Blast from the Past #114: Donatello about to throw bo staff

This is another early pinup drawing I did, back in 1984... old-school style. -- PL

Blast from the Past repost #41: Elite fights Foot / pencils

I penciled this depiction of one of the Shredder's elite guard fighting a bunch of Foot soldiers around the time we did “City at War”, as another “cyberinking” test. I don't believe it was ever used for anything. -- PL

Blast from the Past #113: Illustrations for our ad for the Dark Horse miniature lead figures

One of the most exciting things that ever happened in the early days of the TMNT was the introduction, by a company called Dark Horse Miniatures, of a line of very detailed small lead figures of the Turtles and some of their supporting cast. I believe this was our first or second licensing deal (glow-in-the-dark t-shirts may have come first).

This was the first time we'd ever seen our characters rendered in three dimensions, and it was a big thrill. The sculpting was perfect and the poses they chose were excellent.



The artwork above is something I drew, using the figures as reference, for an ad we ran in the early TMNT comics in an attempt to sell some of these figures through mail order. I can't remember how many we sold, but in a way it was irrelevant -- I just love the fact that these things existed at all! Dark Horse (not related to the comic book publisher of the same name) went on to do several more variations, including a wicked cool Triceraton in a flying harness, and a bigger Turtle figure (about two inches tall, as I recall). I'm not sure if the company is still in business. -- PL

Donatello with...? pinup

Here's an interesting oddity I turned up while looking for some stuff in my old studio yesterday. It's a pinup drawing from back in 1986 that I drew and Michael Dooney inked.



I'm pretty sure the female warrior Donatello is trying to give the apple to is an anthropomorphic character from someone's comic book, but for the life of me I can't remember whose book it was or what the character is called. Anyone know? -- PL

Blast from the Past #40 repost: Raphael's new look

This is the last of the proposed redesigns for the unfilmed fourth live-action TMNT movie. One of our ideas was to give Raphael the ability to “morph” into what we were calling “Raptor Raph”, complete with big gnashy teeth and claws to complement his big gnashy personality.



This was not much of a stretch, obviously. In retrospect, while this new approach was probably appropriate for Raph, it was also uncomfortably close to what we were proposing for Splinter.

Years later, during the Volume 4 run of my TMNT comic, I decided to (temporarily) transform Raph into a beastly-looking thing with some similarities to this iteration (minus the "morphing" powers). However, I think the look that Jim Lawson came up with for what some fans call "GameraRaph" is a lot cooler looking than this. -- PL

Blast from the Past #39 repost: Michelangelo's new costume

This is one more of the proposed redesigns for the unfilmed fourth live-action TMNT movie. Here we gave Mike a more “street” look because his new mutation gave him the ability to project a human appearance onto his turtle features, allowing him to interact freely with humans.



This reminds me a little of an even earlier idea Kevin and I toyed with for the TMNT comics. We had this (admittedly more than a bit goofy) plan to have Donatello make "human disguises" which the Turtles could wear that would allow them to move around undetected in public. These disguises would not have survived really close examination, though... for example, to accommodate the Turtles' three-fingered hands, they would wear special latex gloves which from a distance would look like human five-fingered hands, but actually had the index finger and middle finger fused into one, and the other two fingers also fused together in this way. I think I have a quick sketch of this somewhere, but I haven't seen it in a while. -- PL

Blast from the Past #112: Leonardo pinup

Here's another pinup drawing, done by me in 1987. I like the pose and the exaggerated foreshortening of the sword in this one. -- PL