Curious coincidence... this morning (Saturday, November 8, 2003) the second season of the new TMNT animated show premiered with the first "Turtles in Space" episode, which introduced our old pal the Fugitoid. And tonight, while going through some old files for a project I'm working on, I came across some photocopies of a few pages from our preliminary work for the original Mirage TMNT comic #5, in which we took the Turtles into outer space and had them meet the Fugitoid -- in fact, the very same issue upon which today's episode was based. It's a pretty good example of how Kevin and I used to collaborate on the writing of those original comics. (I've picked two pages -- 34 and 35 -- and reproduced first Kevin's thumbnail layouts, second my dialogue polish, and third the final inked and lettered versions of those two pages.)

First we would get together and talk out the plot, trying to construct a story which held together, and covered all of the points we wanted to get across in that issue. Once we were satisfied with the plot, Kevin would do rough layout drawings, breaking down each page and roughing in dialogue.

Second, I would take Kevin's layouts and do finished dialogue.

(At both the layout and finished dialogue stages, we would confer on what we had done and address any problems either of us had with the choices we'd each made.)

Third, we would pencil and ink the final pages based on Kevin's layouts, after the lettering had been done on the penciled pages (in this case, I believe it was Steve Lavigne who did the lettering).

(I apologize for the size of these graphics, but I wanted the words to be legible.)