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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.
He also opens up about the deeply personal inspiration behind The Trouble With Billy, his commitment to animal rescue and activism, and how life experience has changed the way he approaches acting, filmmaking, and storytelling.
This is more than a conversation about a career. It is a story of recovery, purpose, second chances, and finally taking ownership of your own narrative.
Join us as we look back through the eyes of someone who was there, and discover what happened after the credits rolled.
Support a great cause.
https://eastwoodranch.org/
Catch William’s new project here,
https://thetroublewithbillyseries.com/
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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 Halloween II, to stepping into the Brody family legacy in Jaws: The Revenge alongside Michael Caine and Mario Van Peebles, to his Broadway and Off-Broadway run as Johnny Cash in Million Dollar Quartet.
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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 used his military training to orchestrate one of the most devastating ambushes in ancient history, the Battle of Teutoburg Forest, 9 AD. He’s also the writer of The Florida Hippopotamus Cocaine Massacre, a four-issue action-comedy from Mad Cave Studios that sold out its first printing before most people even knew what hit them. And he’s the creator, writer, and voice of Mud79, a fully produced Star Wars audio drama that takes the galaxy far, far away and runs it straight through Platoon.
Fred grew up in Belgium surrounded by real Roman ruins, built a career in Canadian radio and television, and has spent the last several years making comics that swing from historically rigorous to completely unhinged — sometimes in the same sentence. We talk about where history obsession comes from, how broadcast timing shapes the way you write a page, what it means to collaborate with an artist versus just handing them a script, and why the ordinary people caught in the machine are almost always more interesting than the chosen ones.
Also: the hippos. We definitely talk about the hippos. For more on the fearless one. Click here:
https://q107.com/show/fearless-fred/
https://www.instagram.com/fearless_fred?igsh=aDlxYTZkemc0ZmY3
Mud79 Fan Made Star Wars Story: https://open.spotify.com/show/7APxLkXWfXhvv1hzdY5zMx?si=h3mIyK7JTNSTMtt
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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 Who Fights With Monsters and the cover of The Two Week Curse (Book 1 of The Ten Realms), and the artist/co-creator of Greetings from the Maglev, a post-apocalyptic revenge story from Invader Comics.
We dig into what day to day, the invisible design choices that make a comic feel like an object instead of just printed pages, and how Adam built the “1950s title card” energy into the He Who Fights With Monsters typography. We also get into horror fandom, the challenge of stepping into a world someone else built, and the quiet, personal comics Adam’s been building on the side — superhero spas, cosmic consequences, and family mistakes.
In this episode:•Designing The Nasty and taking over from original artist George Kambadais
•Inside the cover and hardcover design of He Who Fights With Monsters
•Building a cover for LitRPG/portal fantasy with The Two Week Curse
•Greetings from the Maglev and the pull of personal, self-owned work
•What makes a comic book logo actually work
Find Adam:
🌐 https://adamcahoon.com
📷 Instagram: https://instagram.com/adamccahoon
🛒 Greetings from the Maglev Vol. 2: https://invadercomics.com
🎙️ Back to Pop — the podcast that looks back through the eyes of those who were there.
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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 (Image Comics Shadowline). Nick’s work carries grit, atmosphere, and cinematic weight — the kind of art that makes a panel feel like it has history behind it.
We talk about what makes a cover stop a reader cold, how a visual style gets built over years of sketchbooks and false starts, the discipline behind sequential storytelling, and what it really means to co-create a world from the ground up alongside a writer. Nick also opens up about process, pressure, deadlines, and the influences — comics and otherwise — that shaped how he sees light, composition, and motion.
If you’ve ever picked up a book purely because the cover wouldn’t let you put it down, this one’s for you.
Find Nick’s work: https://nickmarinkovich.com/
Follow Nick here: https://www.instagram.com/nick.marinkovich?igsh=aWJzZ3g5NW52MjRh
Including Dead Romans and his cover art for Honor and Curse, and keep supporting the artists making comics feel alive before you even turn the first page.
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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, Vinyl, Plush, and I Was a Fashion School Serial Killer. Now there’s Narco. And the work keeps getting bolder.Marc, Doug, and Daniel dig into the DNA of their collaboration how they balance horror and humor, what makes a damaged character feel real inside an absurd premise, and why the strangest stories often carry the most human weight.
If you’ve been reading these books, this one’s for you. If you haven’t, this is a great place to start.You can connect with Daniel here https://www.12gaugecomics.com/creator_danielhillyard
You can can connect with Doug here https://shocknoggin.com/about
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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, Firefly, Dune, and G.I. Joe. In this conversation, Suspiria talks about her artistic upbringing in Spain, the European comics and fashion worlds that shaped her perspective, finding her visual voice, and the turning point that launched her career in American comics. A conversation about craft, identity, and what it takes to create art that truly stops you cold.
For all things Suspiria head here: https://suspirialand.com/
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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 never stopped.
Now, well past his 70th birthday, Tove is a debut screenwriter whose short film Yard Saleing — a Hitchcockian thriller about a yard sale, a locked box, and a decades-old jewelry heist — is making serious noise on the festival circuit. The film stars Eric Roberts and Eliza Roberts, and was directed by Tom Logan, veteran acting coach and former head of the acting department at the American Film Institute. Tove wrote it, and produced it.
There is no expiration date on your dreams. Michael Tove is living proof. If you would like to see Yard Sailing watch it here https://youtu.be/QTNAGtQSWm4
And for all things Mike Tove click here https://www.emeraldoakproductions.com/
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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 from each of them. We get into his process, his discipline philosophy, what it means to capture what makes a character unique, and why showing up anyway is the only real answer to artist’s block. If you grew up on trading cards, action figures, and Saturday morning cartoons, this one hits different.
To connect more with what George has going on click here https://www.georgevegaart.com/
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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, JP joins Back to Pop to talk craft, identity, and his debut Image Comics series White Sky written by William Harms, colored by Lee Loughridge, and already on its third printing.The conversation covers his multicultural journey and how it shaped his visual voice, his years designing iconic collector pieces for DC, Marvel, and beyond, and the process behind building every page of White Sky a post-apocalyptic survival story about a father and daughter crossing a haunted America. JP also gets into the tools he uses, how he draws emotion without dialogue, and what twenty-five years in this industry has taught him about staying in it.
Find out more about JP at mavinga.com.Theme music composed by Ron Wasserman
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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 for comics storytelling, why the animated Batman books weren’t just tie-ins but a genuine artistic statement, and what it actually takes to sustain a career in comics across decades without losing your voice.
Rick breaks down what he’s really chasing when he builds a page, how he shifted gears between Batman’s tension and Superman’s optimism without losing himself, and why clarity and restraint — not flash — are the rarest skills in the medium.
This one’s for the fans who wore out those pages. And for anyone who ever wondered what makes a comic actually work.
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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, because it is.
We dig into reinvention in middle age, the tension between wanting intimacy and settling for availability, what it means to start over in New York City, and whether “happily ever after” is something we’re taught — or something we have to redefine on our own terms.
This one goes deep. And it earns it.
Dancing Between the Raindrops: Happily Ever After?The Magnificent Mr. &Mrs. Maple are available now.
All things Nelson can be found at the link below.
http://nelsonaspen.com/
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He named 200 characters like Megatron, Starscream, Grimlock, Bumblebee, Prowl, and more . He wrote the character bibles that turned a line of Japanese toys into one of the most beloved franchises in pop culture history — and most people have never heard his name.
Bob Budiansky spent 20 years at Marvel Comics as an editor, writer, and penciller. He drew Ghost Rider covers for five years, co-plotted the conclusion of the original Johnny Blaze run, and wrote The Transformers from issue #5 through #55 — crafting the personalities, the mythology, and the names behind roughly 250 characters over six years.
Then he walked away from licensed properties and built something entirely his own: Sleepwalker, a wildly original Marvel series about an otherworldly guardian who battles nightmares bleeding into the real world — which he wrote for all 33 issues.
In this conversation, Bob takes us behind the curtain on all of it: how the Transformers assignment landed on his desk over Thanksgiving with a week’s deadline, what it felt like to realize he was building the foundation of a global franchise, and why he didn’t fully grasp what he’d created until he googled his own name in the 90s.
This one’s for every kid who ever picked up a Transformer and wondered where it came from.Back to Pop drops every Thursday. Subscribe wherever you listen.
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Jeremy Robinson has written nearly 100 novels. He’s a #1 Audible and New York Times bestselling author published in 14 languages. His kaiju series Project Nemesis is in development at Sony Pictures Television with John Wick director Chad Stahelski. And now he’s back where he started — in comics.
But he’s not adapting his novels.He’s creating something new.
Nectar, the debut title from Robinson’s own Breakneck Comics imprint at Vault Comics, is a 19th-century gothic folk horror story set in 1837 on Misery Island — a cold, isolated stretch of land off the coast of Salem, Massachusetts. Its monster: blood-drinking butterflies carrying the Dancing Plague. The goal was to build something that could stand alongside Dracula and Frankenstein. From the early reviews, they may have pulled it off.
In this episode, Jeremy Robinson traces the full arc — from Beverly, Massachusetts kid raised on science fiction and seacoast exploration, to comic book illustrator, to screenwriter, to genre fiction empire builder. We talk about the leap from drawing panels to filling them with story, the architecture of a shared universe, what it means to run your own imprint, and how an idea that arrived in minutes with his wife Hilaree became the horror comic readers are already hunting on the secondary market.
This is the origin story. And the monster story. And the business story.
Let’s go.Find out more here!
https://www.breakneckcomics.com/
Follow him on Instagram:
https://www.instagram.com/jrobinsonauthor?igsh=MXE2NjVpdjU3YW1mYw==
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William Harms has spent thirty years building worlds — and the dead ones are his best work yet.
From small press comics in the early ‘90s to writing Captain America and Wolverine for Marvel, to crafting the entire story of inFAMOUS for PlayStation 3 (IGN’s Best Story of the Year, 2009), to serving as Narrative Director on Mafia III — a BAFTA-nominated game that ended up in a Victoria and Albert Museum exhibit — William Harms has done it all.And now he’s back in creator-owned comics with White Sky, his haunting new post-apocalyptic series from Image Comics about a father and daughter fleeing across a world completely ruled by ghosts.
Issue one sold out at the distributor level on release day. The second printing has already topped 30,000 orders.
In this episode, we go deep on the personal thread running through thirty years of horror, games, and comics — how William wrote the moral complexity of Mafia III, what makes ghost stories different from every other kind of horror, and why White Sky isn’t just a story about the end of the world. It’s a story about what you hold onto when everything is gone.
White Sky #1 and #2 are available now from Image Comics.Theme music composed by Ron Wasserman
Audio composed and edited by
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Website:
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Before streaming. Before shared universes. Before fandom went mainstream — there were heroes who meant it.
This week on Back to Pop, we give Marc Singer’s career the full treatment it deserves. He was a classically trained stage actor before any of this happened on a screen — playing Petruchio in A.C.T.’s landmark 1976 Taming of the Shrew for PBS, Christian in Cyrano de Bergerac opposite Peter Donat and Marsha Mason. His film debut was opposite Burt Lancaster in Go Tell the Spartans, one of the sharpest Vietnam War films ever made. His 1982 alone contained two completely different performances: the stoic, compassionate Dar in The Beastmaster and the funny, chaotic Tom Sullivan in If You Could See What I Hear.
Then came V — not just science fiction spectacle, but a documented Nazi allegory adapted from Sinclair Lewis, with Singer’s Mike Donovan as the TV news cameraman who sneaks aboard an alien mothership, films the truth, and refuses to look away.
We trace the full arc: the Singer family musical dynasty that explains everything, the cable TV revolution that turned The Beastmaster into a generational touchstone, the voice of Man-Bat in what many consider the greatest animated series ever made, and Singer’s late-career villain turn in Arrow — a general who unleashes a bioweapon on Hong Kong and calls it patriotism.
Hero. Monster. Villain. Shakespearean. The man brought his full instrument to every room — and because he did, these stories became something people carry for decades.
Start with The Beastmaster. Chase it with the original V. Then find the 1976 Taming of the Shrew on YouTube — and you’ll understand everything.Theme music composed by Ron Wasserman
Audio composed and edited by
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Composer Ron Wasserman
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Today, on Back To Pop we dive into the pages of comics, with acclaimed writer Doug Wagner
Doug Wagner writes serial killers in love, cannibal furries, fashion designers with a taste for human flesh, and Viking curses — and somehow, every single one lands with genuine heart. This week, Marc sits down with the creator of Plastic, Vinyl, Plush, I Was a Fashion School Serial Killer, and the upcoming Narco to find out how he makes the darkest material feel weirdly, disarmingly human.
They dig into Wagner’s long road in — seven years, 200+ rejection letters, a brief window at Malibu Comics that collapsed just two months after he was hired, and nine more years clawing back from that. They talk about the anthology crime roots that built his storytelling instincts, his creative partnership with artist Daniel Hillyard, and the tonal tightrope he walks in every book: horror, comedy, and sincerity, all at once.
Plus: the Hitchcock influences behind Narco, why his protagonists always feel like outsiders reaching for something just out of grasp, and what that kid who learned to read through comics would think of what he’s built.
Start with Plastic. Then spiral in beautifully from there.For more info and the latest news follow Doug https://linktr.ee/doug.wagner13?utm_source=linktree_profile_share<sid=c0e16828-d003-4923-9124-df30a05b9d9e
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Michael Watkins (CEO/Editor-in-Chief, Highburn Studios) is back — and this time he brought the whole crew. Joining him are Lyle Pollard, creator of the slice-of-life series Tribulations, and Mike “Mez” Phillips, freelance artist and creator behind No More and the upcoming Hemlock.
Over the course of an hour, we get into what Highburn actually looks like from the inside in 2026, the challenges of running a creator-owned studio, and what it means to be both a working artist and a publisher at the same time.
We break down each of their books — the new second-generation arc in Guardians, what makes Tribulations feel so specific and human, and how Mez is juggling two creator-owned projects alongside freelance work and teaching art.We also get into the messy, honest stuff: page 87 burnout, pricing and print costs, what marketing actually works (versus what sounds good on a panel), and what to do if you just finished book one and have no idea what comes next.
This one’s for the readers, the makers, and everyone somewhere in between.
🔗 Find Highburn Studios and all their titles in the link below.
https://www.highburn.com/https://www.instagram.com/mike_mez_phillips?igsh=bGRmdnlzZWVmYmpi
https://www.instagram.com/michaelwatkins_highburn?igsh=cHBrbDJnYXIxa3Qw
Theme music composed by Ron Wasserman
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Lauren M. Antoine
Website:
Composer Ron Wasserman
Back To Pop
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He covered the O.J. Simpson trial, the Rodney King riots, the Northridge earthquake, Columbine, the Las Vegas mass shooting, and Michael Jackson’s death. For 58 years, Hal Eisner was there — camera rolling, microphone in hand — for the moments that defined Los Angeles and shook the nation.
But here’s what makes his story different: he never planned any of it.
In this episode, the legendary FOX 11 and KCOP reporter joins us to talk about his new memoir, An Accidental Career: My Fifty-Eight-Year Adventure as a Broadcast News Reporter — and the conversation goes everywhere.From accidentally reporting false information live on air to getting knocked unconscious by the Northridge earthquake. From intimate moments with Dick Van Dyke and George Clooney to being struck by a drunk driver on Hollywood Boulevard in the middle of a live shoot.
From launching a mentorship camp that accidentally played matchmaker — to retiring on the exact anniversary of the day he started, only to watch LA burn from a cruise ship days later.
Hal Eisner is funny, sharp, honest, and deeply human. This one will stay with you.Pick up your copy of Hal’s new book “My Accidental Career.”
https://haleisner.com/
🎙️ New episodes every week. Subscribe, rate & review Back to Pop wherever you listen.Theme music composed by Ron Wasserman
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Composer Ron Wasserman
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Ever had an idea for an action figure, or maybe you just wish one had been made? Well at Lecroy Toys you don't have to wait anymore, head over and tell Matthew we sent you! https://www.instagram.com/lecroystoys?igsh=MW1ndWE5cHhzaGQ3dw==
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People know the kicks. The costumes. The Christmas magic.
But they don’t always know what it cost to stand on that line — and what it takes to stay whole after you do.
This week on Back to Pop, we sit down with Jennifer Jones — history-maker, dancer, author, and survivor — who became the first Black Rockette at Radio City Music Hall in 1987. What followed wasn’t just applause. It was pressure, resistance, representation, and a level of scrutiny few could imagine.
Jennifer opens up about:
• The audition room where courage mattered as much as choreography
• Becoming “the first” in an institution built on uniformity
• Hate mail, historic milestones, and finding out through the news
• Performing at Super Bowl XXII and on Broadway in 42nd Street
• The physical reality behind “precision”
• And surviving stage III colon cancer — and choosing to live differently afterward
We talk about her children’s book On the Line, her powerful memoir pulling back the velvet curtain, and what legacy really means when your body, your art, and your identity have all been tested.
This isn’t just a story about breaking barriers.
It’s about what happens after you do.
Jennifer is also being honored in the All-Star History Exhibit on February 19 and recognized at the Museum of Broadway on February 22 — and we discuss what those milestones mean in the context of her full journey.
If you’ve ever stood in a room wondering whether you belong — this conversation is for you.
🎧 Listen now.
For colorectal cancer screening guidelines, visit the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force: https://www.uspreventiveservicestaskforce.org
Support dancers facing cancer through I’m A Dancer Against Cancer: https://imadanceragainstcancer.org
Theme music composed by Ron Wasserman
Audio composed and edited by
Lauren M. Antoine
Website:
Composer Ron Wasserman
Back To Pop
https://lantoine2.wixsite.com/portfolio
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Ever had an idea for an action figure, or maybe you just wish one had been made? Well at Lecroy Toys you don't have to wait anymore, head over and tell Matthew we sent you! https://www.instagram.com/lecroystoys?igsh=MW1ndWE5cHhzaGQ3dw==
Support the show
Ever had an idea for an action figure, or maybe you just wish one had been made? Well at Lecroy Toys you don't have to wait anymore, head over and tell Matthew we sent you! https://www.instagram.com/lecroystoys?igsh=MW1ndWE5cHhzaGQ3dw==
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