Benjamin Marra is the creator, writer and artist of the comics NIGHT BUSINESS, GANGSTA RAP POSSE, THE INCREDIBLY FANTASTIC ADVENTURES OF MAUREEN DOWD (A WORK OF SATIRE AND FICTION) and LINCOLN WASHINGTON: FREE MAN! and is the publisher of TRADITIONAL COMICS. His art is influenced by important artists who are in museums, like those guys, Picasso and Michaelangelo. His personal interests include deep stuff, cultural things, plays, art shows, the mall, sciences, fashion trends, different books and different kinds of music. He is disinterested in lots of stuff though, like, being insensitive.

Marra has been recognized as a serious artist by quality institutions like The Society of Illustrators, The Society of Publication Designers and American Illustration. In 2006, the Art Directors Club, in their eternal wisdom, named Marra as one of their Young Guns. He has also been hired to make art for serious publications and companies like Playboy, Rolling Stone, The New York Times, Vice, Marvel Comics, Paper, Nylon, Radar, Widen+Kennedy and McCann-Erickson. But he also is street. He has done album covers for the underground rapper Lil B.

See more of his comics work at www.traditionalcomics.com. Check out his illustration strangeness over at www.benjaminmarra.com.

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Jasdeep Khaira is the Director of Artist and Member Services at Pittsburgh Filmmakers/Pittsburgh Center for the Arts, Administrative Director of Flight School, and the co-founder of Encyclopedia Destructica - a community-based artist book publisher based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Encyclopedia Destructica publishes hand-bound artist books and zines. Their current project is a collaboration with The Institute of Extraterrestrial Sexuality called Strange Attractors: Investigations in Non-Humanoid Extraterrestrial Sexualities.

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Matt Doughty is an illustrator, scupltor, and toy designer. For the past five years his company Onell Design has produced the highly successful toy line, Glyos - a series of action figures and accessories "disguised as building kits" that are completely interchangeable by the interlocking form-fit function that Doughty has developed. He also allows other designers to incorporate the functionality into their work. He has also helped several artists create their own figures that work within the Glyos System, allowing for several different compatible toy lines. Celebrating their fifth year in production, Glyos continues to grow and develop as Matt continues to create new products in both PVC plastic and vinyl. Glyos will be celebrating with a 5th Anniversary release on Sunday, July 29th at 8:30 PM EST. www.Glyos.com

NOTE: This episode was recorded in Matt's studio in Acton, Massachusetts.

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Mike Mignola is the Eisner and Harvey Award-winning creator of Hellboy, the Amazing Screw-On Head, and BPRD. His comics career began in the early 1980s as an inker at Marvel. His work has been adapted in movies, animation, and video games. In 2007, he co-created Baltimore, an illustrated novel, with Christopher Golden. This December, he returns to drawing comics full-time, with Hellboy in Hell (Dark Horse Comics)!

NOTE: This episode was recorded live at HeroesCon and engineered by Adam Daughhetee from Dollar Bin Productions.

Top image: B.P.R.D. HELL ON EARTH: THE RETURN OF THE MASTER #1 variant cover by Mike Mignola; Bottom image: Dave Cooper's Weasel #4 interior page

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Julie Sokolow is a musician, writer, and filmmaker raised in suburban New Jersey and currently residing in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. At nineteen, she released an introspective, lo-fi album, Something About Violins, through Western Vinyl that achieved acclaim from Pitchfork, Wire, and The Washington Post. As a Chancellor’s Scholar at the University of Pittsburgh, Sokolow focused on writing and film and was awarded two Brackenridge Fellowships and an honorary BPhil degree towards the development of her screenplay, The Subvertebrates, a dark comedy set in suburbia. Recently, she’s embarked on filmmaking and from 2010 to 2011, she was a finalist in Ridley Scott’s Life in a Day contest, won best director at the Sprocket Guild’s Film Festival, won a Creative Capital Flight School Fellowship, and received a Pittsburgh Filmmakers First Works Grant and Heinz Endowment for various film work. Sokolow is the founder and director of Healthy Artists, an organization that produces an original documentary series in which artists discuss their lives, their work, how they’ve struggled with the current, broken health care system. Currently, she is shooting a psychological feature-length documentary entitled Aspie Seeks Love, made possible by a Creative Development Grant from The Pittsburgh Foundation. Sokolow’s work often addresses consumerism and escapism in American society and explores the friction between the individual and societal norms.

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Keenan Marshall Keller is the creator of Galactic Breakdown, a.k.a. Space Battleground 666 - the comic book saga of Roids, a Largo, FL. drug dealer whom is inexplicably beamed into the far off reaches of the galaxy and becomes an Intergalactic space warrior!! He is also 1/3 of the DIY underground art and zine publishing collective, Drippy Bone Books. As part of Drippy Bone Books, he has published fellow cartoonists Derek M. Ballard's You Will All Die in Pain and Pat Aulisio's F'Real Real. He is also the curator of Freak Scene, an art show of contemporary underground comix, featuring the work of Johnny Ryan, Benjamin Marra, Tom Neely, Victor "Bald Eagles" Cayro, Jason Karns, and others, opening July 6th at Synchronicity in LA. Learn more and damage your retinas at drippybonebooks.com.

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Box Brown is a cartoonist, illustrator and comic publisher from Philadelphia. His comics have been featured in Mad Magazine and his illustrations have been on Wired.com. His web and print comic Everything Dies was named a notable comic of 2011 in the Best American Comics Anthology and was honored with two Ignatz Awards. His comics publishing outfit, Retrofit launched in 2011. He’s currently working on a comic biography of pro wrestler Andre the Giant. Follow him @boxbrown.

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Artnoose is a writer, zine-maker, DIY-punk, and letterpress artist, best known for her bi-monthly, autobiographical zine, Ker-Bloom! which began in 1996. She currently resides in Pittsburgh and is part of the Cyberpunk Apocalypse writers co-op. You can order issues of Ker-Bloom! on her Etsy shop (etsy.com/shop/artnoose) and see more of her art on Flickr.

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Ed Piskor is a cartoonist. He began his comics career drawing American Splendor, Macedonia, and the Beats with writer Harvey Pekar. His first graphic novel, Wizzywig, about the history of phone phreaking and computer hacking, debuts this summer from Top Shelf. You can read his newest comic, Hip Hop Family Tree, weekly on boingboing.net's Brain Rot. Follow Ed on Twitter: @EdPiskor.

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WARNING: What you are about to hear is a very frank and urgent discussion with a 16-year-old suburban, American teenager. In order to protect all those involved during the course of this interview, the subject shall be referred to only as teenager x.

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