Speech Bubble

Speech Bubble

By Aaron BrovermanSociety & CultureArtsVisual Arts
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Speech Bubble episodes

  • Ryan North

    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

    55 min
  • Comics on Comics: Ben Miner

    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

    1 hr 17 min
  • Nicole Marie Burton
    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.
    1 hr 27 min
  • Yaron Betan
    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.
    1 hr 8 min
  • Ricky Lima
    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.
    1 hr 38 min
  • A. Shay Hahn
    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.
    1 hr 25 min
  • Meaghan Carter
    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.
    54 min
  • Adam Prosser
    The Strange Romance Anthology is a series of short romance comics with a genre fiction twist. Whether a fantasy, western, science fiction or something else entirely, love is always at the centre of these stories from a wide array of international collaborators. It’s a modern tribute to the Weird Love comics of the 1950s without entirely being a pastiche. Editor Adam Prosser stops by in the midst of the Kickstarter to produce a print version of Vol. 1 (ending Aug. 13, 2016) to explain the book’s genesis and why Strange Romance fits so well with his love of pulp magazines and soap opera strips (Rex Morgan M.D., anyone?)
    1 hr 13 min
  • Mark Askwith
    As one of the founders of the Space Channel and a producer on the homegrown genre fiction culture show Innerspace,  Mark Askwith has more than made his mark in the long history of comic book fandom in Canada. (Although, he” far too humble to agree on that fact.) He has personal ties to the likes of Neil Gaiman, Alan Moore and Frank Miller. He is also a staple in the history of Canadian comic book television with the seminal “Prisoners of Gravity,” and was a pioneering manager of The Silver Snail comic store in the 1980s. Aaron delves into Mark’s personal and professional history, and learns Mark’s simple but effective philosophy of creating, sharing and promoting content based on nothing but his genuine passion for genre fiction
    54 min
  • Chris Watton
    Chris is the owner, founder and curator for The Sidekick, (www.thesidekickcomics.com) a Toronto East End coffee and comic book spot. Chris wanted to have a combined shop since her high school days, long before the two cultures were mutually engaged the way they are in a few comic shops across Toronto. Chris opens up about how comics helped her through her difficult formative years and how growing up in Windsor was particularly difficult for a budding comic fan. Her challenges had far from relented when she entered art school as she -and many of her fellow students- butted heads with the school’s ideas on how to run something as subjective as art education. Aaron also takes some time to discuss their mutual fondness for French-Pressed Coffee.
    56 min

About Speech Bubble

From the publisher's feed

The podcast that goes one-on-one with the writers, artists, retailers, publishers, critics and journalists inside the Toronto comic book scene.