Monthly Archives: July 2022

Turtle Talk

Oops! That’s a whole oth­er IP, isn’t it?

This is not new work; it’s some­thing I redis­cov­ered going through some old files. Lit­er­al, phys­i­cal files in a fil­ing cab­i­net, I mean. It’s a com­ic book cov­er I did, and it was nev­er published.

Before I got into ani­ma­tion, I was try­ing to make comics my career. In the late ’80s/early ’90s, I did a fair amount of work for Don Chin, pub­lish­er of Par­o­dy Press/Entity Comics. Around that time, there was a Teenage Mutant Nin­ja Tur­tles strip appear­ing in news­pa­pers. Don was always look­ing for things he could do to expand his comics line, so he got the idea to license the TMNT strip and put it out col­lect­ed in com­ic book form.

To that end, he had me do a cou­ple pieces of art. The one you see here was going to be the cov­er of (I believe) the first issue. The rea­son the for­mat looks odd is because the cov­er art was going to have bor­ders around it, and a big, offi­cial TMNT logo up top, tak­ing up rough­ly a third of the page. As I recall, the plan was that I was going to be the reg­u­lar cov­er guy for the comic.

Unfor­tu­nate­ly, they had to pull the plug on the project. Don found out that the one thing they would not allow him to do with the strip was to col­lect it and put it out in com­ic book form. He could basi­cal­ly do just about any­thing but that. Per­haps because then that would put it in com­pe­ti­tion with oth­er TMNT com­ic books. So this is the first time any­one out­side of Don, Lau­ra, any­one else who were work­ing for them, or myself, have seen this cov­er art.

Enjoy, and stay cool!