TMNT #31 cover by Michael Dooney

I got the word today from Michael Dooney that he had finished the cover painting for the next issue of TMNT Volume 4 -- #31 -- and he'd left it on one of the computers at Mirage. So this afternoon, while I was at the office waiting for Eric Talbot to get there so he and Jim Lawson and I could go for a short (but sweet) motorcycle ride, I copied it onto my trusty memory stick and brought it home.

And here it is!



Now that Mike has worked his magic, I think the only thing left to do is put together the letters pages. So if you had been thinking of writing a letter of comment, now would be a good time to finish it up and send it in. -- PL

Blast from the Past #199: Biker gorilla

This is another one of the sketches I did back in the late 1980's when Kevin and I were trying to come up with concepts to help Playmates flesh out the rapidly-expanding TMNT toy line.



This one was meant to be in keeping with the "mutant animal" approach which Playmates found so successful. -- PL

Blast from the Past #198: Robot Foot Soldier designs

These three drawings are not dated or well-annotated, so it's a little hard for me to remember exactly when they are from and for what reason they were created. But I probably did them in the first decade of TMNT.







I wish I could remember if I did these with the intent of using the concepts and designs in the comics, or if they were something I did for Playmates Toys. I don't recall ever planning any humanoid robot Foot ninja for the comics, but they were a common sight in the first animated series. It's even possible that these sketches came before the designs were settled on for the way the Foot soldiers appeared in that show... but don't quote me. -- PL

Blast from the Past #197: Michelangelo kneeling with 'chuks

Here's another of my pinup drawings, this one of Michelangelo in a ready pose, from 1987. -- PL

Blast from the Past #195: Raphael with shoulder-mounted weapon

I'm not sure exactly WHAT this weapon on Raph's shoulder is supposed to fire -- maybe some kind of missiles -- or WHY I drew it back in 1987. But I do like the way it turned out. -- PL

Blast from the Past #192: Donatello in a relaxed pose

Here's another one of my old pinup drawings, this one from 1987, of my favorite Turtle in a relaxed pose... just "takin' five" between ninja battles, perhaps. -- PL

Further progress

I did get to print out a couple of proof copies of TMNT #31 today (thankfully, the printer seems to be able to do duplexing again, after being on the fritz for a few days... actually, it's not the printer's fault, but the new Macs we got to replace some old ones -- some kind of classic new operating system software/printer driver conflict... but that's neither here nor there). I gave one copy to Jim to check out (and got an email from him tonight saying he liked it... thanks, Jim!).

I took my copy home and read it through once, and found a few mistakes, and will likely read it through a few more times. I am pleased that this issue seems to be coming together without too many hitches, because this marks the first time I have composited an issue of TMNT directly in Adobe InDesign. Prior to this, I would always do it in a version of Quark Xpress, and for the last few years after I'd done that I would convert the Quark file into an InDesign file (Dan likes them better, and he's the dude interfacing with our printer). There were always some glitches during this conversion process, and I would end up spending several more hours correcting them.

So I finally decided that even though I was really comfortable with the lettering tools in Quark, I had to learn how to do it in InDesign. I'm still not loving InDesign's tool set, but I think I can get used to it eventually. -- PL