Saturday, January 3, 2015

Snippets #28: May 12, 1985


     This one is from a May 12, 1985 letter to Mom and Pop:

     "The last shipment of TMNT #3 went out Friday, for which I am grateful. I am so glad that we will not be doing that anymore, and that our new printer will be handling all the handling. I hope that our new printer will prove to be more reliable than our old one, with whom I am very disgusted.

     What's going on with Turtles? Well, we're working right now on the artwork for issue #4, which should go to the printer around June 10. They are already working on the Raphael special issue, which should be shipping in the next few weeks. Then we are working out a deal with this guy from Windsor, CT to do a limited edition of button sets. And the game is still in the works; just before Kevin left for his vacation, we signed and sent off the contracts for that. I think pretty soon we'll have to start working on the artwork for that game.

     Then we're planning to do another signing, this time at a comic book store down in New Haven. They called us and asked if we'd be interested, and we're doing that on June 8. And we're definitely planning to go to that convention in Michigan, to which we have been invited, on June 29-30. After that, if we can swing it, we may go to the big San Diego convention in August. (We haven't been invited, but it would be fun to go anyway!) Plus we have to work on the Fugitoid book, which is scheduled for August, and issue TMNT after that, and after that the special Michaelangelo one-shot issue in December. So as you can see, we have our time pretty well booked up."

     [When I wrote the following:

     "Plus we have to work on the Fugitoid book, which is scheduled for August, and issue TMNT after that, and after that the special Michaelangelo one-shot issue in December."

     … I think "issue TMNT" was meant to be "issue #5 of TMNT". 

     The new printer mentioned in the first paragraph was Southern Duchess News in Poughkeepsie, NY. Their taking over the shipping duties made a HUGE difference in our work lives. It was bad enough when the print runs were 15,000 to 30,000 or so, but I shudder to think what a horror show it would have been had we kept the old way of doing things when we got to the higher print runs for some later books.

     "The game" was the Palladium Books role-playing game.

     The convention in Michigan turned out to have some special significance to the history of Mirage Studios -- it's where we met Dan Berger and Ryan Brown. -- PL]

4 comments:

  1. How much would it cost to print, say, 10 comic books? Whenever my issue finally gets done, I tend to hand out 10 #1's as a collectible. just in case it ever gets big enough to be worth anything more than 1 cent ;o).

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    1. Neil, I think that would vary from printer to printer. But if you went with the process that I did for issue #32 of TMNT Volume 4, which was not offset printed, but printed on high-end copiers, you might pay less than a dollar for each copy, depending on page count. -- PL

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  2. Thank you for posting these letters. They have been some of the most informative reads about TMNT history I've come across in some time.

    With respect to the comment of changing your printer company, were you still using the same printer for the covers? I had read that you and Kevin used a different printer company for the interior pages than the covers. I find the historical aspect of these "Snippets" completely fascinating. Thank you for sharing them.

    Mike

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    1. Mike, I'm glad to hear that you have been enjoying these "snippets". I don't have many left, unfortunately... but there is always the possibility that other letters will turn up.

      If memory serves, when we switched from the Lakeville Journal to Southern Duchess New, there was a separate printing company handling the printing of the covers. I can't remember the name of that second printer, but I recall that when we started doing full-color covers -- I think starting with issue #5 -- they also did the color separations. -- PL

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