Blast from the Past #313: Rough sketches for "Sewer Scraper" vehicle idea

From the same sketchbook...

Readers of this blog may remember my post back on December 17, 2008 (actually a repost of one of the original "Blast from the Past" posts I put up on the planetracers.com site before i migrated them over here) of a drawing for the "Sewer Scraper", a proposed Foot Clan vehicle which looked much like an enlarged version of the business end of a medieval flail-type mace.

This piece shows the rough pencil sketching I did for that concept. -- PL

Blast from the Past #312: sketch for toy figure "Mercenary Mouse"

Again, from that same sketchbook -- this is yet another one of the drawings I did and sent off to Karl Aaronian at Playmates back when they were casting around for ideas for ways to expand the TMNT toy line in the 1980's and early 1990's.



I'm not sure why I combined the concepts of "mercenary" and "mouse" -- I suspect it probably had something to do with the alliteration. In any event, no "Mercenary Mouse" figure was ever made. I don't think the world is poorer for it. -- PL

Blast from the Past #311: Thumbnail layouts for TMNT Volume 1 #15

Some more stuff from that sketchbook -- these are my very rough thumbnail layouts (and some of them are, literally, about the size of a large thumbnail) for issue #15 of the original TMNT comic series.

It's interesting to look back at these and see just how much -- or how little -- I felt I needed to draw to get across to myself the idea of what was meant to be on each page.

I'm not sure when or why Jim Lawson drew his "Orson" character from "Bade Biker and Orson" on my layouts, but it's kind of funny to see him there. -- PL















P.S. -- Apropos of some of the personal stuff I've been blogging about lately, as I was looking over these pages of thumbnails, specifically the penultimate page, my eye was caught by the dialogue I wrote for "Steve "Stainless" Steel's in his words to "Battling Bernice's daughter, Ananda:

"You're wise for your age, Ananda… I wish I had been as wise. But you need a few more years… to realize that it's never too late to change... as long as you're alive, there's hope…"

Not having the printed issue #15 here in front of me, I can't say how much of that made it into the final form of the comic, but I seem to recall I did have Steve saying something like that. -- PL

P.P.S. I also note that, according to these roughs, at one pint I had considered calling the Justice Force "The Superior Six". I have no recollection of why I didn't.

Blast from the Past #310: rough pencil sketch for cover of TMNT Volume 1, #15

Continuing on with interesting tidbits found in that same sketchbook -- here is the rough pencil sketch I drew while working out the design for the cover of issue #15 of the original run of Mirage TMNT comics.



For anyone who wants to see what the cover ended up looking like when penciled, inked and colored, I posted two images of it back on March 4, 2009.

Blast from the Past #84 repost: TMNT Vol. 1 #15 "clean" cover

Eagle-eyed readers might be able to see faint hints of a drawing of the Fugitoid peeking through the image of the rough pencil cover drawing -- darn that cheap sketchbook paper! -- PL

Blast from the Past #309: Frog characters for Playmates

I found this page with these two sketches in that same sketchbook from whence came "Blast from the Past" numbers 305, 306 and 307. It's not dated, but it's probably from the late 1980's.



Neither of these characters ever made it to the toy line, as far as I recall. -- PL

"Falling Away": an update

In my post from this June 8th, I wrote the following:

"I will take the plots that I have written out for what would have been the concluding six or seven issues of the comic book, beef them up a little bit..."

Well, I should have taken a look at my "TMNT plots" file (which I keep on another laptop that I don't use that much), something I haven't done in quite a few months. If I had, I would have been reminded of the salient fact that the plots for the remaining issues of Volume 4 (beyond the two that are already drawn but not yet published) are incomplete at best; some are really only one or two lines. So to "beef up" these things is going to take quite a bit of work.

Sigh.

At least I have a firm idea of how I want the series to end. That much is solid. -- PL

"Things Change…" Part Three: Falling away

I picked up a new MacBook Pro laptop yesterday, and have spent a few hours copying old files onto it, re-installing some key programs, and generally trying to get things back to the way they were -- or at least close to it. So far, it seems to be going pretty well. AOL is working, I can get on the Internet, and I don't think I have lost anything vital (of course, that estimation could change as things progress).

I have made one big decision, though, which I was not expecting… but which I can see now is connected to the continuing series of changes going on in my life.

I have not -- and won't -- copy my "TMNT Stuff" folder to the new computer.

"TMNT Stuff" was a folder I'd maintained across several laptops -- in fact, I think it started on my G4 desktop Mac. I put just about everything and anything TMNT-related into it -- art that I'd scanned, some of which I'd colored in Photoshop; all of the art files for the 2K3 TMNT animated series that Lloyd and his crew sent me for approval; plots and notes for the stories I created for the TMNT Volume 4 comics, as well as the Quark (and later InDesign) files for the comics themselves; various interesting emails and web clippings related to TMNT; some important contracts, various drafts of movie scripts and treatments and outlines; and so on. The last time I checked (about a minute ago) this folder was slightly over ten gigabytes.

(I am not deleting this folder full of files -- I will be keeping it on a back-up external hard drive in case i ever need to refer to it again.)

Lately, I have been feeling the sense that the Turtles are "falling away" from me -- I know that is imprecise and very subjective, but it is the closest I can get to articulating how it feels. After the sale of the TMNT property to Viacom in October of 2009, I felt some immediate relief, some significant lessening of my sense of responsibility to and for the Turtles. But I didn't experience the real -- you know, I'm not even sure how to describe it, but I had this kind of anticipation of a feeling of liberation or something. And it wasn't there.

But now it is.

In the last week or two I have actually found myself breathing more easily, and feeling like my shoulders and neck aren't as tight as they once were. I find myself thinking of the Turtles as something from my past, not something of my future… which is a little freaky, given how long they'd been part of my present, but even as a freaky feeling it isn't unpleasant. It feels… relaxing.

I'm not eradicating the Turtles from my life. That would be foolish -- they are a huge part of my personal and creative history. And someday, maybe I will play with them again. But right now, that day seems very, very far away.

Those of you who were/are fans of my TMNT Volume 4 comics may wonder what this means for the continuation/conclusion of that series. I have been doing some soul-searching about that, and at the risk of disappointing some of those fans, I have to say that I don't think the series will ever be finished as I had originally intended it to be. I just don't have any desire to leap back into it, and in fact, I am a little afraid of trying to do so, given my sense of of trepidation about getting sucked back into the world of the TMNT at a time when I finally feel like I am getting free from it.

So this is my current thinking: The art, scripting and lettering for issue #31 is done, and the inking on the art for #32 is just about finished. I may finish up the final details of these two issues, and publish them not in print form but on the Web.

Following that, I will take the plots that I have written out for what would have been the concluding six or seven issues of the comic book, beef them up a little bit, and post them online, either at the Mirage Licensing site or on this blog, so as to give readers of Volume 4 a clear look at how I intended to conclude that series.

I'll have to double-check to make sure I'm within my rights to do this, but I think it will be okay. And in all honesty, at this point I think it's probably the only way this series will get anything close to its intended conclusion. I apologize in advance to anyone who will be disappointed by this approach, but I sincerely see it as the only reasonable way to go forward, all things considered. -- PL