 a month you can hear audio blogs from Aaron and some process blogs from guests about some of their best comic book issues.

@jimruggart

Jimrugg.com

Octobriana 1976 Kickstarter Page

Cartoonist Kayfabe YouTube Channel

The Making of Octobriana 1976

The books that influenced Octobriana 1976

The story behind Octobriana

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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 employee to working for major comic companies like Marvel, Image and Valiant. This includes finding his first gig as a comic artist on Craigslist, working with Toronto radio personality “Fearless” Fred Kennedy on Fred's self-published, three volume indie book Teuton, and eventually breaking out as the artist on The Violent, a creator-owned gritty crime book published by Image and written by Ghost Rider and Old Man Logan scribe Ed Brisson.

Aaron also gets Adam's take on the New Mutants trailer since he worked on New Mutants: Dead Souls with writer Matthew Rosenberg (4 Kids Walk Into a Bank) which was the book that was likely going to launch as the movie came out before the film got delayed. Adam also tells a wild story about randomly discovering his letter envelope art in a Wizard Magazine years after the fact. This episode is sponsored by Hairy Tarantula and Bam Coffee Co. If you want 15% off your next Bam Box of coffee and geek swag, including prints and a limited edition mug, use code SB15 at checkout.

@AdamTGorham on Instagram

@AdamTGorham on Twitter

Adam's Portfolio

Adam's Princely Dreadful Blog

Buy Adam's original art

Buy Adam's TMNT sketchcovers or Inktober sketches

Adam's Modern Mythology Original Art Page

Adam's page on Marvel.com

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Bam Coffee Co.

Those who think comic book geeks and computer nerds are two mutually exclusive groups have never met Ryan North. The Toronto resident and writer behind The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl, Adventure Time and Dinosaur Comics also holds a masters in computer science with a focus on Computational Linguistics — teaching artificial intelligence how to speak more naturally. His love of computer science also bleeds into the pages of the Unbeatable Squirrel Girl, aiding in its progressive picture of what makes a female heroine. Even his effort to bring back the choose your own adventure genre – Romeo and/or Juliet – refuses to define society along gender lines. Not bad for a guy who can’t draw, but still left what his parents called, “a respectable profession” to create comics.

@ryanqnorth

www.ryannorth.ca

Episode Sponsor: Hairy Tarantula

The first guest on our experimental Comics on Comics series, Comedian Ben Miner is the host of Comic Stripped, an interview show with comedy’s biggest names, on Canada Laughs – Sirius XM’s uncensored comedy satellite radio station. In addition to being a stand-up comic since he was 14, he’s also come in the top 16 of Master Chef Canada and absolutely loves comic books. He gives us an inside look at life as road comic, tells us why he hates Hugh Jackman as Wolverine, explains why diversity in comics has its limits and then pitches any listening artists on the best creator-owned comic book idea ever – The 10 Minute Man.

@BenMiner

Canada Laughs

Ad Astra Comix is a Canadian comics publisher specializing in comics with social justice themes. It was a mission first ignited in founder Nicole Marie Burton while reading the pulitzer-prize winning holocaust graphic novel Maus by Art Spiegelman way back in elementary school and hasn’t really stopped since. The latest books in her slate include a republishing of War in the Neighbourhood by Seth Tobocman and the anthology Drawing the Line: Indian Women Fight Back! She comes to us while on a roadtrip across Canada meeting with shop owners about how they can better engage their customers towards comics dealing with social justice issues. To that end, we talk about diversity in comics, the power of comics journalism and how comics fandom is very much a political microcosm of our own society.

Yaron Betan is the director of a new documentary premiering on Oct. 14, 2016 at the Carlton Cinema in Toronto called Heroes Manufactured. It features many former guests of this podcast like Mark Shainblum, Shane Kirshenblatt and Meaghan Carter and follows them as they make a living on Canada’s comic convention circuit. Yaron talks about how reading comics taught him how to tell a story and what it is about the Canadian convention scene that makes it distinctly different from the convention circuit in the U.S. Plus, he reveals how the U.S. film market has many similarities to a comic convention itself.

Brampton, Ontario’s own Ricky Lima went from comic retailer to comic writer after being exposed to many seminal works in the medium. It was quickly evident that writing comics was his true calling after creating graphic novel Deep Sea with D.A. Bishop and ongoing series Black Hole Hunters Club with Shane Heron. But even though his latest effort, Happily Ever Aftr, was funded in only six days on Kickstarter, he suffers from an inferiority complex – struggling with the confidence to take popular projects to larger publishers. He opens up in studio about his successes, his anxieties and the debt he put himself in to get his latest project off the ground.

Kitchener, Ontario native A. Shay Hahn spent his childhood buying comics from the late legendary retailer Harry Kremer – namesake of the Harry Kremer Retailer Award presented to Canada’s best comic retailer by the Joe Shuster Awards. He would eventually grow up to produce his own comic books: Cryptozombic, Battle Rally and the local indie hit, Homeless G-Men. Before that he was a fine artist exhibiting his paintings in galleries and doing background set painting for the period TV productions of Kevin Sullivan (Road to Avonlea, Pit Pony, Anne of Green Gables) and soon discovered that there was no crossover whatsoever when came to the comic book audience. What could make a man with a relatively successful fine art career transition to comics? Is he mad? Tune in to find out.

Meaghan Carter’s love of manga and anime informs all of the webcomics she does. Take Off features fantastical creatures working together with their human partners like Digimon or Pokemon. In a way, Godslave is the same, but the relationship is a master-student dynamic, like the ninja schools of Naruto, with a lot of Egyptian history informing the narrative. It’s no wonder the strips have garnered her enough of a cult following to earn her a gig as the new colourist on The Pitiful Human-Lizard. She breaks down the role of a colourist, why you need an insane work ethic to even make it into comics and why her belief in ghosts and the afterlife will probably be a major component of her next project.