Word Balloon Comics Podcast

Welcome to a brand new Fortress of Word Balloon, where the mic gets handed over to the League of Word Balloon Listeners, straight from patreon.com/wordballoon.

Coming to you from my secret headquarters, and this one’s a freewheeling hang with the smartest fans in comics as we bounce from comics to TV to film, hitting everything we love . And along the way, I dig into the Word Balloon vault to share some behind-the-scenes stories from the last 20 years, the guests, the moments, and the surprises that helped shape the show.

Scott Larson, the creator of the supernatural commic Visitations talks about his mentor Len Strazewski, co-creator of Jesse Quick for DC, Prime for Malibu and so much more.

Len also did 17 ssiues of The Fly for Impact Comics, and wrote 10 issues of Jstice Society in 1992

On this episode, we go back to 2009 for a great conversation with Gerry Conway, a writer whose career has taken some fascinating turns across comics and television. We talk about why Gerry stepped away from a successful run in TV, writing shows like Law & Order and Diagnosis: Murder, to return to DC Comics for a surprising and, frankly, underappreciated project, The Last Days of Animal Man.

That decision ends up sparking what you could call a full third act comeback in comics, leading him back into the Marvel universe and onto Spider-Man once again.

Along the way, we dig into some of Gerry’s most iconic work, from the still controversial and era defining “death of Gwen Stacy” in The Amazing Spider-Man to the massive, history making 1976 Superman vs. The Amazing Spider-Man treasury edition.

The 2020 One On One chat between Gerry Conway and Brian Michael Bendis 

I arranged this chat between the guys the wrote their share of Spider-Man Superman, Avengers and Justice League stories.

from 202o. during covid gerry abd I talked about where the punisher fits in the post Black Lives Matter era, his DC and Marvel yeras, and adventures in TV and film writing.