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Kevin Eastman's Radically Rearranged Ronin Ragdolls – A Semi-Autobio Tale About What Really Happened With The Turtles Money

Published Fri, 04 Aug 2017 15:00:07 -0500

The co-creator of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Kevin Eastman, along with David Avallone have taken to Kickstarter to launch a semi-autobiographical account of Kevin Eastman's career, pencilled by ~~Bebop~~ Ben Bishop, with segments drawn by Eastman himself.

Entitled Drawing Blood, it takes the very familiar tale about a pair of cartoonists with an unexpected hit on their hands… and what happened after the money dried up.

And, yes, as a result, they are publishing an actual Radically Rearranged Ronin Ragdolls comic spinoff as a stretch goal. Let's let the boys take you through it.

In 1992, Shane "Books" Bookman, and his brother Paul, released their scrappy indie creation on the unsuspecting comic book universe: The Radically Rearranged Ronin Ragdolls. To their great surprise, everyone went wild for the adventures of three feline Katana wielding mutant cats, and a multi-million dollar franchise was born.

After more than a decade and a half of global success – comics/action figures/movies and just about anything else you could sell with a Ragdoll on it — the creators imploded. Too young and too naïve to know how to handle the sudden pressures of wealth and fame, they split up, and the franchise eventually sold.

Now "Books" is hitting his forties (hard), his money all gone, his artistic inspiration tapped out, and his very life in danger from the loan sharks his crooked business partner failed to tell him about before committing suicide. It's hard enough to recover from a catastrophic encounter with the hit and run driver called "early success," without having to worry about killers chasing you all over town.

Drawing Blood is a dark-comic-drama (dramadey?), the story behind the stories, a look inside the twisted life of a professional cartoonist. A roller-coaster of show biz and sex, fame and infamy, controlled substances and uncontrolled artists, genius and goons, this series takes you into the darkest corners of a mad world only talked about in the hotel bars of a Comic Con.

Drawing Blood is co-created by Eastman and Avallone, with scripts by Avallone. Primary art by Ben Bishop, with some sequences by Kevin Eastman and Troy Little and a Radically Rearranged Ronin Ragdolls one-shot drawn by Little. Variant covers will be by Kevin Eastman and a constellation of comic book stars.