 My name is Ben Bishop. I'm a comic book artist, self-publisher, illustrator, comic creator. I do my own books, self-publishing, lot through Kickstarter, my book The Aggregate, and then more recently, I've been doing a lot of Ninja Turtles stuff with Kevin Eastman himself. We actually just did this book here, Drawing Blood, which we also self-published, kind of going back to the self-publishing roots that Kevin started out with. You know, I've been drawing since I was four. I've always wanted to draw comics. I started making my own comics, stapling together. I wrote to Marvel when I was 11 in 1997, asking for a job, and they wrote me back and said, you know, get older and get better and keep in touch. And then I tried to go to school for it, couldn't go to school, couldn't afford it, and so that's when I started self-publishing when I was 18. I started work on my first book, Nathan the Caveman, and that came out 10 years ago. It was the 10-year anniversary of my first book, 300-page graphic novel, and so that led to the next thing, led to the next thing, and just been going since then. I've always had my own characters and ideas and stories and comics, unlike animation or toy design, is something that you can do all on your own to get those stories out so that people can read them and see them, because comics you can write, illustrate, self-publish, one man team kind of thing. So it's good to be able to, you know, tell the stories that I have inside of me, they're kind of driving me nuts to get out there into the world. Yeah, and I've always wanted to have my own characters that would influence and inspire other people later, like the Turtles or the X-Men or Spider-Man did for me as a kid. It's actually Rhode Island Comic-Con, I think two years ago, you came down to my table and you were like, hey, Kevin just had a panel, and he said that you draw Turtles better than him, and I was like, what? I've never even met that guy before, and that's not true, but of course, then I started tweeting about it and saying, ha ha. So, but anyway, what ended up happening after that was I started getting more turtle work with covers and things like that through IDW, and then hand in hand I did my creator-owned book, The Aggregate, and there were a few copies of The Aggregate over at IDW in San Diego, like on the coffee table there, and I was trying to get in touch with Kevin to get a quote for the back about whether or not he liked the book, and he never did get me the quote, but about a year or so after that I got an email, one night I was out at a bar during a convention, I got an email that said, hey Ben, Kevin Eastman here, I just read The Aggregate, it's effin' awesome, what are you doing for the next year? I'd love you to do a book for me, and I was like, so I really only met the guy once, and it was that Rhode Island Comic-Con, and about a year later he wanted me to be the artist of the story that he wanted to tell, which is the, I say it's the fictional true story of how the turtles were created, but instead of Shane Bookman, or instead of Kevin Eastman, it's Shane Bookman, and instead of the team doing Ninja Turtles, it's the radically rearranged Ronan Ragdolls, so it's definitely a really fun story to tell, and again, going back to self-publishing for Kevin, I think he saw a lot of what he used to love about self-publishing and what I was doing with The Aggregate and stuff like that, so it's been awesome. People are like, how often do you talk to them, like, too much, he's texting me all the time, but can't complain, and he wants me to get to work right away on the next one, but we just finished Drawing Blood, and then we jumped right over to this big Raphael story, it's like a 46-page story called Target R, and it's basically Raphael, but Weapon X, so it's like Raph at his craziest and most angry, his eyes actually turn red, he's so angry, so, and that comes out December 19th through IDW. I was in the military, and I worked on aircraft, and we had a bunch of fiberglass stuff left over, and I wanted to make something out of it, so I said, well, do a Casey Jones mask so I can have everybody I ever meet that has anything to do with Ninja Turtles sign it, and that's pretty much what has happened for the past five, six years now, so, yeah. Yeah, no, I gotta make another one soon. And so it's pretty wild that I was influenced by turtles and inspired by turtles and inspired by people like Kevin, and now to work with him and to work on those properties. It's a real bucket list kind of thing, and what IDW is doing with the turtles is great too, because they give all the different artists and writers their kind of voice on the series, and they can change stuff around and make the turtles their own, and then it comes on to the next artist, and they do the same thing, and so Kevin and I really made the Target R story our own. We gave Raph red eyes and took off his mask, and we changed Casey's mask, and I put him back in the sweatpants and the holes, and I tried to grunge it up and make it a little bit more like it used to be when Kevin first created Casey and Raph with Peter, so it's gonna be fun. A lot of artists start out trying to find a style or mimic a style or something like that, and what I found was that you should just learn how to draw, and then the same way that everyone has a certain type of handwriting, I feel like the style just happens, and then it comes to a point, once you know how to draw almost anything as well as you can, from the top of your head, you're gonna inherently just start drawing a certain way. You can't chase a certain style, and you should never chase a certain style that is hot or popular, because it always changes, and that's one of the things that's so good about comics is that every single comic can look wildly different. Some people make comics with photos and collages, but it's still comics, and so the turtles are similar, where it's like, it's one of the, not one of the only, but one of the few properties where they can look wildly different, like from Jim Lawson's turtles to Kevin Eastman's turtles to Peter Laird's turtles, they're all so unique, but people still know it's the turtles, and so for me, it was about finding my favorite version, and I think for my turtles, they're kind of somewhere between the IDW series that Mattea Saneluko style and the Jim Henson suits, because I think the Jim Henson suits are the best version of the turtles. I want my books to kind of have some lasting power and stories that people still care about. Nathan the Caveman, like I said, I did 10 years ago, and I just actually did a Kickstarter for the 10-year anniversary edition, and it went up to 15,000 bucks, so that was really heartfelt for me, because it showed me that people still care, and the books still last, and I have this great fan base that wants to read anything that I put out, as long as it's not bad, and I haven't made anything that they think is bad yet, so that's nice. So lasting power, again, characters and stories that inspire people want to pick up and read again. That's what's cool about the aggregate is it's the world's first split decision comics, it's like an old chooser on a venture book which forces people to read it again and again and again in different ways. So, yeah, just characters that last, stories that last, and then kind of making a mark similar to what Kevin and Peter did. I mean, even a fraction of that, just some kind of ongoing franchise that would wind up on t-shirts and lunch boxes and stuff, that'd be cool. Yeah.