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Ron: In this special episode of Stereo Geeks, we interview Canadian creatives at Fan Expo Canada 2025. The Fan Expo Canada media team put us in touch with a couple of guests: 

Mon: Before we start our episode, we would like to acknowledge that the land we are recording on is the traditional territory of many nations, including the Mississaugas of the Credit, the Anishnabeg, the Chippewa, the Haudenosaunee and the Wendat peoples. It is now home to many diverse First Nations, Inuit and Métis peoples. We also acknowledge that Toronto is covered by Treaty 13 with the Mississaugas of the Credit.

Ron: While we are making this land acknowledgement, we understand that this is not enough and that positive action is required by the people of Canada to make substantive change for the Indigenous nations and communities whose lands we now reside on.

[Music]

We asked Dave:

Dave McCaig: So the big difference between working in comics and working in animation, I think, is the amount of time you get to develop the look and overall tone of an animated project.

When I worked on the animated series, The Batman, we had quite a bit of development time in advance of getting started on the first episode of the show, so we could figure out how we wanted to handle things like Gotham City at night and work around some issues in the scripts where, for example, a lot of the, I mean, Batman primarily takes place at night, and we ran into problems where it was hard to show the transition from one night to another without, in our case, making a total of 3 different copies of all the backgrounds for the show.

So there was a red night, so that it touched on the classic Bruce Tim, Batman. There was purple night, and there was a green night in color. So that you always knew if it was like the one scene was all in red and the other scene was all in green, that it was a different night taking place. ‘Cos otherwise, sometimes in the script it didn't actually say, you know, like, meanwhile or the next day this happens or whatever. So yeah, that's one of the big changes. 

Dave McCaig: There's a lot of similarities between working in comics and animation though, Drawing comics is basically like doing storyboards. The coloring process is just a much more elaborate version of the coloring process in comics.

Again, one of the big advantages in animation is you can take an entire storyboard for a movie or a TV episode, and you can go through the storyboards and color script the whole show so that you can do a flow of the lighting and mood and stuff, all the way through it before going into the individual background elements, which is a lot of fun to do, being able to take that extra time is really cool.

Dave McCaig: I do work on some comics that allow me to have that extra time, but it's pretty rare, working on stuff like superhero books for DC and Marvel. You do not have a lot of free time to do that. Usually, if you're working on a team book for Marvel or DC, it's go, go, go, go, go. These things are all running late. You draw a book with, you know, 20 guys in it fighting a million ninjas. It takes forever to draw, it takes forever to color, and it's really deadline-focused, whereas with animation, that deadline-focus is there, but there's a much larger team and there's an understanding that this stuff needs to get developed.

Dave McCaig: I've had really good luck with projects over my career. When I first got started working in the industry, I got to color a lot of the Star Wars books that were being published by Dark Horse Comics at the time. Which led me to be able to go to Skywalker Ranch and check that out while the prequel movies were getting made and I got to write and draw a Star Wars comic, which was really fun. I mean it was a, you know, short story, but it was really fun to do. 

I really enjoyed working on, you know, the hallmarks of the big two, like X-Men and Avengers and Superman and Batman. Those things, you know, were very exciting, you know, the first issue of Action Comics that I got to work on, I was pretty stoked.

And now, I get to work on a lot of books at Image and I'm really excited to work with guys like Robert Kirkman and Rick Remender. Robert Kirkman always gives me super awesome projects to work on, like, I mean, I'm coloring the entire Walking Dead. I'm working on Invincible covers for the 20th anniversary stuff that's coming out, and also getting to do promotional work for the show, which is amazing.

And working with Rick Remenderon books like, I mean, Low, I think maybe my favorite book that I've worked on, Low with Greg Tocchini drawing it. 

I also am working on a book with Rick right now called The Sacriificers with Max Fiumara, and it's a really satisfying book. I just really love working with Rick. He really loves putting his characters through the grinder, and that makes it fun to read the book as I'm working on it. And also it makes it a lot of fun to color because there's a lot of, you know, a lot of angst leads to a lot of great scenes that make it, fun to throw big bold colors out.

We asked Katie:

Katie Sawatsky: I can. it's almost not a sneak preview anymore. We just had the bulk of the book shipped to the studio this week, very excited. 

So, sneak preview of Blackmouth. It's a Gothic horror mystery. And we have a love triangle and two conflicted characters, both with toxic fathers and a central mystery in that town. About a witch who may have come to life from an old rhyme that the citizens of black meth have been reciting for centuries. 

Katie Sawatsky: Oh, character design. I love it. A lot of my work has been character design, both for my own comics and also, projects I've worked on in, you know, other people's comics and, video game and animation. 

I think for me character design begins with the physicality of the character. How do they stand? Are they, do they have a strong stance, a strong posture? How do they move? And then I start to get into the accoutrement of what do they put on their body. 

And then how does that sort of interact with their physicality? How would they do their hair? Are they practical? Are they ornate? And how to show that in what they choose to put on themselves in everyday life.

Sometimes if they are uniform-wearing, the way they wear that uniform can tell you a lot about that character. I also like to start plunking characters next to each other so that you can really get a good idea of what they are going to look like and feel like next to each other, so the relative characteristics of those characters as well. And then, you know, you just draw for 100 hours after that and lickity-split, you got characters.

We asked Kalman:

Kalman Andrasofszky: Hey, Stereo Geeks. Here are my answers to your two great questions. So, question one. How does my process differ from drawing comic art, drawing cover art versus interior art? I mean, it's all comic art. There's a bunch of differences, or at least a few that I can talk about. 

Let's see, in terms of overall like headspace. When you're working on a cover, it's a single image. Everything needs to happen on that one single image. However, whatever you're trying to convey, whatever you're trying to imply, whatever like, marks you have to hit in terms of this character or that character, I mean, a good cover should kind of suggest something that makes the person curious. There should be like intriguing little tidbits in there and something that makes them want to know what the next moment of that scene is, or if it's not a scene, at least intrigued by who the character is or what this book is all about. And everything needs to happen in that one image. 

People I know who are more page-oriented have shared with me that that's a bit anxiety-inducing, that it's make or break, one image has to do it all. Whereas on a page, you have 3-4-5 swings, and throughout an issue, you have so many drawings that if you don't quite nail a few, overall, you have many chances to hit the mark. 

Personally, I feel differently. I feel like all of my energy is finite and the amount of focus, time and energy I have is finite, and I think I'm better suited to putting that all into one image, rather than dividing that up.

What that means is, I've had to fight against trying to make every panel on a page cover, and I have to keep reminding myself that if there's 6 panels on a page, you know, it's totally justifiable that each of those panels is 1/6 of that energy, or, you know, in the case of fewer panels or a panel where there's a clear anchor image panel. You're putting maybe 50% into one big cool image and then the other panels get less. 

Now that doesn't mean that anyone's half-a**ing anything, but we're human and it only paid so much and we only have so much time and it can be exhausting to try to put a cover's worth of energy into every panel, and because I have a broken brain, I can't resist that, which means I tend to get really burnt out when I do interiors. So covers, all of that energy goes into one image, which results in something that I generally feel more satisfied by. 

The other thing is, it's a shorter arc to completion. I teach at the illustration faculty at Seneca College and I talk to my students a lot about that. Whereas when you're doing interiors, you're on page 12 of 20. And it feels like you're nowhere, you're lost at sea. Even if you crunched for the next week, you might get up to page 15 or 18 out of 20 or 22, you're still not done. There's a lot of this sort of limbo of being somewhere and some brains have a really hard time finding direction or focus in there and sometimes it can feel very unmotivating, whereas with the cover, generally it's a few steps and you know, it can take a day or two or a week or more depending on the complexity, but then you're done, you get the pat on the head. Good job, you did this, thank you, great, you get paid or you get the promise of pay depending on the publisher you're working for. And there's an arc of completion, there's satisfaction, it comes quicker. 

So, I've been a cover artist for much more of my career than interior artist. I've done a few things here and there. I'm actually working on a new project where I'm doing interiors now, but, and it's going well, by the way, but in terms of that lost at sea feeling, I've instituted safeguards and so far they're working. But yeah, with covers, it's a quicker arc, and it's all that energy is going into one image, which means you tend to spend, have more time to make it exactly how you want and greater satisfaction.

And also, I mean, a lot of my artistic vision comes across, that sounds really, you know, but what I mean is, is that like color is very important in how I work. It doesn't entirely feel like me unless I'm coloring. So much of what I do comes in the color, and with a cover, it's very common to color your own covers. It's very rare to colour your own interiors. It's so much work that it just doesn't make sense. And so as a result, again, another difference is I feel like my covers are more a reflection of me and how I make art, and because I get to take it from start to finish entirely myself. 

OK, that's question one.

Kalman Andrasofszky: The reason Fan Expo is celebrating Captain Canuck this year is Captain, the good captain is turning 50 this year. In related news, so am I. Captain Canuck and I were both created in the same year, and it's been a while since I've worked on Canuck. 

I started in the mid-2010s somewhere and I was done at the end of 2017 or so. So it's been eight years now, but for a while there, the captain was very much at the center of my work life. 

It started as a design gig for a reboot and a comeback for the what was the 40th anniversary at the time, I think. And it started with doing designs for the animated shorts. And then there was talk of doing comics, and it turned into more. I wanted to write and I got the opportunity to try my hand at writing, which is something I've wanted to do for a long time. I drew a couple of issues, I designed every character pretty much, created a bunch of new characters, some other editorial was involved in some of the creation, so it wasn't just me, it was collaborative, but I added a lot of new characters to the universe and some radical takes on old characters. All of my animated designs were kind of used in, in the comics. 

Then we got the incredible good luck to hire Leonard Kirk, who is a national treasure, Canadian comic book artist to take over and I continued writing and doing covers and then I shifted more into kind of a creative director, editor-in-chief role, kind of overseeing what they start, wanted to make a bigger line, a bigger universe of comics, and so, they got to add Northguard, who was another Canadian superhero inspired by Canuck and a bunch of other properties that were public domain and new characters, and I kind of show ran that first season of what was called the chapter verse. 

And I'm very proud of all of that. It was an incredible learning process to get to, transition into writing as well as art. I learned a ton about that and myself. There's a million things I wish I had done differently or I wish I had known then. There's a million things that I look back on when I reread and I still love. I had a lot of creative freedom, which for a first gig was very lucky. I had a lot of support in that regard, and I got to kind of do, try out a bunch of, of ideas I had while also respecting where Captain Canuck came from, right? 

Like, Captain Canuck was created by Richard Comely. A Canadian in Canada, distinct from, I don't know, Guardian, created by Americans. John Byrne had a hand, he has since renounced any Canadianness, very publicly. Wolverine, created by Americans, Deadpool, created by Americans. Puck, same. Captain Canuck was created by Canadians.

An apocryphal story is Byrne wanted to buy, wanted Marvel to buy Captain Canuck to use him in Alpha Flight, and Richard Comely wouldn't sell, and so he created Guardian. So if you see some visual similarities between Guardian of Alpha Flight and Captain Canuck, that explains that. And the Captain was 1st, 1975. Guardian didn't roll out until '79. 

So that was my experience, you know. It enabled me to pretty much wear almost like you do in small companies, not just in comics, it enabled me to wear pretty much every hat in comic bookmaking. I'd done covers, I'd done art, I'd done some character design, but I was new to writing and then shifting into kind of an editorial role. I did more character design, I did story editing, I worked with writers, I worked with artists, I tweaked lettering and balloon, like I, by the end of it, I had done every job in comics and I came out of it a far more fully flashed, well rounded comic creator who can, who can, who can do all the things. 

So yeah, very grateful for my time there and adding sort of my voice and my style and my aesthetic and my taste to the legend, and I don't know, it's pretty gratifying that I haven't worked there in, in almost 8 years and my design is still the design, that is still the Captain Canuck. It would not be shocking for them to bring other people in after me to do their take and revise the costume. 

I mean, Ho Che Anderson did his Captain Canuck, which is different, but that was a different character. That was somebody, you know, much like they did in the original Canuck series, there was a new Canuck, so that's a different character. 

But Tom Evans, the rebooted Captain Canuck, there's that look that I designed is still very much at the forefront of all of the Captain Canuck stuff that they're doing to this day, which feels like a tremendous compliment and it's really gratifying to see that, That probably, I mean, out of everything I've talked about, the biggest contribution is reimagining the character design. It’s still there and people still seem to respond really positively to it, which, as somebody for whom character design is probably my favorite thing of all the things you can do in art, is extremely gratifying and rewarding.

Ron: Thank you to Fan Expo Canada for connecting us with these creators. And thank you to Dave, Kalman, and Katie for their insights.