Capes and Tights Podcast

This week on the Capes and Tights Podcast, Justin Soderberg welcomes comic creators Zack Kaplan and John Pearson to the podcast to discuss The Smart Division, Mindset, and more!

Kaplan is a break out science fiction comic writer and creator of such comics and graphic novels as Eclipse, Port of Earth, The Lost City Explorers, Join the Future, Break Out, Metal Society, Mindset, and more recently, Forever Forward, Beyond Real. The Midnight: Shadows, Masterminds, and Kill All Immortals. He has worked with publishers such as Image Comics/Top Cow, Dark Horse, Aftershock Comics, Vault Comics, Humanoids, Scout Comics and DC Comics. He has a new series coming to Dark Horse on June 3, Only the Savage are Left.

Pearson is the Eisner Award-winning artist and illustrator of such comics as The Infernals, In Bloom, and with Kaplan, Mindset. He has built a reputation as an inimitable talent through his varied portfolio producing work for clients as diverse as DC Comics, Image Comics, Vault Comics, Z2 Comics, Heavy Metal Magazine, Netflix, WWE, Rue Morgue Magazine, The Ray Harryhausen Foundation, Burning Witches Records and Arrow Video amongst many others.

Together the two are set to release a new series at Dark Horse in fall 2026 entitled The Smart Division.

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This week on the Capes and Tights Podcast, Justin Soderberg welcomes back comic book retailer Paul Eaton to the program to discuss the 1993 Super Mario Bros. movie!

Two Brooklyn plumbers, Mario and Luigi, must travel to another dimension to rescue a princess from the evil dictator King Koopa and stop him from taking over the world.

The 1993 film based (loosely) on the Mario video game series by Nintendo was directed by the husband-and-wife team Rocky Morton and Annabel Jankel and written by Parker Bennett, Terry Runté and Ed Solomon. Super Mario Bros. stars Bob Hoskins as Mario Mario, John Leguizamo as Luigi Mario, Dennis Hopper as President "King" Koopa, Samantha Mathis as Princess Daisy and the Queen, Fisher Stevens as Iggy Koopa, Richard Edson as Spike Koopa, Mojo Nixon as Toad, and Frank Welker as the voice of Yoshi and Goombas.

The Super Mario Bros. movie hit theaters on May 28, 1993 and is now available on DVD and Blu-ray.

We discussed the artwork of Bob Tkacik.

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This week on the Capes and Tights Podcast, Justin Soderberg welcomes author Caroline Bicks to the podcast to discuss Monsters in the Archives: My Year of Fear with Stephen King and more!

Caroline Bicks is an internationally-recognized Shakespeare scholar who has published widely on early modern drama, gender, and the history of science. She studied Renaissance poetry at Harvard University as an undergraduate and received her Phd in English Literature from Stanford University. She was tenured at Boston College in 2008, the same year that she began summer teaching at the Bread Loaf School of English.

In 2017, she became the inaugural Stephen E. King Chair in Literature at the University of Maine. The endowed Chair’s mission is to support the public humanities, a challenge that Bicks has embraced by giving talks around the state to a wide variety of audiences, and bringing award-winning fiction writers, journalists, educators, and activists to speak and work with different Maine communities. The position also allowed her to develop a working relationship with Stephen Kingthat led to him granting her access to his personal papers and to her writing a book about what she discovered, Monsters in the Archives: My Year of Fear with Stephen King.

The uniquely public-facing nature of her position as King Chair complements the creative nonfiction pieces she has delivered to popular audiences over the years across various media platforms, including the Modern Love column for the New York Times, NPR’s “All Things Considered,” and the show Afterbirth, which she performed in alongside Andrew McCarthy, Andrea Martin, and other stars. Bicks’s award-winning blog, “Everyday Shakespeare,” was the inspiration for her humorous book, Shakespeare, Not Stirred: Cocktails for Your Everyday Dramas, co-authored with Michelle Ephraim.

In April 2023, they launched their Webby-Award honored Everyday Shakespeare podcast, where they use their talents as educators and entertainers to deliver fresh, funny insights into how Shakespeare’s world connects to ours.

Monsters in the Archives: My Year of Fear with Stephen King is available at bookstores everywhere from Hogarth. The audiobook, narrated by the author herself, is available via Libro.fm!

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This week on the Capes and Tights Podcast, Justin Soderberg welcomes author and comic book writer Sarah Gailey to the podcast to discuss Neighborhood Watch, Make Me Better, and more!

Sarah Gailey is a Hugo Award and British Fantasy Award winning, bestselling author of speculative fiction, short stories, and essays. They have been a finalist for the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus awards for multiple years running. Their bestselling adult novel debut, Magic For Liars, was published by Tor Books in 2019. More recently Gailey has release novels Just Like Home and Spread Me with their latest novel coming this May.

Gailey's most recent original comic book series with BOOM! Studios, Know Your Station, is also available now. They have also written comics for Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Steven Universe, Predator, White Widow, and more.

Their shorter works and essays have been published in Mashable, The Boston Globe, Vice, Tor.com, and The Atlantic. Their work has been translated and published around the world. They are the editor and publisher of Stone Soup and Love Letters: Reasons To Be Alive.

Neighborhood Watch #1 hits local comic shops on April 8, 2026 from BOOM! Studios.

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This week on the Capes and Tights Podcast, Justin Soderberg welcomes comic creators Jacob Phillips and Tate Brombal to the podcast to discuss their comic series Everything Dead & Dying and more!

Brombal is a comic book writer based in Toronto, Canada. His comic series House of Slaughter at BOOM! Studios with artist Chris Shehan spun out of James Tynion IV & Werther Dell’Edera’s hit Something is Killing the Children and debuted in 2021. His Eisner-nominated mini-series Barbalien: Red Planet (Dark Horse) alongside Eisner-winning artist Gabriel Hernández Walta also released in 2021 as a part of Jeff Lemire and Dean Ormston’s Black Hammer universe.

Tate's also is the writer behind Behold, Behemoth (BOOM! Studios), and The Oddly Pedestrian Life of Christopher Chaos(Dark Horse). Brombal also has written comics for DC such as New Titans, Batman, The Question, Batgirl, Green Lantern: Dark, and more!

Phillips is a comic artist and colorist residing in Manchester, UK. He has been drawing his whole life, self publishing first comic ‘Roboy’ at the age of 11 and selling it at Brighton Comic Con. Skip forward 16 years and today he is the artist on That Texas Blood and The Peril of the Brutal Dark: An Ezra Cain Mystery with writer Chris Condon and as well as Newburn with Chip Zdarsky as well as coloring projects such as Reckless, Criminal, and Madi.

Together, Brombal and Phillips released a five-issue miniseries Everything Dead & Dying at Image Comics. The collected edition hit shelves at local comic shops on April 8, 2026 and at bookstores everywhere on May 5.

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