Blast from the Past #69 repost: Unfinished ad for TMNT #2

This is a "Blast" from WAY back. I started -- but obviously never finished -- this ad for the second issue of TMNT Volume 1. Thinking back, this was probably done during that period of about a year when I was living in Connecticut, coordinating all of the printing and shipping activities and dealing with the distributors. Kevin at that time was still living in Maine, and we were doing the artwork together through the mail.



This is clearly something that I started and drew on my own, without Kevin's involvement (I can recognize my drawing style and my bad lettering), and for some reason, halfway through the inking process, gave up on it. Maybe Kevin came up with a better idea for the ad, and we went with that. Who knows? -- PL

Blast from the Past #35 repost: TMNT Volume 1 #2 cover/inks and tones

Back in the early days of the TMNT comic book, Kevin Eastman and I would alternate cover duties. He did the artwork for the cover to the first issue (although, if memory serves, I did the mechanical color separation overlay for the red color on that cover), I did the second, he did the third, and so on.

This is my cover drawing for TMNT #2, done on the duo shade board we used for the interior art. I’ve reproduced this black and white art in color to show the sepia tones created by the aging toning chemicals in the paper.



I think this was the first time I tried using the toning chemicals in my airbrush -- boy, did that dark tone chemical stink! It was truly vile. -- PL

Blast from the Past #23 repost: TMNT Volume 1 #2 unfinished inks

It's funny what you can find completely by accident. Back in 2001, I needed to check some old original artwork from the first TMNT comic book series to make sure that the tone patterns in the paper I was planning to use for the Vol. 4 TMNT book matched the old pages, so I looked in my folder of originals from TMNT #2. In that folder were some things I had completely forgotten about, including the two examples below.

These are copies I made of pages from TMNT #2 which Kevin and I had both penciled on and I had partially inked, prior to passing the pages back to Kevin for him to do his part of the inking (and, obviously, prior to doing the grey Duo-Shade tones). I must have made these copies for some reason, though I can't recall exactly why -- perhaps because at the time we were working on that issue, Kevin was living in Maine and I was living in Connecticut, and if I was mailing originals back to him I might have wanted to have some kind of record of what inking I'd done in case the pages got lost in the mail.



Back in the early days, when we were doing comic shows together, one of the most common questions was "How do you guys work together?" and it never ceased to amaze me that so many people just couldn't quite comprehend that both of us worked on penciling, inking and toning each and every page of the artwork. (In fact, a lot of people couldn't quite get the fact the one of us wasn't "the writer" and the other one "the artist".) I wish I had remembered that I had these copies when we were asked those questions.



I also wish I had done this kind of copying on all of the pages we worked on together -- it would have been cool to be able to see what each of us had done on each page. Right now, looking back over all those years, it's difficult to say for sure who inked what, although there are some things that stand out. -- PL