The Tip of Atlantis [Patreon Preview]

Summary

Podcast Summary: Otherworld - "The Tip of Atlantis" [Patreon Preview]

Date: July 1, 2026
Host: Jack Wagner
Guest: Mike Feehan (Comic Book Artist, Director, Co-director of a Documentary on Jeff Sterling)

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Episode Overview

In this Patreon preview, host Jack Wagner interviews comic book artist and filmmaker Mike Feehan about Jeff Sterling—an enigmatic, eccentric Canadian media mogul, and the visionary behind the surreal superhero Captain Newfoundland. The conversation journeys through Sterling’s bizarre influence on Newfoundland media, his deep obsession with New Age spirituality and the paranormal, and his creation of one of the strangest superheroes ever: a cosmic, metaphysical figure whose origins may tie directly to the lost continent of Atlantis.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Who Is Jeff Sterling? (05:38–07:00)

• Jeff Sterling was a Newfoundland-based media mogul, credited with starting NTV (Newfoundland’s first local TV station, broadcasting since 1955), Oz FM radio, and the long-running Newfoundland Herald magazine.
• Sterling’s influence permeated local culture, but his unique interests set him apart: he was devoted to new age spirituality, metaphysics, and the paranormal.

Quote:
"Jeff Sterling was a media mogul... He is also a supernatural comic book character that he and his son developed and they've kind of become synonymous."
— Mike Feehan [05:38]

2. The Surreal Local Media Landscape (07:00–09:55)

• NTV’s programming often included trippy, experimental visuals, like kaleidoscopic station IDs and covers featuring UFOs and ancient mysteries in the Newfoundland Herald.
• Growing up, Mike remembers surreal moments blending into more ordinary local content, becoming “background noise.”

Quote:
"I remember watching Saturday morning cartoons as a kid and you would see these station IDs... It's this character, Captain Canada, wearing this like red and gold suit. He'd be standing on the edge of a cliff talking to a floating head in the sky."
— Mike Feehan [07:23]

3. Captain Newfoundland and the “Sterling Universe” (03:00–09:00)

• Captain Newfoundland is both a meditating, metaphysical superhero and a vehicle for Sterling’s spiritual philosophy.
• The character is visually striking: a faceless, cloaked figure with a glowing outline of Newfoundland for a face.
• Captain Newfoundland and related characters appeared across TV, print, and comics, often blurring the lines between regular local programming and Sterling’s personal esoteric quests.

Quote:
"If you can just imagine a cloaked figure wearing a black cape and a hood without a face. Instead of a face, he has a glowing map of Newfoundland as a face, which is very interesting, especially if you're like me and didn't even know what the outline of Newfoundland looked like."
— Jack Wagner [02:42]

4. The Birth of Experimental 'Overnight TV' (11:19–13:56)

• In 1972, NTV became one of the first North American stations to broadcast 24/7.
• To satisfy Canadian content regulations, Sterling created endless “experimental TV”: fish tanks, documentaries about UFOs or Atlantis, and marathon interviews with spiritual figures and fringe guests—a precursor to long-form, late-night YouTube.

Quote:
"He would do these long format interviews... what we would be almost like accustomed to now of like the Joe Rogan experience... talking about channeling aliens or diving into ancient aliens or Atlantis or any of this stuff... broadcasting them live overnight."
— Mike Feehan [12:54]

5. Mike’s Personal Discovery (13:56–16:03)

• As an adult, Mike’s fascination reignited after coming across a midnight program: “Captain Newfoundland Salutes Elvis.”
• The surreal program involved a costumed Sterling flying through psychedelic graphics, imparting metaphysical wisdom, and abruptly cutting to concert footage.

Quote:
"This narrator is talking about how Captain Newfoundland is from the ancient continent of Atlantis, but he's an ancient alien who can transcend space and time and he can assume any form and speak telepathically. And also he lives in the hearts of all of us... And then it just cuts to an Elvis concert for an hour and then cuts back to this intro again."
— Mike Feehan [14:20]

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• Captain’s Code:
  "This above all, to thine own self be true." (Refrain repeated throughout Captain Newfoundland appearances) [00:03, 14:33]

• On the Bizarre Normalcy of NTV:
  "You thought it was a normal part of local TV... They have the news, they have the weather, they have sports, and then they also have, you know, the Stonehenge 3D graphics..."
  — Jack Wagner [10:51]

• Experimental TV and Canadian Regulations:
  "They would do everything from allegedly film a fish tank for like several hours overnight to say, look, those are Canadian fish. This is our Canadian content."
  — Mike Feehan [12:21]

• Describing Captain Newfoundland:
  "He's kind of dressed like the Grim Reaper, but he has a map of Newfoundland as a face. And this trippy sci fi disco music is playing and he's like flying through a wormhole that's like poorly chroma keyed..."
  — Mike Feehan [14:06]

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• Introduction to Captain Newfoundland [00:03–02:41]
• Jack introduces Jeff Sterling and Mike Feehan [00:49–05:38]
• Origin Story of NTV and Sterling’s Local Media Empire [05:38–09:55]
• Sterling's Bizarre Programming, Magazine Covers, and Captain Characters [07:00–09:55]
• Local TV Norms & NTV’s Unique Blend [10:01–11:19]
• 24-Hour Broadcasting and Experimental TV [11:19–13:56]
• Mike’s Late-Night Discovery of Captain Newfoundland [13:56–16:03]

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Tone & Style

The episode is informal, curious, and amused, driven by Jack’s fascination with Sterling’s eccentric legacy and Mike's homegrown anecdotes. Both convey genuine wonder and affectionate bemusement at how one man’s spiritual and cosmic obsessions bled into mainstream local media—making the unexplainable, for a while, feel like just another channel option.

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Summary

For those unfamiliar, this Otherworld episode offers a fascinating dive into Newfoundland’s local lore and the legacy of media outsider Jeff Sterling—a man who wove together the metaphysical, the extraterrestrial, and the utterly bizarre into the fabric of Canadian TV, all embodied in the superhero-sage, Captain Newfoundland.

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For the full, in-depth interview and more bonus content, visit Otherworld on Patreon.

Transcript

[A]

Captain Newfoundland is the spirit of Newfoundland. He lives in the hearts of all of us. His ancestors came from beyond the stars, settled on the great continent of Atlantis. He knows the oneness and teaches wisdom. He has many friends, such as the Silver Warrior and the Golden Dove. He's the father of Captain Kundalini. Join the Captain now as he explores the outer and inner spaces of life through the magic of television. And remember, every fan of Captain Newfoundland knows the Captain's code. This above all, to thine own be true.

[B]

Welcome to the otherworld, Patreon. I'm your host, Jack Wagner. This week, something a little different and one that I had a lot of fun recording in this episode. I I am joined by comic book artist and director Mike Feehan to talk about a man who was once called the weirdest Canadian of all time. That man is Jeff Sterling. This is somebody I knew nothing about. In fact, I had never even heard this name before until Mike emailed me about it. Jeff Sterling was a very eccentric TV mogul. Essentially he owned a TV station in Newfoundland, Canada, who got really into New Age spirituality, the paranormal meditation, you name it. He got very interested in all of these things and sort of forced these interests into TV networks and publications that he ran as a result. Part of this involved creating a character named Captain Newfoundland. Captain Newfoundland is a surreal, meditating superhero that uses his powers to defend the cosmic oneness of the universe and taught metaphysical lessons to the people watching him on TV and reading the comic books. I have never seen or heard of anything quite like this. When Mike emailed me, I was immediately hooked by this description. The character itself is honestly very sick looking. If you can just imagine a cloaked figure wearing a black cape and a hood without a face. Instead of a face, he has a glowing map of Newfoundland as a face, which is very interesting, especially if you're like me and didn't even know what the outline of Newfoundland looked like. He also has some sort of glowing static light energy. I don't know. He's very cool looking. Anyway, Captain Newfoundland and the man who created him, Jeff Sterling, are a bit hard to summarize, especially in the case of Jeff, who had many weird adventures ranging from introducing himself to John Lennon interviewing Ram Dass injecting liquid gold into his own veins, believing that the lost city of Atlantis is actually Newfoundland. There's a lot to cover in the life of this very eccentric man who ended up doing a lot of strange things on TV that had a profound influence on the youth of Newfoundland, Canada that grew up seeing this stuff on tv, often by accident, it seems. Like I said, it's hard to summarize this guy, but luckily I have Mike here to tell me all about it. He is co directing a documentary about Jeff Sterling. And join me for this special episode to tell me all about him. If you want to hear the full conversation, it's available now on the Otherworld Patreon along with all our other bonus episodes. In fact, last week we put out a great episode and the week before that. I don't always post previews for the bonus episodes. There are a lot of really good ones back there. You can hear all of that, including this Week's [e-mail] Otherworld this episode is called the Tip of Atlantis and you're listening to the Otherworld Patreon. All right, welcome to Otherworld. I am joined here today by comic book artist and director Mike Feehan. Welcome to the show. How are you?

[C]

I'm great. Thanks for having me.

[B]

The reason you are here today is that you are making a documentary about a very interesting guy that you sent me an email about. And honestly, it's very rare that a cold email a part of projects such as this ends up making it onto the show. We get a lot of strange PR emails from people self publishing books, things like that. A lot of very, very, very weird ones. Basically spam. But I saw your email, I saw who it was about and what this person made, and I became instantly interested. So I know very little about this topic and I can't wait to learn more. Why don't we start from the very beginning? Who is this film about and how did you first encounter the world of Jeff Sterling?

[C]

Yeah, so this film is about Jeff Sterling. It's called right now the title is tentatively Captain Newfoundland, which is a title moniker that has become associated with Jeff Sterling. It is also a supernatural comic book character that he and his son developed and they've kind of become synonymous. So Jeff Sterling was a media mogul, as we like to say, from Newfoundland, Canada. Newfoundland is the island portion of the province of Newfoundland and Labrador. We are the most eastern province in Canada. So if you look at a map, there's, you know, just south of Greenland, there's this little island hanging out off the coast and that's Newfoundland. So Jeff was probably best known here for starting the first television station in Newfoundland back in 1955, which is NTV, which is still running today and still independently owned by his family.

[B]

Ntv. Not mtv?

[C]

No, ntv. Yeah, not mtv. So he's best known for starting ntv. And growing up, NTV has always been like a staple. Here it is. It is the local broadcaster. It's got like the most watched news hour program in the province. It's something that everyone's familiar with. He also has a radio station called Oz FM and a magazine that ran weekly for over 75 years called the Newfoundland Herald. So he's like, his influence on like, the media landscape here was very big. But these were all just kind of like local staples that I think a lot of people take for granted. Most people have their own local TV station that has local news or various local programming. But with ntv, if you watched it for long enough, you would start to see really bizarre things. Sometimes, like, the station IDs would be really strange. Like, I remember watching Saturday morning cartoons as a kid and you would see these station IDs that were clearly filmed for some sort of movie or show in the 80s that never really came together. But it's this character, Captain Canada, wearing this like red and gold suit. He'd be standing on like edge of a cliff talking to a floating head in the sky. Or you'd have these station IDs that were like fractal patterns, kaleidoscope images with like bizarre quotes from like, Jesus or Gurdjieff. And then in the magazine, the Newfoundland Herald, like, often they would devote covers to things like UFOs. Oh my God.

[B]

That's a really cool cover.

[C]

It's a great cover.

[B]

This is the early, early days of like 3D graphic design is what I would describe this, these visuals as.

[C]

Yeah, they have like, a lot of bizarre things like that, A lot of experimentation with graphic design with 3D animation. And they just embraced that and just would put that in their magazines, put that on, on tv. So like, here's another example of just like, I know the, the listeners can. This is like this article is when he was still alive, 65 years of the Newfoundland Herald behind the Sterling universe. So it's got him on the COVID and then this folds out into like a poster that's got stonehenge, it's got UFOs, it's got pyramids.

[B]

Is incredible. I really want. I want some other world merch in the same exact aesthetic.

[C]

It's so this, the thing that is like, this stuff is, is so cool and so bizarre. But it was just like part of the local media company and broadcaster. So a lot of people growing up, it just became like background noise. Or you would think like, okay, this is the, the kind of the norm for a local Broadcaster. And then I would ask my parents sometimes as kids, like, what's Captain Canada's deal? Or what's Captain Newfoundland's deal? Or what's this weird stuff that I'm seeing on mtv? And the response would be like, oh, well, that's just Jeff Sterling and he's crazy.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

So it just kind of like fell into. To the background for me. But when I was context.

[B]

What. What else. What is the normal programming on ntv? Like, like, besides this?

[C]

Normally it's like during the day they would broadcast soap operas that they would license from other networks.

[B]

Okay.

[C]

You know, in the evening they would have the NTV evening news hour.

[B]

Like local news?

[C]

Yeah, local news. They would have some local programming, just like, like a sports show, like a. I think like a hunting and fishing show. And then also in the evening, they would also license a lot of primetime shows from like, major American broadcasters. So like ncis, Entertainment Tonight, Jeopardy. Those kind of things would come on.

[B]

So like, basically like the, the local, like Channel 5 or whatever channel. What channel was it? Do you remember?

[C]

It was Channel five, actually.

[B]

Okay, Channel five. Yeah. So like basically very normal programming, but occasionally there are some very trippy visuals in the mix that you. You thought was a normal part of local tv. Like, oh, they have the news, they have the weather, they have sports, and then they also have, you know, the Stonehenge 3D graphics. And the owner of the network pursuing his own weird little interests.

[C]

Yeah, I mean, that's basically what it became, is that because he owned the network, he used it as a vehicle to pursue the things that he was interested in and especially in the. In the overnight hours. So NTV is apparently the first television station to start broadcasting 24 hours a day in North America. So they started this back in 1972. And just for some context, there's the Canadian Radio Television Telecommunications Commission, which has these broadcasting guidelines for Canadian content. So because Jeff really wanted people to watch his station, but he also understood that people were more interested in watching American shows than Canadian shows. So he would get these programs licensed from America, broadcast them. The CRTC would have these issues with. You'd have to have so much Canadian content. So when he went 24 hours a day, they made up their own Canadian content by creating their own programming to fill the overnight hours. So it actually Canadian content quota. So that is where they. They describe it as experimental television. So they would do everything from allegedly film a fish tank for like several hours overnight to say, look, those are Canadian fish. This is our Canadian content to like,

[B]

fair that is sort of how I imagine Canadian tv, if I'm going to be honest with you, is fish.

[C]

We've got some good stuff. We've got some good stuff. He'd arrived.

[B]

Yeah. Oh yeah, you do have. But, you know, this was, what year was this?

[C]

This was 1972. So he really was kind of like, especially when satellite television was coming in and he knew that people were going to have options to go to other networks. He would rather have people watch American shows on a Canadian network than have them tuned to an American network. But yeah, for these overnight hours, he would do these experiments, television, film fish tanks cut together, documentaries about UFOs or pyramids. He would do these long format interviews, kind of what we would be almost like accustomed to now of like the, the Joe Rogan experience, kind of podcast of like having someone on who's talking about like channeling aliens or diving into ancient aliens or Atlantis or any of this stuff. He would be doing this in the 1970s, these like, sometimes interviews that would go like six hours and he'd just broadcasting them live overnight or just.

[B]

Funny you're describing like YouTube.

[C]

It was essentially YouTube 40 years before YouTube.

[B]

Yeah. Pretty amazing.

[C]

Yeah. So like I, I, growing up didn't watch NTV in the overnight hours. So it was something that I was kind of unaware of. I was vaguely aware of the kind of superhero characters and some of the other weird stuff, but I never really stayed up late. But my first job after I graduated from graphic design school, I was working at a newspaper and was working overnight shifts and just we had a little TV there and one night this, this program came on that was like Captain Newfoundland Salutes Elvis. Which was this character, which is Captain Newfoundland, which is apparently was Jeff in this costume. He's kind of dressed like the Grim Reaper, but he has a map of Newfoundland as a face. And this trippy sci fi disco music is playing and he's like flying through a wormhole that's like poorly chroma keyed. And this narrator is talking about how Captain Newfoundland is from the ancient continent of Atlantis, but he's an, he's an ancient alien who can transcend space and time and he can assume any form and speak telepathically. And also he lives in the hearts of all of us. And he's the spirit of creativity and imagination and adventure. And we must all remember the Captain's code. This above all, to thine own self be true. And then it just cuts to an Elvis concert for an hour and then cuts back to this intro again and then cuts back to the Elvis concert and I was like, what the fuck is this? And so I called mtv, I called the station, I emailed the station, and I was just like really stoked on it. Like being an artist myself, being someone who was interested in breaking into comic books and superhero comics, I was vaguely aware that these characters existed and were part of ntv, but I'd never seen anything like this. And at this time, none of this stuff was up on YouTube, so I was just really concerned. Like, is this sitting on like a reel at the NTV studios? Is this just gonna get lost in time? Someone needs to preserve this stuff because there's something actually really cool.

[B]

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