Speech Bubble

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

Sponsors

Hairy Tarantula

Bam Coffee Co.

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 of The North Hall of Fame as part of Canada's Doug Wright Awards for indepedent cartooning along with the late Inuit cartoonist Alootook Ipellie (1951-2007).

Her psychadelic and fluid drawing style has graced a who's who of Canadian publishers, newspapers and magazines since the time she was a student at the Ontario College of Art and Design, (now OCAD University) where she now teaches a new generation of students how to make comics. She is best known for tackling feminist issues, including issues of sexuality, gender and idenity throughout her entire body of work, which spans 30 plus years. In 2018, Koyama Press published a retrospective of her career from 1985-2018 called Somnambulance, which features excerts from her comic Nocturnal Emissions, published by Vortex Comics, as well as work she did for Vice, Drawn and Quarterly, Exclaim! Snipe Hunt, Taddle Creek and even Urban Outfitters' Slant Magazine, among others.

On the podcast, Aaron finds out how Fiona was recruited to create the Sneaky Dee's sign, what about her childhood and catholic upbringing pushed her to explore feminism in her art, what makes her work for kids different than her work for adults, what her southern good ol' boy pen name is and how it felt going from a punk student with a D.I.Y. ethos that's skipping class at OCAD to teaching at OCAD and becoming the authority she used to rebel against. Plus, find out if Seth lived with her, where she saw herself among the “Holy Triumverate” of Toronto's autobio artists (Seth, Chester Brown and Joe Matt) in the 90s and what it's like to be featured as one of Canada's Big Four comic artists in the recently closed This is Serious: Canadian Indie Comics at the Art Gallery of Hamilton. Oh, and she reveals that she and Cory Silverberg are working on a third sex education graphic novel covering puberty. Also, did you know she wanted to be a realist painter?

This episode of Speech Bubble with Fiona Smyth is sponsored by Hairy Tarantula and Bam Coffee Co.

@fionasmythlukkie

Fiona's Facebook

Fiona's blog

Fiona's Tumblr

Fiona's Giants of the North Hall of Fame Write-up

Fiona's Zines Online

What Makes a Baby?

How to Comission Fiona Smyth for a Project

Learn How to Make Comics from Fiona – Starts Jan. 25, 2020

Society of Illustrators

Weird Things

Albatross Soup – a short film by Winnie Cheung with illustrations by Fiona Smyth

Bradley of Him by Connor Willumsen – Koyama Press

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 Pixie Dream Ghoul and Moth – a true story about the time she chased a moth around her dad's home – she is currently working on her own long-form graphic novel that has been a number of years in the making. Mariel drops some hints right here as far as what readers can expect when it comes out.

Mariel is someone that has drawn her entire life and dabbling in publishing gave her all the skills she needed to publish her own comics. With a style that Aaron compares to Emily the Strange and a heavy influence from the New Yorker covers of Adrian Tomine, Mariel has always been drawn to telling her own personal stories, rather than working for Marvel or DC. On the pod, she discusses how her subject matter focuses on relationships – even the lack of one and the relationship with one's self – thanks to her early love of Archie Comics.

Aaron and Mariel also go deep on a brief history of Toronto's zine scene and zines in general. They go back to the well on graphic medicine and Mariel's recent discovery that she had bipolar disorder and they talk about why a lot of Mariel's comics take place in the bathtub. Plus, for the movie lovers out there, the two do a small tribute to Toronto's Revue Cinema since Mariel draws posters for many of its screenings and does an ongoing comic strip for its program about the lonely life of a projectionist.

This episode of Speech Bubble is sponsored by the Geek Gods at Hairy Tarantula and the comic book coffee stylings of Bam Coffee Co. Don't forget to use SB15 at checkout and get 15% off your first Bam Box of coffee and comic swag from Canada's best indie comic artists.

@marielashlinn

Marielashlinn.com

The Department of Lost Things

@MarielAshlinn

Mariel Ashlinn Kelly on Facebook

Mariel's Etsy Shop

Mariel's Prints

Mariel's shirts

Sponsors

Hairy Tarantula

Bam Coffee Co.

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 well as the Spotlight Award, honouring the identical circumstance, at the Doug Wright Awards – both in 2018.

In this episode, Aaron and Jenn geek out over Jenn's love of manga and anime, especially the magical girl genre, which was a heavy influence on Magical Beatdown. They talk about why the comic is such a local phenomenon in the indie comics scene, juxtaposing whimsical fantasy with over-the-top violence and gore. They also reflect on why the work often serves as a powerful catharsis for all women who have been catcalled and harassed by entitled men. They then move on to Marie and the Worrywort by tracing Jenn's ongoing battle with anxiety and depression and answering why she decided to go public in this comic. They talk about the emerging graphic medicine genre (comics covering mental illness, trauma, grief, disability and overall experience with the medical system) and why comics are one of the most effective ways to bring awareness and relatability to these still misunderstood issues. Plus, if you're an artist who also struggles with anxiety, Jenn has some great advice for you.

This is episode of Speech Bubble is sponsored by Hairy Tarantula where you can get 50% off graphic novels, trade paperbacks art books and manga for the entire month of November. Take advantage at 3456 Yonge St. This episode is also sponsored by Bam Coffee Co. where you can order freshly roasted coffee and comic book swag, including a limited edition mug delivered right to your door as part of a Bam! Box. Listeners use code SB15 at checkout and get 15% off your next Bam Box.

@funeralbeat

@jenn_woodall

Jenn Woodall's Big Cartel Store

Jennwoodall.com

Jenn on Gumroad

Jenn's publisher Silver Sprocket

Jenn's artist collective Friendship Edition

Sponsors

Hairy Tarantula

Bam Coffee Co.

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 precocious 7-year-old she didn't truly understand, but as an adult in retrospect, had far reaching consequences on the rest of her life – both greatly positive and darkly negative in equal parts

Aaron learns that Emmanuelle is exceedingly self-aware, but also still that gifted dreamer with a hugely developed imagination that she was as a child. Her inner child is still active and it's what makes her such a lush creator and artist. They talk about the influence of growing up in Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario as a half Filipino, half French-Canadian who used ballet as her first gateway to putting her creative energy to use in the physical world. Speaking of the physical world, the idyllic time of Queen Street eventually gave way to the grey of adolescent reality. Emmanuelle addresses what became of her in those grey times as the recession loomed, addiction touched her life and she grew into the adult she is today.

Emmanuelle unpacks the spoken and unspoken barriers she faced as a women of colour of lower middle-class and how her unspoken personality sometimes comes directly in conflict with outdated societal expectations and assumptions about how woman are supposed to act.

Then, we talk about her chaste christian-catholic upbringing and how she balances that with a modern culture that is very open with sex and sexuality. She explains how she walks that emotional tightrope as part of her new adult's only erotic comic (exclusively available on Patreon) Princess Bunyi. With a strong manga influence ala Rumiko Takahashi, a heavy romance novel bend and a little dose of straight-up sexual fantasy. Princess Bunyi is now published monthly for Emmanuelle's Patreon supporters, so go check it out!

This episode of Speech Bubble is sponsored by Hairy Tarantula, which is having a 50% off sale on all trade paperbacks and graphic novels all through the month of November. Go grab these perfect stocking stuffers at 3456 Yonge Street. This episode is also sponsored by Bam Coffee Co.. Their Bam Box combines amazing locally-sourced coffee roasted in Canada with comic art from some of Canada's greatest up and coming indie talents. Get 15% off your next Bam Box on their website by entering SB15 at checkout.

@emmanuellechateauneuf

@TheBatmanni

@princess.bunyi

Princess Bunyi on Patreon

Buy Queen Street

An interview with Emmanuelle on Canadian Filipino Net

Sponsors

Hairy Tarantula

Bam Coffee Co.

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 animated film.

His first project of note was Streaker's, which won Peter Laird's Xeric Grant in 2010 about three men who are connoisseurs of streaking and treat it like an obscure high art form. It was distributed by John Porcellino (King-Cat Comics and Stories) through Spit and a Half and Diamond and was his breakout work when the late publisher Alvin Buenaventura of Pigeon Press took an interest and commissioned his two follow-ups, Facility Integrity – about a corporation that controls its employees' bathroom breaks to up efficiency – and The Libertarian -- about a libertarian that becomes infatuated with a socialist and must compromise his ideals as a result. Alvin also featured Maandag's work when he edited “Comics” in The Believer Magazine.

Now, with Drawn and Quarterly, Maandag has released his first full-length graphic novel featuring three stories that highlight his absurdist sense of humour, including the title story, The Follies of Richard Wadsworth about a dimwitted philosophy professor. In this more than an hour conversation, Aaron unpacks how such a bizarre sense of humour can come from such a straight-laced individual. They also talk about how Maandag's style means the art is just a vehicle to serve the jokes and the writing, but is otherwise pretty minimalist. Plus, Maandag details his earliest interaction with Chester Brown and what it's like to be friends with him now. Maandag also explains how he always felt that he was always going to be successful at doing comics for a living.

This podcast is sponsored by Hairy Tarantula and Bam Coffee Co. Don't forget to type SB15 at checkout to get 15% off your Bam Box featuring finely roasted coffee, a limited edition mug and more geektacular swag comic fans will dig.

@nick_maandag

Nick Maandag at Drawn and Quarterly

Nick Maandaag at Spit and a Half

Nick Maandag interview in Broken Pencil Magazine

Nick Maandag in The Comics Journal as featured in Jeet Heer's The Comics Chronicles

Nick Maandag in The Believer

Alvin Buenaventura Obituary from The Comics Journal

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 many of his most well-known characters first appeared. These are characters like The Nod, (not to be confused with Domino's Pizza's The Noid) JetCat and Tutenstein. The Nod would go on to be the title character in The Land of Nod – Stephens' most critically-acclaimed comics work to date, having been nominated for both an Eisner and a Harvey Award. Meanwhile, Tutenstein would live on in a cartoon of the same name on Discovery Kids and JetCat would be part of Nickelodeon's KaBlam! segments.

Speaking of animation, thanks to his underground comics work on Sin, Stephens was soon plucked from that realm to work on a favourite of Aaron's childhood – YTV's absurdist '90s sketch comedy show, Squawk Box starring the very underrated, but never imitated child actor Dov Tiefenbach. Not only did Stephens write on the show, but he also created the animated short Wonder Duds about a hapless superhero who only ever did the bare minimum necessary to call himself a hero. In addition to being influenced by classic Hanna Barbara cartoons and Harvey Comics like Casper, Richie Rich, and Hot Stuff, he was also fascinated by creepy horror comics and monsters of legend, which was a heavy influence on his Cartoon Network show, The Secret Saturdays, which featured its own toy line from Mattel.

As an artist who tells Aaron that he peaked kind of early, his latest work, Dejects, represents a revival of sorts featuring lost and rejected stories starring his most well-known characters: Tutenstein, The Nod, Wonder Duds and JetCat. It also marks a reunion with his old Tragedy Sucks editor Michel Vrana who has revived his old publishing outfit Black Eyed Books to put out Dejects. On the pod, Aaron and Jay get personal to talk about the ups and downs of his career. They answer where he has been and what he has been doing since his peak? They talk about his occultist upbringing, which had a huge influence on his art, what the comic scene is like in Guelph and his mainstream comics work with the original co-creator of the Teen Titans Bob Haney in what would be his last and lost Teen Titans script – eventually released in 2008 (four years after Haney's death) as Teen Titans: The Lost Annual.

This episode is sponsored by Hairy Tarantula at 3456 Yonge Street in Toronto and Saskatchewan's Bam Coffee Co. Don't forget to go to bamcoffee.ca and use SB15 at checkout to receive 15% off your own Bam Box, which combines coffee and amazing geek swag our listeners drool over.

@Jaypopgun

Buy Dejects

Jay's old archived website

Jay's old Monsterama blog circa 2010

Jay Stephens entry on Lambiek's Comiclopedia

Buy t-shirts with Jay's design

Buy Welcome to Oddville

Owl Magazine – Arrowhead (Jay's creation from the True Patriot Canadian superhero anthology)

Black Eye Books – Jay's Publisher

@blackeyebooks

The Interesting Case of The Secret Saturdays

JetCat on Nickelodeon's KaBlam!

Sponsors

Hairy Tarantula

Bam Coffee Co.

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 Montreal's International Wrestling Syndicate as Bob “The Animal” Anger.

Aaron and Andy talk about it all, including how they met 16 years ago when Andy was in his rockabilly phase promoting his first ever self-published effort, Dead End 56 by selling comics out of the back of a classic car while flanked by rollergirls. They talk about Wolf for a little publisher that didn't last called Moonstone and his first real ongoing title as the primary artist, Kill Shakespear. Did you know that Steve Niles (30 Days of Night) almost wrote Southern Cross? Speech Bubble is the only place you'll find out why he didn't.

Somewhere in there, they also talk about what it was like to work with Duncan Trussell and Donny Cates on The Simulationists for Heavy Metal Magazine and how that lead to illustrating a Tijuana bible that Trussell can hand out at shows. Plus, his plans to found a new Montreal studio space with Isola's Karl Kerschel, a sneak peak of his new comic project coming in October 2019 from TKO Studios, Pound for Pound with writer Natalie Chaidez (showrunner on USA Network's Queen of the South) and how he found his new found love of professional wrestling – a place for all that wild energy to go and possibly the greatest feat of embedded journalism known to man for what may be his most ambitious comic project yet.

This episode is sponsored by Hairy Tarantula and Bam Coffee Co.. Don't forget to use SB15 at checkout to receive 15% off your Bam Box of coffee and geektastic swag.

@AndyBelanger

@Andy_Belanger

Andy's Blog

Buy Andy's original art

International Wrestling Syndicate

Bob “The Animal” Anger in action

Buy Pound for Pound

Buy Southern Cross

Buy Kill Shakespeare

The Simulationists interview in Paste Magazine 2016

Sponsors

Hairy Tarantula

Bam Coffee Co.

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 about that.” The memoir also documents how meeting legendary media theorist Marshall McLuhan and his son Eric changed her life. How having people of that calibre believe in her gave her more confidence and how she embraced new technology to help overcome her struggles with reading. Meanwhile, she had to overcome being perceived as a dummy in her own family and she explains what it's like to be failed over and over again in school and then overcoming that to go to university. The graphic novel she releases now helped her accept her own personal style and embrace who she is as a cartoonist.

Ken began his career working for Marvel as an inker right out of school, but it wasn't the dream he thought it would be. He talks about having to carve his own path through the comics industry as a military brat. He went to Sheridan College and learned art fundamentals and basically started again to unlearn bad habits and learn good habits. He eventually would go on to win the Governor General's medal for his work in sequential art and draw books like Iron Man and Astro Boy. He talks about his journey toward authorship and away from being a cog in a wheel.

His latest project War Bears happened thanks to an article he illustrated written by Margaret Atwood that takes place during the golden age of Canadian comics -- The Canadian Whites. The article was published to celebrate Canada's 150th birthday and War Bears is its continuation – a further exploration of the story. He talks about what it was like to work with Margaret Atwood and the creation of Oursonette – a fiction hero of the Canadian Whites period. The two Steacys pack a great one-two punch as you listen to them react to each other's work as Joan explores her own history and Ken explores Canadian comics history both real and fictional. This episode is sponsored by Hairy Tarantula.

@joansteacy

Joan's blog

Conundrum Press

The Comics Journal interviews Joan

The Comics Program that Ken and Joan teach at Camosun College

Joan and Ken's son Alex's forthcoming webcomic Drainers

Buy War Bears

Buy Aurora Borealice

Sponsor

Hairy Tarantula

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 Kung Fu – a mash-up of Shaw Brothers and Golden Harvest 1970s kung fu movies with blaxploitation, zombie horror and spaghetti western films. He also teamed with Chip Zdarsky on the scifi romp Kaptara about a gay space explorer that crash lands on a planet right out of a Playmates action figure catalogue.

Kagan gives Aaron the inside scoop on all this, including the status of Kaparta and why it stopped. Plus, he reveals an exciting new project that will mark his return to comics after a long hiatus. If that doesn't float your boat, find out what it was like for him to be a courtroom illustrator for some of the most high profile cases in Canada, including The Toronto 18, serial killer Russell Williams and disgraced former CBC Radio host Jian Ghomeshi. This episode is sponsored by Hairy Tarantula.

@kaganmcleod

@KaganMcLeod

Kagan's Website

Buy Draw People Every Day

YouTube Review of Draw People Every Day

Buy Kaptara Vol. 1: Fear Not, Tiny Alien

Buy Infinite Kung Fu

Infinite Kung Fu Trailer

Infinite Kung Fu Launch Party Video

The History of Rap Video

The History of Rap Poster

Sponsors

Hairy Tarantula