Blast from the Past 213: "The Good Ol' Days" in Sharon, CT

While looking for those old San Diego photos I posted last week, I also found these goodies from our days in Sharon, CT. These were taken at a time when we had not yet grasped the idea that, if we supplied a list of addresses and how many copies were supposed to go to which addresses, our printer could ship all of the books. Instead, we had the printer -- which at the time was in Lakeville, CT, one town over -- ship all the books to my rented house (or maybe we picked them up from the printer in my car, I can't remember). Here's a photo of Kevin taking a break on a stack of TMNT #2 in the living room of our house.



My wife didn't really care to have these boxes cluttering up the house, so we'd haul them down to the basement, where we'd begin the laborious job of counting out each order, then reboxing them to be shipped out to the various distributors. One of the reasons we did this instead of just depending on the count the printer put on the outside of each box was that we had discovered when looking through one of those early printings of TMNT #2 that it suffered from random bad trimming -- at some point in the binding and trimming process, something went wrong and some of the copies ended up trimmed at weird angles, rendering those copies unsaleable (and unreadable, in some cases). So, just to be sure none of our customers got any of these bad copies, we hand inspected each one before they went out. It was a giant pain in the butt.

Steve Lavigne moved down to Sharon around this time, becoming the first Mirage Studios employee. We put him to work helping us go through the boxes of comics, inspecting and counting and reboxing. Here he and Kevin are hard at work in the basement, packing copies of TMNT #3.



And here's Kevin doing the same thing with issue #2, in the living room.



But this grunt work wasn't the only thing occupying our time -- we also had to continue working on the drawing of the book itself. Here's Kevin working on issue #3 during the short time he lived with us in our rented house by Silver Lake.



Occasionally, the need would arise for goofy hijinks and silliness -- witness "Conehead Kevin".



Kevin would often do stuff like this, usually to make me laugh... and usually succeeding. -- PL