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Showing posts from June, 2017

HOLLYWOOD/VG ARTIST JOHN GALLAGHER ON THE MOST IMPORTANT SKILL TO JOIN THE INDUSTRY, THE BEST DIGITAL TOOLS ON THE HORIZON, WHAT YOUNG ILLUSTRATORS MUST KNOW ABOUT THEMSELVES TO SUCCEED (MF GALAXY 128)

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HOW HE BEGAN HIS CAREER IN TELEVISION—BUT NOT WHERE OR HOW YOU’D THINK, DRAWING AT BIOWARE IN ITS EARLIEST DAYS, THE MYTH AND REALITY ABOUT HOLLYWOOD AGEISM + WHY OLDER ARTISTS HAVE AN ADVANTAGE LISTEN/DOWNLOAD I met John Gallagher so long ago I don’t even remember it, but we were both members of the same fannish club called ESFCAS, the Edmonton Science Fiction and Comic Arts Society at the University of Alberta. A bunch of us there wanted to be professional artists—including Adrian Kleinbergen and Nigel Tully who found work in comics, Jaemi Hardy who became a fine artist, and Marc Taro Holmes who worked in video games and Hollywood and has published instructional books on art— and you can hear my conversation with him on MF GALAXY. But John Gallagher is a particularly amazing success story. After training at the Alberta College of Art and Design, he went to work at Edmonton’s BioWare studio as a production illustrator. Later he broke into Hollywood, and has wor

SALADIN AHMED ON WRITING BLACK BOLT, INFLUENTIAL EDITORS + WRITER WHO GOT HIM GIG, TURNING A MARVEL D-LISTER INTO A-LIST POTENTIAL, COSMIC PRISONS + AHMED’S CONNECTION TO SECRET LIFE OF PRISONERS (MF GALAXY 127)

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HIS LOVE FOR CRUSHER CREEL, BLACK BOLT’S RACIAL IDENTITY, HOW WRITING COMICS PROTECTS HIM FROM A “GOOD OLD-FASHIONED NERVOUS BREAKDOWN” LISTEN/DOWNLOAD Saladin Ahmed is a fascinating cat. He’s best known as the Arab and Muslim American fantasy novelist who crafted Throne of the Crescent Moon which was nominated for the Hugo and won the Locus Award for best first novel. But his ethnicity also includes Polish and Irish, and his writing also includes short stories, articles, a stunning number of Tweets, and the new Marvel Comics series Black Bolt about the king of the Inhumans. We met at the Science Fiction Research Association conference in Detroit in 2012, and he was as fun and down to earth in person as he is online. When I learned that he was writing for Marvel I just knew I had to find out what it was like for him as a novelist to leap into the world of comics, and was delighted to learn that like me, he was a lifelong comics fan who’d always wanted to cr

BIRTH OF A FAMILY – STUNNING NEW DOCUMENTARY ON FOUR SURVIVORS OF CANADIAN GOV’T DECADES-LONG MASS-KIDNAPPING PROGRAMME THAT DESTROYED THOUSANDS OF FAMILIES (MF GALAXY 126)

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DIRECTOR TASHA HUBBARD LENSES THE UNION OF FOUR SIBLINGS MEETING DECADES AFTER SETTLER GOV’T RIPPED THEM FROM THEIR MOTHER; TRIUMPHING WITH JOY AND LOVE OVER COLOSSAL BIG GOV’T RACISM + TYRANNY LISTEN/DOWNLOAD Remember when the Chinese, Saudi Arabian, and Nigerian governments invaded Canada and occupied it and it seemed like they would never leave? Remember how every province and territory fell like dominoes even after heroic military struggles against them, and so the invaders jailed or killed our resistance leaders after labelling them terrorists and savages? Remember how they made trillions of dollars in profit for the Chinese communist party, the Saudi monarchy, and the Nigerian government, by stealing our whole country, and then they mocked us for being poor? Remember how they destroyed and outlawed all our cultural institutions, suppressed all our languages, forced us to take Mandarin, Arabic, and Yoruba names, and forcibly converted some of us to commu