Special Guests

Ryan Sohmer began his career as a newspaper reporter in Montreal, Canada before realizing fiction was more his speed. 

Eventually teaming up with renowned Canadian artist Lar deSouza, Sohmer created the daily comic strip 'Least I Could Do', currently published online (www.leasticoulddo.com) to a readerships that tops 1 million, in print in several dozen college newspapers in North America and in a yearly collection. 

Least I Could Do, detailing the trials and errors of five 20-something friends told from the viewpoint of a sex obsessed Narcissist, Rayne Summers, who uses his charm, humor and vivid imagination to enjoy life as often as he can manage, is also being developed as an animated series and headed to the small screen. 

Following the success of LICD, Sohmer created another series, this time an adventure parody ripe with fantasy and sci-fi elements. 'Looking For Group' (www.lfgcomic.com) has surpassed all expectations. 

In addition to being in stores around the world in comic book form, a feature film based on Looking for Group is being produced in house by Blind Ferret Entertainment. The trailer can be seen here:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fcbazH6aE2g

A professional illustrator for over 20 years, Lar is the cartoonist for the 2008 Shuster Award winning online comics, "Least I Could Do", which is updated seven times weekly at www.leasticoulddo.com, and "Looking For Group", which is updated Mondays and Thursdays at www.lfgcomic.com.  Lar has also been the recipient of the Prix Aurora Award for Artistic Achievement in Canadian Science Fiction (2006, 2008, 2009) and numerous other awards for caricature and cartooning. 

Lar works from his home in Acton, Ontario.  He continues to receive commissions for digital and paper illustrations, caricatures and cartoons.  Lar has a lovely wife, two beautiful children and three tolerant cats. The wife and kids are tolerant too.

After studies in graphic design and a boring part-time job as an animation colorist, Sirkowski became a freelance illustrator, cartoonist and animator for ad agencies and a regular artist on Starship Titus. He is now working on Sister Wulfia Focka, for Slipshine.net. Sirkowski is most known for the Miss Dynamite anime and manga, created in 1990. Miss Dynamite "follows freelance terrorist Eva Sirkowski and her bisexual assassin associate Blackie Chin on their 'action packed, mostly weird' adventures.

Mark Sprague is the main artist on the long-running webcomic "Dragon Mango" - a fantasy story with a plot too complicated to explain here, but that basically involves cute girls named after fruit fighting dragons.  

To learn what else is going on in the story - which is a lot - you can read it for yourself at www.dragon-mango.com! 
 
He's still not entirely sure why he's a guest at a convention, but promises to do his best to be really entertaining and fun anyway!

In the beginning, Kyowa Québec was formed by artists with a single interest: publish a fanzine. After the publication of Mangue A, our very first common booklet, we have evolved into a starter publishing company to publish ourselves! Since then, we have been focusing on our collections “Mangues”, publishing Cactus +16 and recruiting new artists!

Scott is a renaissance man, which means he's several hundred years behind the times. An Otaku since his birth in 1966, he's made AMVs, owned an anime store, directed the fan parodies "This Is Otakudom" and "S.T.E.A.M.: The Movie" and run panels and workshops at anime conventions. Since then he's lost his store, lost his girlfriend, seen "Lost" on DVD and almost lost his life to diabetes. He is now a Financial Advisor, and has dedicated his life to finding the love of his life and making the world a better place through laughter. 

International award-winning mangaka and 2009 TED Fellowship member, Sara E. Mayhew is a Canadian writer and illustrator striving to produce manga that promotes skepticism and critical thinking. Canada's prestigious graphic arts magazine, Applied Arts, featured her in their Young Blood article on "new talent commanding our attention". Sara was awarded the Northern Arts grant in 2007 by the Ontario Arts Council. She has spoken on the TED Fellows stage at the prestigious TED (Technology Entertainment Design) conference, in 2009, in Long Beach, CA, and more recently at TEDActive 2010 in Palm Springs, CA. Currently, Sara is launching her newest series, Legend of the Ztarr, which aims to introduce manga readers to skeptical and humanist values through storytelling, available in the Apple iBookstore. Her blog, There Are Four Lights, combines art and science themes, with occasional pepperings of general geekdom and cuteness. 

Founder and editor-in-chief of Protoculture Addicts

As a child, Claude J. Pelletier dreamed of becoming an archaeologist. Later, because of his love for books and writing, he wanted to be a librarian and novelist. Ironically, he ended up publishing other people’s stories—a science-fiction fanzine (Samizdat, in French) and several anthologies of Quebec science-fiction (Sous Des Soleils Étrangers, four volumes of Orbite d'Approche and three collections of short stories by Daniel Sernine, all in French). In 1987, after completing his master’s degree in Roman history, he founded the Robotech fanzine Protoculture Addicts—which quickly evolved into the general anime and manga magazine it is now, more than twenty years later.

In the early 90s, as a publisher, he also contributed to the publication of a few comic books and role-playing games (alternate reality Cyberpunk, Heavy Gear, Jovian Chronicles). In 2000, he published Anime: A Guide To Japanese Animation (a filmography of the first thirty years of the anime industry in Japan, translated from Italian). In 2005, joining force with Anime News Network, he relinquished his position as Protoculture Addicts' publisher but remained its editor-in-chief. His proudest achievement is to have kept the magazine going and constantly improving—it is the longest running anime magazine in North America and the best guide to anime culture.

MUSEbasement is a comics/manga/doujinshi circle founded in 2005 by Simon Gannon and A.E. Prevost, who have been making comics together since 2001. The Montreal-based studio numbers nearly a dozen artists, whose collective influences and interests span Eastern and Western styles. The team works on multiple projects, both original and fan-based. An important part of MUSEbasement's mandate is encouraging a growing community of sequential artists, and educating the community at large about making comics, which they accomplish through workshops and lectures at conventions, schools, and beyond.

Site: www.musebasement.com

Quinton's voice has been burning up film and television since he first arrived in Los Angeles from his native Cleveland. He is an A-list voice actor, having played such famous animated characters as Jonny Quest, Spiderman, Speed Racer, The Human Torch, and Timon, just to name a few. His television and film appearances include Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, King of Queens, Animaniacs, Woody Woodpecker, Robot Chicken, and many more. 

His best known roles in video game franchises have been his work providing the english voices of Raiden in the Metal Gear Solid series, Axel in Kingdom Hearts II, and Reno in Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children the motion picture. If you're hip to the anime scene you'll know him as Iruka-sensei in Naruto, Marcus Damon in Digimon Data Squad, and Carl in Blood+, to name a few.

Jacob is a 23 year old web designer from Massachusetts. He started his career at an early age, making websites for his favorite video games and anime. In college he majored in Marketing and Web Design and while there created FAKKU.NET, now the largest English speaking hentai website in the world. His site attracts over 250 million pageviews a month and over 7 million unique visitors. But he didn't stop there, over the past year he created a second company called Sanshee (http://sanshee.com) with two of his close friends. Through Sanshee they turn their nerdy passions into something productive by making shirts, buttons, and whatever else they can think of. Jacob now travels around speaking about his various experiences while maintaining his websites and working on new projects. He is also frequently seen donning his famed horse head mask wherever he goes.