Word Balloon Comics Podcast

In this episode, I sit down with cartoonist and longtime Marvel letterer Rick Parker for a wide-ranging conversation about his career in comics and cartooning. Rick spent years lettering at Marvel Comics, working during a fascinating period in the company’s history and contributing his distinctive hand to titles like Amazing Spider-Man and many others. We talk about what lettering at Marvel was really like. How the job worked day-to-day, the production realities of the era, and how lettering quietly shapes the rhythm and storytelling of a comic page.

Rick also discusses his creator-owned graphic novel Drafted, a powerful and personal project that reflects his own experiences with the Vietnam draft and military service. It’s a candid look at the book’s origins, the emotional weight behind the story, and why he felt compelled to tell it in comics form.

And of course we dig into Rick’s work as an artist, including his run drawing the Beavis and Butt-Head comic book, translating the anarchic MTV characters into comics while keeping their chaotic humor intact.

Today I’m talking with actor, writer, and lifelong comics fan David Dastmalchian. You know David from a ton of great genre work . He played Thomas Schiff in The Dark Knight, Kurt in Marvel’s Ant-Man, and Polka-Dot Man in The Suicide Squad. And horror fans have been raving about his performance as the haunted late-night host Jack Delroy in Late Night with the Devil.

But beyond acting, David is also a serious comic book storyteller. This week he’s launching a brand-new graphic novel called Through, created with artist Cat Staggs. It’s a haunting supernatural story that mixes horror, trauma, and redemption in a way that feels very personal to David. We talk about how Through came together, what it was like collaborating with Cat Staggs, and how comics have been part of David’s life long before Hollywood came calling. We also get into his earlier comic work, the influence of classic horror and indie comics on his writing, and of course some stories from the sets of The Dark Knight, Ant-Man, The Suicide Squad, and the breakout horror hit Late Night with the Devil.

Kelly Sue DeConnick from 2012 lays out her Carol Danvers plans. They led to 32 issues a big movie hit and a new wave of Marvel readers

Today on Word Balloon, we’re celebrating a milestone in comics history — the 40th anniversary of The Dark Knight Returns , with the man whose inks helped define its look, Klaus Janson. When Frank Miller reinvented Batman in 1986, it wasn’t just the writing and pencils that shocked the comics world. Janson’s bold, expressive inks were a huge part of the book’s gritty atmosphere, giving Miller’s pages that raw, noir intensity that made Dark Knight feel unlike anything else on the stands. The result became one of the most influential graphic novels ever published . A book that reshaped how Batman was portrayed across comics, animation, and film. Klaus had already made his mark in the industry before Dark Knight, particularly with his legendary run on Daredevil, where he and Frank Miller forged one of the great creator pairings in comics. But Janson’s career stretches far beyond those landmark collaborations.

In this conversation, Klaus talks about working with some of the medium’s most dynamic artists — John Romita Jr., John Buscema, Sal Buscema, and Bill Sienkiewicz, and how his inking approach adapts to very different drawing styles while still bringing his own storytelling instincts to the page.