Donatello: The Brain Thief #1

Cover: Jim Lawson & Steve Lavigne
Script: Jim Lawson
Pencils: Jim Lawson
Inks: Eric Talbot
Letters: Eric Talbot
First Printing: September, 2009

This story takes place immediately after the events of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles issue 9 of series 2.

After defeating the Baxter Stockman Robot, and unknown to his brothers, Donatello takes the robot's remains and sequesters them in a secret room hidden in the sewers. Why would he choose to reactivate their old enemy and more importantly, what is this new robot prowling the sewers?

Mirage Mini Comics Collection story #11

Originally published in: Mirage Mini Comics Collection
Publication date: 1989

Story and art: Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird

“Casey Jones, Private Eye”

Summary:

In an office in the city somewhere, Casey Jones, private eye, is standing behind his desk, pondering how funky the city can be. Just then, a ravishing yet familiar dame walks in. She asks if he’s heard the news, and he has: the Slaughter Dogs, a ruthless gang Casey helped put away, have just busted out of jail. She asks what Casey intends to do. He intends to take her for a night on the town.

The Time Has (Unfortunately) Come

Life's a bitch sometimes, and you gotta do what you gotta do. I am selling my copy of TMNT Vol.1 #1. All the info is here: http://tinyurl.com/ycebv2r

Yes. Today is a sad day.

The Good with the Bad

I'm about to have a very unappealing day involving a two hour trip to a place I don't really like all that much to do something I don't particularly want to do in what I'm hearing is going to be 40 degree (Celsius) heat, but two cool (one ridiculously, the other pretty) things were also brought to my attention this morning.

The first, my final TMNT comic is going to be in stores. If you can't get your hands on it, let me know and I'll see what I can sort out. There's a new review for it up as well, which can be found my clicking right about... here!

WARNING: There are a couple of pretty epic spoilers, so if you want, just skip down to the review bit!

Secondly, and this is the ridiculously cool thing in my mind: REEF, my favorite band of all time, are finally getting back together to play some gigs after breaking up in 2003! Anyone want to donate me some cash so I can see them...? ;)

Interviewness!

A couple of weeks ago, I did an interview with Alec Berry, who runs what is easily one of the coolest podcasts online (and I'm not just saying that, I was made aware of this blog a while ago and have loved it from way back). It's a little behind the times (the interview itself) because it was done about a week before the news of the Viacom / Nickelodeon buyout occurred, but I love how it came out, and I hate hearing myself back on anything.

Give it a listen: here

Also, I just saw the Japanese move "Kairo", known in the West as "The Pulse". Did this make sense to anyone? Did it even scare anyone? I know the US remakes tend to dumb things down, but I think I'm going to need to watch it to see what they made of it...

Teasity-tease-tease! Tales of the TMNT #59 and #61

Introducing (sorta), my new favorite character. Anyone who does anything creative knows that you sometimes become a little overly protective/attached to certain things you come up with, and, well, this character is mine... perhaps purely because of the last two panels. Paul and I didn't really even discuss the look of the character, he just did it and she turned out perfect. Everything about her is spot on! Anyway, here's a little more...

I crack up every time I see these two panels.

Here's a full page just to hold you over until June.



Also, as noted in the title of the post, here are some teasers from #61, with art by Andres Ponce! Love the nod to #36 too! More on all that later!

Get this shit offa me. I iz pissed!

Der Fastcar ist norty!

Leo: I can haz volleyball?
Don: You are in my base, ruining my carpetz.

Huey Lewis.

Street Pizza

TMNT25.com Blogging redux

Alright, so my first blog for TMNT 25.com went up. You can check that out by clicking right here.
Keep in mind that this was written a little over a month ago, when I'd just finished the script for "Burning Man" (in stores November). Probably nothing you didn't already know, but I did try to drop a few little morsels here and there. There will be one focusing on Hun and another about my work on the Fast Forward books for Titan.

No Feet!

Michael Bay's Awesome Book of the Week

This was at the front desk when I went to pick up my Deadpool stuff at Comics R Us in Melbourne. This was cool because the dude behind the desk (not the usual dudes in there either) was saying that they'd had people start ordering the books recently because of my last couple of stories. Before this, the stores (there are two of them here in town) hadn't been stocking Turtles.

Sometimes They Come Back

That's the title for Tales of the TMNT #61. Next August. To be illustrated by Andres Ponce (who I actually worked with once before on the Titan UK Fast Forward comics).

Peace

Also...

Starting soon, TMNT comics will start appearing on Newsarama, CBR, EveryDayIsLikeWednesday, ComicNewsI and a few other websites as regularly reviewed titles. It'll be interesting to see how things go...

More Hun Concepts

This is another image I shot to Paul for the upcoming Hun story. This is certainly not final, as Paul has this ridiculously cool ability to take whatever crap I scribble out and make it into something that oozes all kinds of amazing.

When I wrote Hun's reappearance, I wrote it fairly straightforward. He's big and has lots of tats. I didn't go into any detail with them really. I had a vague idea of what would be symbolically cool to have on his body, but nothing set in stone, and nothing definite in terms of visuals. Paul asked me what ideas I had for the tattoos and I roughed this out. As I said, it's NOT what is going to be in the final product (and knowing Paul, it's going to be pretty far from it visually, although the core IDEA I want to get across will probably still be there).

Take a gander:

TMNT Stage Show

I just finished working on a TMNT live show for the Royal Melbourne Show later next month. It's one of those mall-style, pantomime sorts of shows where the kids get involved. Kids stuff really, but it should be interesting to see how it turns out. I was told that the 4kids crew were recording the voice overs, which is cool. Hopefully the show prices aren't complete rips...

Guess Who's Comin' to Town?

I'm sure someone worked this out, but Tales #56 will see the introduction of a new character to the Mirage Universe... Actually, a reintroduction of sorts...



His name is Hunter Mason.


...



Hunter Mason.

TMNT 25

Everyone should get behind this. We NEED this as I think you will agree that it is LONG overdue. 'Nuff said!

Titan's TMNT Fast Forward Comics

Hey guys and gals! Those of you who read Ross May's Livejournal may have seen his post sharing his own pitches for the ill-fated comic series. Well, he's got me all inspired to share my own, seeing as the book is gone. The first three are my published stories, the rest are the ones that were accepted and held for use. I'll post the unsuccessful pitches at the end.


EXTREME MEASURES

Cody has developed a new type of hoverboard/skateboard to be unveiled at a charity extreme sports event. A bounty hunter sees this as an opportunity to make some money and decides to kidnap Cody during the event and hold him for ransom. What follows is an extreme sports chase as the kidnapper tries to get away on one of the boards with the Turtles in pursuit – and Raph managing to take home first prize in the event!

GHOST IN THE SHELL

Cody and Donatello have been experimenting with one of Jammerhead’s ghosting cloaks and believe they’ve come up with a similar device of their own. Mikey decides to check it out and hassles them to let him try it. They refuse him because they’re still running tests on it, but Mikey sneaks up later on figuring a quick go wouldn’t hurt (and think of the pranks he can play on Raph!). After messing with Raph, Mikey goes to put the device back – only to discover that he can’t get it off, and with both him and the device stuck as ‘Ghosts’, his greatest fears are realised: he can no longer play video games, read his comic books or worst of all – EAT! It’s up to Donatello and Cody to figure out a way of reversing the process and shutting off the device before it’s too late!


TWO HEADS ARE BETTER THAN THREE

After an experiment of Donatello’s goes horribly wrong, Raph and Mike end up fused together. With the device responsible destroyed in the experiment, Raph must endure being fused with Mike until Don can fix the machine. Things are made worse when Triple Threat strikes, having just escaped from jail, looking for revenge against those shellbacks that put him away in the first place!


ATTACK OF THE TURTLE TITAN! (Revised)

Technology developers are being attacked by what appears to be the (future) Turtle Titan! Mikey (as the Turtle Titan) and the future’s real Turtle Titan team up to track down the impostor, discovering it to be a robotic impostor. They catch up with the robot midway through a heist at one of O’Neil Tech’s R & D buildings and the three battle it out. Our heroes defeat the robot, and in it’s escape, leads our heroes to the real villain behind it all… the future Turtle Titan’s grandfather’s arch-nemisis: the dreaded Doctor Malignus!

ROBOT IN DISGUISE

When an alien spacecraft crashes into New New York, President Bishop dispatches a team of researchers to check it out. Naturally inquisitive, the Turtles do too. Everyone is somewhat surprised and disappointed to find the ship empty… everyone except Donatello and Bishop, whose suspicions of the ship are realised when the ship turns out to be a malevolent alien robot! It’s up to Bishop and Donatello with the help of the Turtles and Bishop’s enforcers to stop the robot before it tears up the city!

LITTLE MONSTER

Starlee stumbles across a cute little creature hiding in an alleyway and decides to find a home for it. She gives to it Cody as a present, unaware that the cute little guy isn’t so cute when no one’s looking – it’s actually a wanted intergalactic criminal! Thinking it’s hit the jackpot being brought into the heart of the O’NeilTech empire, it decides to milk things while it can before it strikes… but Michaelangelo is onto the little guy, even if no one believes him!

BROKEN LAWS

On a return trip home from buying video games at the mall, Cody and Michelangelo are attacked by Constable Biggles’ Peace Keepers. They manage to evade them and get back home, only to find themselves under seige, with Biggles demanding the Turtles be handed over. Donatello notices something odd about the energy readings on the Peace Keepers and realises that they are under Viral’s control! So, while the Turtles keep the Peace Keepers busy, Donatello and Cody manage to get a fix on Viral and draw her out of the Peace Keepers. Once the Peace Keepers are back to normal, they help the Turtles apprehend the villainous Viral.

OLD ENEMIES

Viral has once again launched an assault on O’Neil Tech HQ in order to get her hands on a piece of experimental technology that will be used to help send the Turtles home, and the Turtles are just about to put an end to what has been an arduous battle. Donatello sacrifices the device to save Cody and the others, overloading Viral with power to the point where she and the device explode. Our heroes are ready for a little R & R after such an intense battle, but little do they know that trace elements of Viral have infected various displays in Cody’s TMNT history museum/collection, bringing the Utrom exosuit of their nemesis The Shredder back to life! With the back up memory of the exosuit being fuelled by Viral’s hatred for the Turtles, the Shredder goes on a rampage and only the Turtles can stop it!

*Just a quick note regarding this story - I was actually asked by Steve White, the senior editor at Titan to write the script for this, as it was meant to be the first story to be published. I wrote the script, which I really liked, but when the Turtles editor came on board, the decision was made to publish Extreme Measures instead (as each mag came with a turtles toy -- this issue came with a mini-skateboard). It was kind of a dark script too, which was cool. Think along the lines of the darker FF eps...

And here are the rest:

INTO THE LIGHT

Sh’Okanabo has managed to correct the genetic deficiencies in his spores to further propogate his species here on earth. No longer affected by sunlight, the eggs pose an even bigger threat to mankind. Sh’Okanabo sends out his minions to spread the eggs via hover-trucks (kind of like Invasion of the Bodysnatchers), and the Turtles must put a stop to it before the eggs hatch or affect anyone.

RETURN TICKET

Cody believes he’s found a way to send the Turtles (reluctantly) back to their own time. They test the machine and discover it can open small windows back to the past, requiring massive amounts of energy to do so. Sh’Okanabo gets wind of this and decides to crash in and use the device to go back in time and plant his seeds back in Earth’s past to eliminate the human race. The Turtles go after Sh’Okanabo in order to stop him, but in doing so, they sacrifice their opportunity to return home… for now at least…

VIRTUAL INSANITY!

Mike decides it’d be a great idea to hook his video games up to the Dojo simulator, but the characters in the games become a little too real and escape into the city and of course only the Turtles and Mike’s knowledge of video gaming can put an end to the madness!




RETURN OF THE SAVANTI ROMERO

Savanti Romero has managed to track his Turtle nemeses across time and space to the New York of 2105, but it’s taken him most of his power to do this. Lucky for him, the New York of the future has an abundance of energy, though not so lucky for the city itself, or even the world! When technology becomes useless against his magic, the Turtles bring him down the way they do best…

YOU HAD TO BE THERE

When the annual International Tech Developers Show hits New York, Starlee and Cody can’t get there soon enough, eager to see what’s coming from other countries and companies. The Turtles go, but clearly aren’t as enthused about the convention as Starlee and Cody. At the convention, the groups go their separate ways and look around (the Turtles positive they’ll be bored senseless), but for Cody and Starlee, it’s anything but, as they stumble upon a plot by a greedy tech developer and his goons to steal valuable experimental technology from the show!

Totally Worth 19 Years

Today I saw the one film I have been waiting to see longer than any other:

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull!

Being a child of the Eighties, the Indiana Jones films mean a great deal to me. Indy was my favourite hero, even above Batman and Spiderman, and for a while his name became my nickname at school and with the various coaches I had for the sports I was playing.

Anyway, I saw Kingdom of the Crystal Skull today and I loved it. I could see it's flaws, most of them being special effects flaws along the lines of how obvious the melting face sequences are in Raiders and the rapid aging of Walter Donovan in Last Crusade, but ultimately I loved it. If you're an Indy fan, you can't not like it. Harrison Ford does a great job of advancing Indy as a character with age, and it really does reach the point where you forget how old he is. He does a great job, and Shia LaBeouf and Karen Allen are both really great in this film.

For me, it's on the same level as Last Crusade. To put them in order of favourites, it'd go Raiders, Last Crusade and Temple of Doom. Now it's Raiders, Kingdom/Last Crusade and Temple. For some reason Temple never really did it for me as much as the others. I love it, but I'd watch the others first given the choice. Anyway, Kingdom had the same feel and aesthetic as Last Crusade, but it was a tale more in line with Temple of Doom in terms of suspension of disbelief. The first half of the film feels like Crusade and the latter feels like Temple. It's certainly not Raiders, but it is a very worthy Indy film. There are plenty of signiature Indiana Jones action sequences, and I think fans of the games (particularly Fate of Atlantis) will get a big kick out of this one too.

Bring on Indy 5!

Over the other side of the genre spectrum, I watched Diary of the Dead last night after working inventory for five arduous, tedious hours at the local supermarket. I'm a big fan of George A. Romero's Dead films (encompassing Night of the Living Dead, it's near-verbatim remake, Dawn of the Dead, Day of the Dead and Land of the Dead). The classic Dead trilogy took me years to see because of how hard Dawn and Day were to find in the video stores (to watch Dawn, I had to drive to a video store about an hour away and sign up for the one rental - so worth it!), but nowadays, with the advent of DVD, the classics are all around the corner. Night is a horror classic that pretty much created zombie horror as we now know it, and Dawn, while a little hokey by today's standards did everything all good sequels should do AND carried a very clever commentary on society at the time (and one that is still very relevant today). Day is easily the weakest of the three originals, and while Land was fun, it felt as though it was being made so the companies behind it could cash in on the zombie horror craze and so that George could get some money to fund his next film. Thankfully, that money has been put to good use...

Diary of the Dead acts as though Night of the Living Dead were happening right now, and starts at the same time. Essentially, a group of film students are making a horror film in the woods when word starts coming in over the radio and news about the dead coming back to life. As tends to be the case, the shit hits the fan in a major way, and our film students become desperate to get back home to their loved ones. The film is going to be likened to the Blair Witch Project, due to it's handi-cam point of view, but it has more in common with the fantastic Cloverfield than Blair Witch. Our point of view comes from the director of the student film at the start, who decides to document the events unfolding for anyone who might find it after the chaos.

George is back on top of his game, giving us a film that delivers a very poignant social commentary on the state of the global media today, along with the breakdown of society, and he manages to give us some fantastic zombie horror! There are the odd moments where "one-line" characters totally overdo it, but all the leads are fantastic -- especially, and almost surprisingly, the two lead girls.

Being a media/journalism student, it's interesting watching the film and certain things it touches on, even things that will probably be totally misread by the unknowing viewer (like the young cameraman not putting the camera down in particular moments to help others). The onyl major problem I have with it, is that the film probably won't age well. While the message will be the same, just as it was with Dawn, people will undoubtedly look back on this film and laugh at how archaic the technology and/or methods being used are.

Finally: monsterism.

Movie: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 2: The Secret of the Ooze
Subject: Rahzar

I actually always like Rahzar more than Tokka. I'm probably the only one. The action figure of Rahzar was one of my favourites back in the day.

Monsterism #39

Movie: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 2
Subject: Tokka

It had to happen eventually. I don't really need to justify my reasoning for including Tokka and the next two monsterisms, although I will say right up front, the first TMNT movie is easily one of the best comic book to film translations of all time, and holds up far better than any of the sequels which, while fun to watch (except Three, which unfortunately remains very painful), don't really hold a match to the original.

Rocksteady

Rocksteady was always my favourite character in the classic TMNT cartoon. Here's my version.

Proverbial Cats and Bags

I'd been sitting on it a while now, until I could say something about it, but the big news (for me at least) is that Paul Harmon will be providing the art on Tales of the TMNT #50! Unfortunately, Jim Lawson - the artist I was originally set to work with - was unable to take on the job to to his own massive workload, so Paul was asked to step in just a couple of weeks ago.

I know the roughs of his Leatherhead design are now up on Murph's blog and Ryan's, but bear in mind that they are just that - roughs. They're close to what we're going to have in the end, but having just seen th rough for the cover, they don't really do the colossal scale of our Leatherhead justice. There are some very noticeable differences in the latter design changes, so keep an eye out and hopefully I'll be able to post something soon! If anyone knows how physically massive some of the characters in the Capcom fighting games can be (I always think Birdie, for those in the know, but he's almost on par with the Juggernaut from X-men and well... Marvel vs Street Fighter).

Oh, and the creature in the post below is part of the same project!

Peace!

T