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Send us Fan Mail There was a time when telling Hollywood you wanted to write an X-Men movie could get you written off. Robert N. Skir wrote the story anyway. That screenplay became the start of a career behind some of the most memorable animated worlds of a generation: X-Men: The Animated Series, Batman: The Animated Series, Spider-Man, Gargoyles, Extreme Ghostbusters, Godzilla: The Series and Bea...

Send us Fan Mail What actually makes someone spend years building something that doesn't exist yet? Brooklyn artist and writer Serena Bell is building a house out of that question. It's called In This Sacred House , her debut graphic novel: gothic horror built on psychological architecture, tragic romance, and the ghosts we build within ourselves. This isn't a credits rundown. It&ap...

Send us Fan Mail Before the movie that scares you becomes the career you build, there's a VHS cover you couldn't walk past. Jason Leavy grew up in a Staten Island house where movie night meant Freddy, Chucky, Gremlins, and a little green troublemaker with a pot of gold. Today he's the co-founder of Fuzz on the Lens Productions and a producer on Terrifier 2 and Terrifier 3. He co-wro...

Send us Fan Mail She was Rainbow Brite. She was Lucy Little. She was Dotty Dog. And she was only twelve years old when one of those roles began with an improvised voice for a black-and-white sketch. Bettina Bush joins Back to Pop to look back on a career that shaped Saturday mornings, from her earliest days as a child actor, to the audition that became Rainbow Brite, to credits spanning The Little...

Send us Fan Mail You've seen Keith Coogan's face a hundred times, but you might not know his name. This week on Back to Pop, I sit down with the actor who voiced Young Tod in Disney's The Fox and the Hound, got left in charge in Adventures in Babysitting, fought for his country in Toy Soldiers, and delivered one of the most quotable lines of the '90s in Don't Tell Mom the...

Send us Fan Mail From 1978 to 1984, Karen Whitfield toured alongside Adam West and Burt Ward as DC Comics' Bronze Age Batgirl — suiting up in the cape and cowl for audiences across America and getting a front-row seat to who Batman and Robin really were when the cameras stopped rolling. She was 20 years old. She left Durham, North Carolina for California. And then, for nearly 35 years, she ba...

Send us Fan Mail Morph. The Joker. Countless characters you’d recognize instantly, and a voice you’d never place a face to. This week, JP Karliak steps out from behind the mic to talk about what it actually means to become someone else for a living. We go past the credits and into the craft: how JP prepares an instrument that isn’t a violin or a guitar, but himself, his voice, his body, his nervou...

Send us Fan Mail Mike takes us behind the curtain on the creative process: how a character comes together, why silhouette and shape language matter more than people realize, and what it really means to inherit a character fans already love before you ever pick up a pencil. We dig deep into three animated milestones that still command cult followings , Batman: Mask of the Phantasm , The Batman vs....

Send us Fan Mail This week, Kelly Slaughter (aka “Slaughter Daughter”) joins Back to Pop for a raw, one-on-one conversation about discovering who you are when you grow up in someone else’s spotlight, and what it actually took to find her own. We talk childhood behind the curtain, the identity crisis nobody warns you about, her fitness transformation, and why she’s now dedicated to helping other wo...

Send us Fan Mail Before streaming, before binge-watching, there was a voice you didn’t just recognize , you carried it with you. Beginning in 1992, Lenore Zann gave Rogue her unmistakable Southern charm, her strength, her vulnerability, and that unforgettable “sugah.” Decades later, she stepped back into the booth for X-Men ’97, introducing Rogue to a whole new generation. But Lenore’s story goes...

Send us Fan Mail In 1983, Chuck Patton became the first Black artist to draw Justice League of America, and helped build one of the most divisive, and now most re-examined, eras in the team’s history: Justice League Detroit. This week on Back to Pop, Chuck takes us from a kid in Detroit who wanted nothing but to draw comics, through Dick Giordano’s New Talent workshop, the fan backlash over Vibe a...

Send us Fan Mail Before the algorithm, there was a bell over the door. For us over at Back To Pop, that door belonged to Comics Plus in Macon, Georgia — and the man behind the counter, David Roland, is still there. This week, we sit down with David for a living-legacy conversation that pulls items out of a metaphorical time capsule: an old receipt from the shop’s earliest days, an ’80s comic with...

Send us Fan Mail Kevin Conroy sat in a recording booth for thirty years playing a man who wore two faces,  and somewhere along the way, that dual identity became personal. Before he ever put on the cowl, Bruce Timm was just a burned-out animator tired of being told kids’ cartoons couldn’t be art. And a Warner Bros. executive gambled the whole look of Gotham City on painting black backgrounds onto...

Send us Fan Mail William McNamara joins Back to Pop for an honest conversation about the life that unfolded beyond the movie screen. Known for memorable performances in Dream a Little Dream , Surviving the Game , Copycat , Chasers , and numerous television appearances, William reflects on navigating fame, typecasting, addiction, sobriety, and eventually stepping away from Hollywood’s expectations....

Send us Fan Mail Every generation has a movie that finds them at exactly the right age. For a lot of us, that movie was The Last Starfighter — and at the center of it was Lance Guest, who turned Alex Rogan into one of the most quietly beloved heroes of ’80s sci-fi. This week, Lance joins Back to Pop for a candid conversation spanning his career — from playing Jimmy opposite Jamie Lee Curtis in Hal...

Send us Fan Mail Fred Kennedy — writer, broadcaster, and professional chaos agent known to most of the world as Fearless Fred- sits down with Back to Pop to talk about making comics that absolutely refuse to stay in one genre. Fred is the writer behind Dead Romans , a six-issue historical epic from Image Comics' Shadowline that follows Arminius, a Germanic prince raised as a Roman hostage who...

Send us Fan Mail This week on Back to Pop , we sit down with Adam Cahoon — artist, designer, and Senior Designer & former Production Lead at Vault Comics. Adam stepped into The Nasty, Vault’s horror-comedy about VHS culture and the “video nasties” moral panic in 1990s Scotland, taking over as sole interior artist from issue #3.  He’s also the designer behind the premium hardcover edition of He...

Send us Fan Mail Some covers don’t ask you to pick them up — they grab you by the collar. That’s exactly what happened with Honor and Curse from Mad Cave Studios. One look at the cover and the search was on: who made this? This week on Back to Pop, we sit down with the artist behind that image — Nick Marinkovich, Canadian comic artist, illustrator, concept artist, and co-creator of Dead Romans (Im...

Send us Fan Mail Writer Doug Wagner returns to Back to Pop  and this time, he brings his artistic partner in crime with him. Daniel Hillyard joins the conversation for a wide-ranging discussion on what it looks like when a creative partnership builds its own corner of the comics world, strange, violent, funny, and more emotionally honest than it has any right to be. Together, they’ve made Plastic,...

Send us Fan Mail This week on Back to Pop, Marc is joined by cover and variant artist Suspiria Vilchez — a Barcelona-born, Toronto-based painter whose hand-crafted acrylic technique sets her apart in today’s comics industry. Her work has appeared across Vault Comics,  BOOM Studios, IDW, Image, Penthouse Comics, and Sumerian Comics, with credits including Nectar,  Buffy: The Last Vampire Slayer, Fi...

Send us Fan Mail What happens when the dream doesn’t die — it just waits? Michael Tove spent decades in North Carolina as a regional actor, film extra, and financial adviser. His first screen credit goes back to 1990, when he worked as an extra on the theatrical adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale — shot right in his home state. He carried a screenplay called Hot Ice for nearly thirty years. He neve...

Send us Fan Mail George Vega grew up in Newark, New Jersey watching Voltron and filling sketchbooks with Jim Lee panels. Today he’s doing G.I. Joe cover work through Skybound and his art has appeared across Marvel, DC, Alien, Firefly, and Rick and Morty. In this conversation, George talks about the artists who shaped him — Jim Lee, Brom, Todd McFarlane, Larry Elmore — and what he actually took fro...

Send us Fan Mail JP Mavinga has spent over twenty-five years building one of the most distinctive careers in illustration and comics — born in the Democratic Republic of Congo, trained at SCAD, and forged across three continents before landing as a senior concept designer and art director at Sideshow Collectibles, where his work on the Thanos on Throne maquette set sales records. In this episode,...

Send us Fan Mail If you grew up reading The Batman Adventures, Batman: Gotham Adventures, or Superman Adventures, Rick Burchett’s work shaped how you see those characters.  His pages don’t just look good — they move, they breathe, they act. In this episode, we sit down with Rick to talk about how a commercial art background at a St. Louis ad agency quietly became one of the best training grounds f...

Send us Fan Mail He’s covered the Oscars, the Golden Globes, and decades of Hollywood from the red carpet out. Now Nelson Aspen is turning the lens on himself. Nelson joins Back to Pop to talk about Dancing Between the Raindrops: Happily Ever After? — the final chapter in his trilogy blending romance, identity, and the unfiltered realities behind the spotlight.  It’s a book that feels lived-in, be...