Category Archives: Interview

Celebration 2017: Interview with Charles Soule

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He hasn’t gotten any less busy since the last time we chatted but Charles Soule was kind enough to sit down with me after the big Marvel panel at Star Wars Celebration last week. We talked about his relatively recently announced Darth Vader book and his continuing work on Poe Dameron including a very in depth look at today’s issue.

Warning! This interview contains spoilers for Poe Dameron #13 and I mean major spoilers. They are all in the back half of the interview so you can safely read until the first mention of the Poe book. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

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via IGN.com

Bria for Tosche Station: So you still haven’t talked them into giving you a Palpatine book then? Just a Vader one?

Charles Soule: Yeah but a Vader book is by definition almost a Palpatine book at the same time. They’re still very, very intertwined. The story that I’m telling in the Vader book has Palpatine as the only point of connection that Vader has left anymore. He’s the only person he can turn to for any sort of advice or guidance. His physicality is completely different and completely changed. He has no anchor point except Palpatine, which Palpatine of course knows and realizes and uses to manipulate Vader further in the great tragedy that is Darth Vader’s life. Continue reading →

NYCC 2016: Interview with Charles Soule

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poe dameron cover 2I was lucky enough to sit down and chat with Charles Soule for a few minutes at New York Comic Con. Since we last talked at Baltimore Comic Con last year, he’s finished his run on Lando, written the Obi-Wan and Anakin series, and is currently writing the ongoing Poe Dameron series for Marvel Comics. (And that’s in addition to all the other books he writes for Marvel and all his creator owned work.) Needless, to say, he’s stayed busy.

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Bria for Tosche Station: Thank you again for talking with me this morning and congratulations on conquering the world of Star Wars Comics.

Charles Soule: It has been an incredibly ride. Doing a series set in Prequel time, doing a series set in Original series time, and new era time? I can’t believe it. I still can’t believe it.

TS: I think you might actually be the first person to have written in all three eras in the new canon.

CS: I guess the dream’s achieved. I can retire now. It’s all happened.

TS: I think it was at NYCC last year that the Obi-Wan and Anakin book was announced which I loved by the way. What was it like getting to delve into another era and its characters since before that you’d been working on Lando?

CS: The thing that I really liked about it was that not only was it a Prequel Era story which is sort of unexplored to begin with but it was in the unexplored—no one has written anything between Episode I and Episode II as far as I know other than this.

TS: One or two Legends books but not much.

CS: So it was very cool to be able to look at a time when the Jedi were… they weren’t ascended but they were certainly powerful and their infrastructure was in place and all that. Palpatine was active but hadn’t yet revealed himself as Sidious. The relationship with Anakin was really developing. There were all these really potent, dramatic things I could do with the Obi-Wan series that aren’t available in other parts of the timeline so I was really thrilled to get a chance to take a crack at it. Continue reading →

Interview: Jon Klassen

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This Is Not My HatThis past April I attended the first Alaska Robotics Mini-Con and had the opportunity to interview award-winning children’s book author and illustrator Jon Klassen, creator of I Want My Hat Back and This is Not My Hat and illustrator of Lemony Snickett’s The Dark, among many others. Listen to us talk about his time working in animation, visual storytelling, turtles, hats, and Star Wars as a series of moments!

Jon Klassen’s art can be seen at his website here and he can be found on twitter as @burstofbeaden. You can e-mail him at info@jonklassen.com. His upcoming book, We Found A Hat, in which two turtles in a desert find one hat, will be available this October and his other books are available now, wherever fine books are sold.

Interview: Raina Telgemeier

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SmileI got the chance to record a quick interview with Raina Telgemeier, Eisner award-winning creator of the all-ages graphic novels Smile, Sisters, and Drama, as well as the the Babysitters Club graphic novel adaptations, at the Alaska Robotics Mini-Con in Juneau this April. Listen to us discuss webcomics, birds, and the wonderfulness of Rey.

You can find Raina Telgemeier at her website here and on twitter as @goraina. Her next graphic novel, Ghosts, will be available for purchase September 13 wherever fine books are sold.

Interview: Pat Race

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comic-bearWhen I was at the Alaska Robotics Mini-Con this past April I got the chance to sit down and interview Pat Race, the organizer of the con and one of the people behind Alaska Robotics (note: there are no robots are involved in Alaska Robotics. OR ARE THERE???). Listen to us discuss Alaska, conventions, robots, Alaskan conventions as robots, the feeling of neglect that comes with not being from the Core Worl–er, the largest community in the area, the Alaska Robotics artist camp, Kowakian monkey-lizards, and more!

You can find Pat Race at the Alaska Robotics website or on twitter as @alaskarobotics.

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Drinking Quest: Interview with Jason Anarchy

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There’s not much I enjoy more than a round of Dungeons & Dragons (or, no doubt, Of Dice and Droids) with a bottle of cider at my side, but there’s probably not much my DM and co-players hate more than a tipsy Saf making critical decisions. When I first heard about Jason Anarchy’s Drinking Quest, I near leapt from my seat with excitement. A role-playing game that is also a drinking game is right up my friends’ and my collective alley.

With an emphasis on responsible drinking and an easy system that can be picked up in the first couple minutes, Anarchy has built both a humorous and smart card-based tabletop RPG perfect for a Friday evening with the gang.

Though Anarchy is Canadian, PAX Aus gave me the opportunity to interview him and talk to him about both Drinking Quest and other tabletop games.

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On Bugs and Bouncing: Hollow Knight’s William Pellen Interview

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There was one game that completely caught my attention in the lead-up to Melbourne’s massive gaming convention, PAX Australia: Hollow Knight, a gorgeously atmospheric action-adventure platformer with a healthy dose of challenge.

Hollow Knight is being developed by Team Cherry, an indie company based in Adelaide made up of Ari Gibson, William Pellen, and David Kazi, with a release planned for the first half of 2016.

Set in a bug-infested cavern system below an eerily silent village, Hollow Knight is filled with all kinds of strange creatures and wonderful sights. I’ve always been a sucker for platformers with fascinating worldbuilding that you can explore for hours, and from what I’ve played of the Hollow Knight beta, it seems to be shaping up to be exactly that. Though the gameplay can be difficult, it never feels punishing. 

I had the opportunity at PAX Aus to interview Willaim Pellen and ask him a few questions about Hollow Knight, influences, Kickstarter, and taking the leap to full time game dev.

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Baltimore Comic Con 2015: Interview with Mark Waid

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Leia_Dodson1Given what a fan I am of Mark Waid’s Marvel work, briefly chatting with him about his work on the Princess Leia series was one of the highlights of my Baltimore Comic Con this year. I loved the heck out of those five issues and was excited to have the chance to ask him all the questions the book left me with and to talk Star Wars in general.  And hey!  It’s not every day that you get to interview someone who just won the Harvey for Best Writer the night before.

Bria: The first question we always ask everyone is how did you become a Star Wars fan?

Mark Waid: I’m old enough to say I was there on opening day. I was there… all right, I have a story. This is a horrible, horrible story that makes me look like an idiot. So… it’s not true. I was not there on opening day. My friends and I got together that weekend and there were six or seven of us and we were having the same argument that you always have when you get six or seven people together on a Saturday night in a car with no direction. They go “Okay, we need to see a movie.” Okay, well there’s a couple of movies opening up this weekend. What do we see? Everyone wanted to see this one movie and I fought really hard to see this other movie because I said, “Look, this is going to be amazing. It’s going to be awesome. It’s going to change your life.” So because I fought for it, we went to see… You Light Up My Life. And I never lived it down. The next weekend, we all saw Star Wars and they were all like, “You idiot! What is wrong with you?” Then that was it. Like everyone else, I saw it a dozen times that summer and it was amazing.

Which is your favorite film?

The second one by far. It just… to manage to take all the stuff that made the first one cool and then add some gravitas was really awesome.

Favorite character? (I know that’s a hard one.)

It is a hard one! I really do think it is Leia.

Mine too! So did you pitch Marvel to do Star Wars? From what I hear, everyone and their mother were calling the editors and saying “I really want to write it!” or did they come to you?

They actually came to me and they said, “We want a Princess Leia series. Are you interested?” While I love the character, I didn’t have a story. I didn’t know where we wanted to go with it and I was on the verge of saying, “Look I appreciate this but this is not for me.” And then I started thinking about… if you let me do it the day after A New Hope ends; if you let me do it the day after and you get a chance to really delve into what it’s like for her to have lost everything? Then I’m in and they totally bought that. That’s really where it stood; the idea that in first movie, there’s no time for it to sink in for her. Continue reading →

Baltimore Comic Con 2015: Interview with Charles Soule

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This weekend at Baltimore Comic Con, I was lucky enough to chat for a few minutes with the awesome Charles Soule. You may know him as the writer who’s also a lawyer who wrote a fantastic run on She-Hulk last year (amongst other things) but Star Wars fans currently know him as the guy who’s writing the rad Lando limited series for Marvel. We sat down and talked all things Star Wars and about his great work with Alex Maleev on the Lando book.

Bria: So the first question we always ask everyone is how did you become a Star Wars fan?

Charles Soule: Oh man, I’ve been a Star Wars fan since I was a little kid. I went to see the movies with my family. I must’ve seen a release of A New Hope at some point because I would’ve been a baby.

The ’96 ones?

No, it would’ve been before that. I don’t know—they kept rereleasing them for the first ten years or so and I must’ve seen it at that point but I remember very distinctly seeing the AT-ATs come out of the fog in Empire Strikes Back and all the Cloud City stuff which was so amazing. I had all the toys and stuff like that. So I was a fan from pretty young and my whole family was pretty into it so it was something that I could share with my brothers and sister and it was great.

Do you have a favorite one of the original films or any of the movies really. I’m not a Prequel hater. Continue reading →

Celebration Anaheim: Interview with Jason Fry

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jace-hed2During the first day of Celebration Anaheim, Brian and I were fortunate enough to run into author Jason Fry and he graciously allowed us to shove a microphone in his face. Unfortunately the recording quality was too poor to upload as its own podcast, but you can read a transcription of the interview under the cut. We chatted about Servants of the Empire and writing in the Star Wars universe, his original Jupiter Pirates series, and, of course, the new The Force Awakens teaser.

Note: This interview contains spoilers for the Servants of the Empire series. 

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