Any resemblance between comics creation Shane Bookman and comics creator Kevin Eastman is purely intentional, but not pure. For those who don’t know, Eastman co-created Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Of course you know it for the global phenomenon that it is. It hasn’t all been pizza and roses for Eastman. Teaming with writer David Avallone and artist Ben Bishop, he’s sort of telling us about it in a semi-autobiographical comic called Drawing Blood.
Kickstarted a few years ago to moderate success, the first issue under the Image Comics banner hit comics shops this week. Scraping away the glamour of comics creation, the story begins with Bookman running afoul of the Lithuanian mob and only gets crazier from there. Why is the mob after him? Why did Bookman think producing a Broadway musical was going to be a snap? And why does he keep hallucinating that his greatest creations are after him?
Of course that’s the hook. To add texture, Eastman inks Bishop’s pencils for flashbacks, and it’s effective. With a chiaroscuro wash, the team evokes the early days of the Turtles, though here they’re Ragdoll cats. Radically Rearranged Ronin Ragdolls to be precise, and they intrude in a scene inked by Troy Little. All of it gets tied together by letterer Taylor Esposito, who shifts from a straightforward style to the scratchiness of those early books by Eastman and Peter Laird, then to the cartooniness that catapulted the Turtles into being a major franchise.
It’s hard to say how Bookman, nicknamed Book, feels about that franchise. He doesn’t own it anymore. It’s bigger than him, and this story is about an artist struggling to not shrink away to nothing.
Drawing Blood remains relevant, though a few references make it clear it was initially written a few years ago. Don’t confuse the comic’s RRRR movie with the actual RRR that saw release a couple of years ago. And more attention is coming back to Eastman, with IDW doing big business off of The Last Ronin, a possible future for the Turtles based off an outline Eastman wrote years before. (That’s allegedly going to be the basis of a new R-Rated Turtles film.)
They say comics will break your heart. But that’s because to make a comic that resonates, it has to have heart. Drawing Blood has that and more.
