Speech Bubble

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 equally high profile American publications of record, including The New York Times Book Review.

In all three of the publications named here, Mark wrote and drew long-running comic strips – the most well-known of which was arguably McDoodle Street, which developed quite a cult following in the pages of The Village Voice among the miscreants living in 1970s New York. He tells Aaron that inspiration for the content of such a thing came on long meandering walks through the city streets at all hours of the night where he would just let his mind wander into all manner of dreamy tangents. Later, in his rent-controlled apartment – where he once heard the music of Kris Kristofferson wafting through the floor boards – he would draw what he saw. What came out was often a Where's Waldo-esque acid trip where every inch of the panels were covered in a warped-ly detailed cityscape with sight gags strewn throughout. Maybe this was at least partially due to the fact that both Mark's parents were gag cartoonists themselves. In fact, growing up he sometimes found himself playing in the backyard with the real Dennis the Menace (son of the strip's creator Hank Ketcham).

In addition, to its busy pages, McDoodle Street gained attention for its biting social commentary and satirism. A combination Mark was later asked to repeat when targeting America's seat of power for his Washingtoon Strip in the Washington Post and then his Boox Strip for the New York Times Book Review. Though special in their own right, these two strips never quite captured the imagination like McDoodle St., which ended abruptly, without explanation. Mark offers that explanation here and in the pages of the newly published McDoodle Street collection from The New York Review of Comics and Penguin Random House Canada, which he came to the Toronto Comics Art Festival to promote at the time of this interview. This episode of Speech Bubble is sponsored by Hairy Tarantula.

Mark's website

Mark's Wikipedia entry

Cartoonist Kayfabe – Show and Tell 04: Picture Books feat. Who Needs Donuts?

The publisher of the re-issued MacDoodle St. New York Review of Comics

Penguin Random House Canada

Yellow Yellow reissued by Drawn and Quarterly

Mark Alan Stamaty on Bullseye with Jesse Thorn

Mark Alan Stamaty on All of It with Alison Stewart

Mark Alan Stamaty on Leonard Lopate At Large on WBAI

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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 (lead singer of the band My Chemical Romance) and Fabio as the co-creator of Casanova with Matt Fraction (Sex Criminals, Hawkeye, Superman's Pal Jimmy Olsen).

The twins came to Speech Bubble's Never Sleeps Network studios in Toronto all the way from São Paulo, Brazil, as a stop-over before 2019's Toronto Comic Art Festival, for a rare and exclusive long-form interview together. During the interview they discuss their special bond as twins, doing everything together, including living together and sharing the same bedroom until they were 23, and explain how drawing became their twin special language from a very early age. They also explain that because they are so bonded, personal relationships are a key part of what they like to unpack and explore when doing comics together. It was their fascination with the way stories unlock a person's imagination, in conjunction with the art, that turned them toward comics as an interest and eventual career.

They chronicle their rise from doing fan zines in Brazil to working on some of the American comic industry's hottest projects with some of its best known creators and how hard, but also necessary, it was to break into the American market if they were ever going to be successful as comic artists. Listeners will also hear about how reflecting on his own death in the shower and how fleeting life actually is, lead to Gabriel coming up with the concept for Day Tripper and how that subsequent Eisner win put both brothers on the map. They also share how being twins and growing up consuming the same media influences their process, with the story always being at the centre in governing who will draw what and their distinctive drawing styles (Gabriel inks with a pen and Fabio inks with a brush) fitting each story differently.

Of course, you'll hear about Umbrella Academy too. You'll learn how Gabriel feels about the comic being adapted by Netflix and whether the two are competitive with each other about their different levels of success and fame. This episode of Speech Bubble is sponsored by Hairy Tarantula and Oldtown Bodega.

@fabiomoon

@gabriel_ba

Fábio's Twitter

Gabriel's Twitter

Fábio and Gabriel's Facebook Page

Fábio and Gabriel's blog

Fábio and Gabriel's YouTube Channel

Fábio and Gabriel's Canadian publisher

Sponsors

Hairy Tarantula

Oldtown Bodega

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 Three Thieves won a Joe Shuster award as The Best Canadian for Comic for Kids. He's a contributor to the Canadian superhero anthology, True Patriot, which was edited by past Speech Bubble guest J. Torres and he's currently doing covers for the Bettie Page comic published by Dynamite Entertainment. The project he's working on (as of this recording) is a graphic biography of a jazz cornet player Bix Beiderbecke aptly named, Bix.

On the pod, Scott comes to the recording session, fresh off his stint as a panelist on Librarian and Educator Day at the Toronto Comic Art Festival, carrying All-Stars, a mini-comic he put together with University of Windsor librarians and history professors Heidi Jacobs and Miriam Wright about the Chatham [Ontario] Coloured All-Stars and their victory in 1934, as the first black team to win the Ontario Baseball Association title. Aaron and Scott cover the Chatham All-Stars and their star player Wilfred “Boomer” Harding, but not before bonding over their mutual love of the Batman 1966 TV show and chronicling Scott's path to professional comics making through animation. His early influences include the great Will Eisner, Canadian legend Ty Templeton and Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics – all of which put him on a path toward cartooning instead of drawing superheroes. He talks about what attracts him to simple storytelling and that mid-century design style that has become a bit of a calling card for him. Plus, he goes behind-the-scenes on the development of Two Generals – a highly personal project for him. This podcast is sponsored by Hairy Tarantula.

@scottchantler (Instagram)

@scottchantler (Twitter)

@Scottchantlercartoonist

Scott's Website

Buy Scott's Original Art

Scott on Amazon

Scott in Maclean's as The University of Windsor's Cartoonist-in-Residence

Scott's TEDx Talk

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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 drawing style that seems to melt off the page at times and talks about his fascination with the aesthetics of activism. Apologetica is very much a lampooning of not just the state of our world, but the way the emotional millage one can get from the appearance of encouraging change means more than creating actual change in the age of social media. Sponsored by Hairy Tarantula

Ben O'Neil's Website

@yung.restless

Ben's work with Sweet Jesus

Aaron's review of Apologetica in Sequential Magazine #2

The trailer for Buzzard – The film Ben co-wrote with Joy Webster

The trailer for The Sunset Channel – The film Ben co-wrote with Matthew Kinahan

Speech Bubble's interview with Ben's publisher Mark Laliberte

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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 Christie Pits Park. Coming out now, the work seems more relevant than ever with Trump in office and fascism seemingly getting more of a foothold than it has ever had since the Second World War in governments around the world.

We talk about that on this podcast and why Jamie Michaels decided to make a little-known moment in Canadian history the subject of the second graphic novel he has written with art by Doug Fedrau. The first was Canoe Boys the story of how he and his friends canoed to Mexico for a bet and this podcast addresses that too. We also talk about why he founded his independent comics company Dirty Water Comics and what it's like trying to make it in the independent comics game outside a national centre like Toronto and do a deep dive on the comic scene in Winnipeg, Manitoba. This podcast is sponsored by Hairy Tarantula.

@dirtywatercomic

@dirtywatercomics

Dirty Water Comics

Christie Pits Kickstarter (archived)

CBC article on Christie Pits

Sponsor

Hairy Tarantula

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 Broverman on this episode, he actually has time to keep office hours. In his “spare time,” he co-hosts a live role-playing game podcast called The Danger Dice Gang featuring past Speech Bubble guest, and Jim's co-collaborator on Freelance, Andrew Wheeler.

Jim has been on over 100 podcasts, so appearing on Speech Bubble is old hat for him. He tells Aaron how he broke into the comic industry through web comics and some help from Scott McCloud (Understanding Comics) while doing animation as a day job. He eventually got a job colouring comics for Udon and the rest is history. He also goes behind the scenes on Avengers: No Surrender and No Road Home explaining what it's like to do those weekly Marvel events co-written by Mark Waid (Kingdom Come, Daredevil) and Al Ewing (The Immortal Hulk) while keeping the story cohesive.

If you've ever wondered how he balances it all, this is also the podcast where he gives a play-by-play on his typical day. He also hypes his new Comixology digital exclusive Stone Star and explains why he went digital without the kind of marketing his stories with Marvel typically get. This episode is sponsored by Hairy Tarantula.

@JimZub

@jim_zub

Jim's website

The Danger Dice Gang Podcast

Stone Star

Seneca Animation

Jim's first webcomic Makeshift Miracle

Sponsor

Hairy Tarantula

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 Songbook.

More recently, he's the well-known cover artist for the DC/Vertigo series Imaginary Fiends and with soon be launching an ongoing series on which he takes care of the art duties called, Second Coming featuring a story where Jesus rooms with a Superman archetype. The series is to be released on July 10, 2019, by Ahoy Comics.

In an exclusive interview with Speech Bubble, Richard explains why Second Coming was canceled by DC/Vertigo and picked up by Ahoy. He also reveals how he avoided the slush pile at Marvel Comics and why he became a primary target of the alt-right Comicsgate movement. This episode is sponsored by Hairy Tarantula.

Richard's Instagram

@rpace

Original art from Richard

Second Coming Comes to Ahoy Comics

Imaginary Fiends

Batman: The Doom that Came to Gotham

Sponsor

Hairy Tarantula

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, he's just a soft-spoken guy with long-hair and a butcher-boy hat who loves his city and his neighbourhood –Cabbagetown, which is why he writes and draws the ongoing comic of the same name. Some of it is vulgar, a lot of it is bizarre, but all of it is out of love. This episode is sponsored by the iconoclasts at Hairy Tarantula.

Jason's website

Sponsors

Hairy Tarantula

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 nine days and quitting books over personal conflicts with writers and editors. If you want to know how Salgood founded the Sequential Canadian Comix News and Culture blog because of his dyslexia and how it morphed into Sequential Magazine, this is also the place. What about how he goes about teaching creative people the ropes of comics making at Syn Studio Concept Art School in Montreal? Checkpoint Checky! You'll also hear about Salgood's desire to leave a legacy of his own in comics. Perhaps it will be through volume two of his comic Dream Life

Smaller bits include a story about an unpublished Ghost Rider project written by Warren Ellis, his one interaction with Clive Barker on Saint Sinner, the story of quitting a disaster Morbius: the Living Vampire script and....PIG SEX!!!! This episode is sponsored by Hairy Tarantula.

@salgoodsam

@salgood

Salgood's Website

Salgood Sam's Spilt Ink

Buy Salgood's work

Salgood's Patreon

Dynamic Drawing with Salgood Sam at Syn Studio Concept Art School

Sequential – Canadian Comix News & Culture blog

Sequential's Facebook Page

Sequential Magazine

Lionel Douglas's Photography

Sponsors

Hairy Tarantula

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” storyline with writer Mariko Tamaki (This One Summer) before going on to release Luke Cage: Everyman as a Marvel Digital Original with writer Anthony Del Col (Kill Shakespeare).

But comics were never really his thing, drawing was his thing and what he would draw were anime characters inspired by shows like Naruto. In life, he's a pretty chill and shy kid who mostly keeps to himself, but on the page is where he really feels he can express himself and shine. He tells Aaron that drawing gives him a sense of peace and recounts that breaking into Marvel came down to a healthy competition between From A Hat members to try and score C.B. Cebulski's business card (then one of Marvel's most renowned talent recruiters) during a portfolio review at a convention. A year of sending samples via e-mail later and he had his first mainstream comics art assignment. Soon he found himself learning to draw comics while he was actually drawing comics.

Inside the pod: We gain insight into the formation of From A Hat, discuss how to gain the confidence to show a Marvel editor your art, why it's really hard to draw comics, especially at a high level and the importance of finishing over perfection.

This episode of Speech Bubble is sponsored by Hairy Tarantula, Adaptdefy and The Amok Podcast Fundraising campaign

Instagram - @jahnoyl

Twitter - @jahnoyl

Jahnoy Lindsay on Deviant Art

Buy Luke Cage: Everyman on Comixology

From A Hat Studio

From A Hat Tumblr

@fromahat

Sponsors

Hairy Tarantula

Adaptdefy

The Amok Podcast Fundraising Campaign