In Bodycount, however, you saw more than flying appendages. You saw kicks and punches and strikes, and heads and eyeballs exploding, and stomachs being stabbed. "We took it to an extreme that was probably inappropriate," Eastman says with a laugh.
They subsequently decided if they were going to do a violent story, they would do it with other characters. They would "keep the Turtles pure."
Related Content
More About
"You can't go too far out of bounds or fans get angry with you," he adds. "They want their Turtles served just right."
More importantly, Eastman realized that with great power comes great responsibility. "It wasn't just two guys sitting in a living room in Dover, N.H., anymore. It was a property being enjoyed by people globally, many of them very young."
Though Eastman quit the Turtles to focus on Heavy Metal, the Turtles wouldn't quit him.
Even now, the half-shell empire keeps expanding. Laird carried the Turtle torch solo for a while but eventually grew weary of it and sold his share to Viacom. Then, a couple years ago, IDW Publishing asked Eastman to draw a cover for its brand-new Turtle comic book series.
Essentially, it's a rejiggering of the old series: It begins with the Turtles crawling out of the sewers and venturing topside for the first time at age 15. Before Eastman knew it, he was drawing more covers, arranging layouts, co-plotting issues, advising on a new Nickelodeon TV show and whipping up storyboards for a controversial, Michael Bay–produced Turtle movie that may or may not recast the Turtles as aliens from another planet. "It's like Michael Corleone," Eastman says. "They kept pulling me back in."
Granted, he had not strayed too far. Turtle fans have been following Eastman around for nearly 30 years. At comic conventions, working the Heavy Metal booth, he's still known as the guy who created the Turtles. The lines are long — four to five hours a month ago at Wizard World in New Orleans.
With any long-lived property, such as Spider-Man or the Avengers, popularity waxes and wanes. Currently, we are in a Turtle waxing period. Eastman recently did a 60-page Turtles annual. Published in October, Big Trouble in Little Italy, as it was called in-house, is a crime caper with gangsters and ninjas. It is the first full-length Turtle story he's done in 20 years.
Yes, he still remembered how to draw them. It's muscle memory, to some extent: Eastman attends about one convention a month, during which he generates 200 Turtle drawings a day for fans. He used to joke that he could draw the Turtles with his eyes closed. A fan once put him to the challenge — so somewhere out there is a fan with a Ninja Turtle sketch that looks like it was drawn by Picasso.
Drawing the Turtles every day again as a regular job, Eastman says, felt "like coming home." He slipped smoothly back into Turtle headspace, to ask the old familiar questions: "What would Rafael think? How would he react?"
Remembering the flow, choreographing the panels, considering pace and action beats again, was exhilarating.
These days, the Turtles have "gone generational." Eastman notes that the older folks — and by "older" he means late 20s and early 30s — who grew up with the original series now watch the new series with their children.
Eastman's own sons, ages 11 and 6, have come down with a bad case of Turtle fever. Well, the younger son, Shane, more than the older. Shane walked into his mother's room while she was cleaning out her closet. She unearthed some Turtle toys and Shane picked them up. "What the heck are these?" he asked. Mom popped in a DVD. "And he was immediately destroyed for life," Eastman says. "It hit him to the core."
Eastman now has firsthand knowledge of what so many parents went through in those early years. Their child becomes obsessed. At signings he often sees a very young person standing in line waiting for an autograph, behind them a parent, usually a little pissed off. "Because they've spent an incredible amount of money on Turtle stuff, and more than a few Christmas Eves putting together a stupid Turtle blimp or Turtle play set until 4 am."
So is he sick of them? Never. Not in his wildest dreams did Eastman imagine his creation would have this kind of staying power. "It's just a perfect storm of ... something," he says, for once at a loss for words. "And a whole lot of good luck."
