Marys, we have a very exciting guest on the podcast today and a word-winning queer

illustrator who is probably most well known to drag race fans for featuring all-star

queens and queer legends as the superheroes and sometimes super villains that they are in his

graphic novel cover art series. Please welcome to the podcast Shane Galardi, welcome Shane. Hello,

hi Marys, how are you? Oh, very good. Sorry to group you all together, the Marys. No, no,

we love it. Yeah, we don't quite know what the plural of Mary is, so it could be Mariah,

it could be Marys with an apostrophe. The question is still out, but more importantly,

let's talk about you, let's talk about this amazing artwork that you've been doing for years now,

at least in terms of like drag race adjacent art. Yeah, yeah, I think, you know, for the last five,

six, seven, I don't know, I lose track of time, but yeah, it's been that long, you know,

drawing drag race, and I haven't even scratched a surface of like, there's so much art I've

want to draw. Yeah, it feels like such a launching point, I guess, is to start here, and then you're

noticing like, oh, there's all these other things I can draw. I guess just to get things started for

Marys that maybe aren't familiar with your story, do you remember how or when you came up with

this idea to marry these two genres together? Yeah, yeah. Well, it was a journey of discovery,

you know, I first started off drawing the queens in like a little golden book style, because I

was obsessed with that. I love the Disney artist, Mary Blair, and I love the Disney golden books,

and so I was like, oh, wouldn't it be cute if I combined queens with like this cutesy little

like gouache like painted style? And so I did, but I was like, I can't really capture their

personality that well, and it's hard to like, you know, jam people into like a, oh, a cute

sensibility when they're not really, you know, and then I tried to draw them as like tattoo art,

because I'm obsessed with like a Sailor Jerry traditional western tattoo art, and I was like,

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