The Turtles, Through My Lens

 
One of my high school students asked me last week "Do people really look at your website? It's just about you."

Well, yeah.

I do try to get the tentacles to reach outwards sometimes, last week's little Mark Martin interview being an excellent case in point. But even on that front I do want to say a little more about me.

I reported in last week's article that Mark had drawn some Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle stories for Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird. But let me tell you that I myself had an almost-run-in with the Turtles.

I started purchasing TMNT with their very first issue when it was released back in 1984. The comic was a fun send-up of Frank Miller's Ronin and I liked it.

After a couple of issues I seem to recall that Eastman and Laird started printing pin-ups of their Turtles on the (I think) inside back covers, as drawn by various other artists. I unwrapped a sheet of Craftint board and drew my version of those Turtles, and you can see the result above. I'm pretty sure I sent it in to them and I'm also fairly certain that it did not see print. If you know to the contrary that it did get published, please let me know! (And did you realize that Kevin Eastman used a few drops of his Turtle Money to purchase Heavy Metal magazine a number of years ago?)

Maybe you'd like to examine a larger image of the drawing, and you can do that here. You can read about late and lamented Craftint here and see some beautiful artwork utilizing it here and (gulp, here are two more by me) here and here.