FAILED PROJECT FRIDAY: Early stages of a never-pitched TMNT proposal, part 1! (Patreon)

So! 

At some point in the distant past, possibly the early 2000s, I must've had a conversation at a comic with somebody from comics company IDW about a writing-only Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles pitch. Obvsly, nothing ever came of this vague idea, but I did work up an initial pitch document covering the overall direction I had in mind.

And now, without further ado, here's the first half of that overview:

VAGUE INITIAL OVERVIEW DEALIE FOR TONAL ISSUES

ON A FUTURE TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES PITCH (part 1)

*Frantic pacing: I'd definitely take the route of "recklessly fast pacing," trying to cram as much action as possible into whatever pagecount is available. The Turtles would be on the run, no time to breathe, scrambling to figure out what the hell's going on as they frenetically race from one action setpiece to the next. The initial arc might well be happening "in real time," with the desperate, overmatched Turtles engaged in a long, winding, frantic battle across the city against a ninja clan with vastly superior skills but (much) lesser numbers than the usual Foot-clan onslaught. Can't afford to sit around eating pizza and trading off low-key exposition, this time; the Turtles are running scared through pretty much the entire arc.

*Stunts ahoy: One mode of action I'd like to emphasize would be wild, over-the-top stunts, using ninjutsu's skill sets of leaping, climbing, clinging and scaling in the course of fast-paced pursuits through interesting urban settings (on cranes/backs of billboards/bridge cables/up in arena rafters/etc.); after all, ninjas were depicted performing parkour-style feats long before parkour was ever invented! In fact, I'd want to derive as much of the comics' action from crazy stunts as from hand-to-hand combat—and, whenever possible, combining the two for maximum impact. Similar to my favorite old-school Jackie Chan scenes, the fights would be more like frantic chase scenes periodically interrupted by hand-to-hand exchanges than conventional "stand in one place, wail on each other" fights.

Example: A scene I've long wanted to do would be a hand-to-hand fight inside (and on top of, then back inside) a minivan or big SUV careening down the highway, the opponents constantly scrambling up front to grab the wheel and weave the SUV out of traffic before going back to smashing each other through windows. Also: Leaping from speeding car to car, seatbelt-as-weapon usage, fun with airbags, "Oops, I lost the steering wheel," and so on. Helluva lot of opportunities for fun fighting riffs with that scenario, with only my sheer hatred of drawing cars having stopped me from exploring it further; but that's no problem if I'm not the poor bastard actually drawing the scene!

Side note: As the arc would take place early on in their career, the Turtles will often be shown screwing up during the more ridiculously difficult and complicated stunts, and wind up falling, smashing through windows, wiping out spectacularly and so on. But this is okay, as it will play up their one big advantage over human ninjas: they're incredibly durable and damage-resistant, because they are frickin' turtles, after all. (As in, naturally well-armored and all that.) Plus, attitude-wise, our heroes are of course plucky and resilient to the point of absurdity.

*Limited fight-scene focus: One thing I've never much cared for is the trope of "hero(es) versus sea of enemies," inevitably depicted via a series of not-terribly-interesting shots of one hero or another beating up Random Bad Guys. If anything, early on the Turtles would themselves outnumber the enemy, as they tangle with 1 or 2 opponents (with superior skill levels) at a time. I'm looking to show much more tightly choreographed fights between strictly limited numbers of foes, relying on the crapload of martial-arts research I've had to do over the last few years (much of it, luckily, in kobudo, the style of Okinawan-karate classical weapons as used by the Turtles). Problem is, this kind of fight scene burns up panel- and page-count in a hurry, and requires way more work on the part of both writer and artist than, say, "PANEL 1: Michelangelo pummels Random Bad Guy, wisecracks."

Wellp, that's it for part 1 of the TNMT pitch overview; on a future Failed-Project Friday later in the month, we'll see the rest of the document, which goes into greater detail on ninjutsu in forms both semi-realistically grounded and magically exotic—for, lo and behold, a lil' something called Naruto was blowing up bigly at the time.

NEXT TIME ON THIS HERE PATREON: Dunno at present what's coming up in the next M/W/F slot, but you should be seeing something awesome shortly, okay? (Or at least "pretty cool," if not "awesome.")