By Zack Quaintance — I recently had a chance to talk with comic book writer and TV/film industry veteran, David Avallone. David has written several titles for publisher Dynamite, including Vampirella, Bettie Paige, Doc Savage, and more. Today’s interview, however, is heavily focused on the indie project Drawing Blood.

Drawing Blood is a comic about comic book creators, and it was born on Kickstarter. As David will explain below, the book features a story conceived by himself and TMNT co-creator, Kevin Eastman, who’s life and industry experiences inform the book. It’s all brought to life by a trio of artists, with Ben Bishop working as the main artist, Troy Little drawing hallucination sequences, and Eastman himself illustrating flashbacks.

But I’ll stop rambling now, and let you learn all about it from today’s David Avallone interview…enjoy!

David Avallone Interview

ZACK QUAINTANCE: Let’s talk DRAWING BLOOD. I know a big part of it must have been a sort of alternate timeline, fictionalized Kevin Eastman biography. How did you two approach structuring that idea and building it into a story?

DAVID AVALLONE: I met Kevin and we became friends, which happened really fast, he’s a really nice guy and we had a lot of similar life experiences despite our lives being very very different. We had a huge group of friends in common without meeting each other. I was working for Limelight Music Videos — who actually made the first Ninja Turtles movie. And I quit right before making that movie. I could have met Kevin in ‘89 and ‘92, and it just never worked out. I finally met him in 2015.

But long story short, he’d been working on this idea for a long time, and he called it On The Shoulders of Giants, which he’ll readily tell you was a terrible title but all he could come up with. He had been making notes for at least 10 years for this project when I met him. He showed me all his notes, and he did an interview with The Comics Journal. He had a 60-page interview with Comics Journal about the rise and fall of Tundra. I wasn’t reading comics press then, so I had no idea about any of that. He gave that to me, and we talked about a bunch of apocryphal and possibly true stories about famous comic book creators.

He was very clear that this isn’t a fictionalized autobiography of him. You’ll notice that Kevin and me and the artist Ben Bishop all show up in one panel as if to say no really, this is a guy who is different from and distinct from Kevin Eastman. We were very conscious about wanting to present it as something that takes place in the real world where the Ninja Turtles are a real thing where Kevin Eastman is a real thing. This is another guy who followed a little in his footsteps, had a similar kind of success and the same kind of career.

I boil it down to this: in the real world, Kevin had a good friend Peter Laird. They co-created the Ninja Turtles, they were living together, all that. For the purposes of our story, I thought it would give it a more emotional connection if the co-creator was his brother Paul, instead of his friend Peter. When people ask me, Is that character based on Peter? I can legitimately and honestly say that I’ve never met Peter, and at the time I wrote the comic, I knew literally nothing about him. I’d never seen a video interview with Peter and I didn’t know what Peter looked like when I started writing Drawing Blood.

But I have a bad relationship with my own sister. The character in Drawing Blood is way more my sister than Peter Laird. Emotionally, what I’m drawing from is my own experience, not Kevin’s experience. It’s easier for me to make it something from my life that has nothing to do with Kevin and Peter and the Turtles, even while being somewhat obviously informed by that. Some of the dynamics are the same, but we didn’t want people going through the comic going, Well that’s Peter Laird and that’s Frank Miller and that’s this person or that person.

Really, it’s me and Kevin coming up with a fictional story that draws from literally everybody’s career. The mentor, Frank Forrest for example, is as much Jack Kirby or Bill Finger as he is Wally Wood as he is Dennis Kitchen as he is any number of other people from the real world.

People also ask me if Shane Bookman is real or if he’s fictional, and I always answer, Yes. The answer is Yes. And the whole thing with the Rag Dolls is that we wanted to create something that was good enough. When we started the project, we just needed something there. We needed that to be part of this story that he created something: they’re cats, they’re mutated, they fight crime in New York City. That’s sort of all we had developed on them, but at a certain point in the developmental process, we both went — we kind of have to make this for real so that we know what it is and it is has value. So we can say, look this fictional character is talented. I like to think you can read The Rag Dolls comic book you made. It could have been a global phenomenon in 1991 if you squint.

I wanted people if they saw the Kickstarter to stop and go, Do I remember a cartoon on Nickolodeon about three mutated cats? That sounds really familiar. Did I see that? No, you didn’t see that, but I thought people in their heads could combine the Powerpuff Girls, My Little Pony, and Sailor Moon and come up with some idea in their heads. We put a lot of effort into the Rag Dolls so it wouldn’t be a cheap Ninja Turtles joke. We wanted it to be its own thing, and when we did the first issue, I was like, let’s do 100 of these. These are great, and we’ve got more Rag Dolls stuff coming with the new volume of Drawing Blood as well.

QUAINTANCE: One more thing about this first volume first. I wanted to ask you about the one of it. I really like the tone. It was gritty in a way. There are plenty of missteps and bad decisions, but the character never feels cynical at all. How do you maintain that tone while working on the book?

AVALLONE: I have a problem with things that are relentlessly grim, and Kevin himself is sort of a relentlessly positive person and not in a fake way. He’s an honestly good guy, easy-going. He wants to believe the best in people, to see the best outcomes for people. So, it’s easy to write Shane Bookman along the lines of who Kevin is, and remember when we create this this is Kevin and I both looking back at what we were like in our 30s and 40s, not what we’re like now. Kevin has kids and is happily married and lives in a nice house with pets. He’s not falling asleep coked out in his Ferrari anymore. That’s not who he is.

I don’t believe in things being relentless grim. I believe they should have humor, and when you have a character going through grim things, when they have a sense of humor about it, it’s bearable to watch. It’s not sadness porn. I always try to write about people who are funny and have good attitudes toward things. It’s not every character. The first comic book character I ever wrote was Vampirella and Vampirella did not have a positive attitude at all. Her thing is she feels like no one is bigger, better, stronger, faster than she is. I wrote Vampirella in a way that it was Superman with a darker personality. The world is filled with people who are made of tissue paper and I can rip their heads off anytime I feel like it, and I’m relaxed for that reason. There’s humor in the people can kiss my ass approach, also.

But it was easy using Kevin’s personality as a template for Shane. The voice that comes out of his mouth is probably 50/50, me and Kevin. When you’re in a character’s head for that long, some of you is going to sneak in there. I think that’s responsible for the tone. Kevin and I wanted it to be dramedy more than anything else.

QUAINTANCE: It definitely comes through. I had another process question for you. With multiple artists on the book, how did you juggle working with them and did you find yourself scripting differently for each one?

AVALLONE: When we started developing this project, the book takes place in three different spaces inside Shane’s mind. The bulk of the book is objective reality, walking around the world day-to-day. Then there are his hallucinations, and then there are flashbacks. The idea of having Kevin do a couple pages in the book came before anything else. I thought as your partner, and us wanting the thing to be a success, there can’t just be Kevin Eastman covers and stories by Kevin Eastman. There has to be your artistic stance on some parts of the actual comic. I just had to figure out a way for him to draw one or two pages in every chapter.

Organically, we figured out that would be the flashbacks. The flashbacks take place in the ‘80s or ‘90s, and they’re drawn in the ‘80s or ‘90s, Mirage style. They’re in sepia, they’re done with Duo-Shade, and you can’t even buy that anymore. Kevin stockpiled some of it. It’s how he did the Turtles. It’s this paper you treat with chemicals and that’s how you get various shades. They literally outlawed it because the chemicals aren’t good for you…so the flashbacks are done in exactly the same art style the original Turtles are done in, by Kevin.

For the fantasies, they’re done by Troy Little, who did Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. This guy draws a hell of a hallucination. What was great about him having done Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is that it was a cartoon-y style depicting incredibly adult things. It wasn’t a children’s book cartoon-y style. It was a harsh, adult cartoon-y style. It was perfect for our hallucinations. Then when it came to do the spin-off book, when I handed the outline to Kevin, he said, I think I’m going to do the layouts for this, which made it look like it was from that time and period.

We wanted to have three different kinds of reality with three flavors, so obviously the writing is different, and as the book goes along, the interplay of art styles gets more complicated. Ben Bishop could have drawn all of it, and the layouts are all Ben in the hallucinations and the flashbacks.

QUAINTANCE: It comes together really coherently. It just works really well.

AVALLONE: Thank you. Kevin’s a good guy and likes giving friends and up-and-comers opportunities. Kevin himself wasn’t going to have the time and energy to draw the book. He showed me Ben’s work when we were talking about who should draw it. I saw Ben’s command of emotion, which is really important in a book like this. There’s was also the thing of when you have three different art styles on a book, you’re employing three people instead of one person. It gave us a bigger pool of collaborators to work with.

Not to change the subject, but the Rag Dolls spinoff property at the moment is mostly Troy’s work. We’ve got a couple of other projects that we’re thinking about launching off of Drawing Blood. There are two other comic book creators with comic characters talked about in that first volume — Frank Forrest’s Night Avenger character and the Webcomic creator in the fourth issue, Amanda, who created Get the Fuck Out Girl. The excellent comic book creator Amanda Deibert, who I will say the character got the name from her, so it’s really fabulous she really wanted to write it. Amanda has written a four-page Get the Fuck Out Girl comic.

We like the idea that when you make a comic about comic book creators, you end up having to create a whole bunch of comic books. We want to do something with all the characters at some point.

QUAINTANCE: So, last question. Where is Drawing Blood out now and where is it headed?

AVALLONE: After we finished the first Kickstarter and got everything out to the Kickstarter supporters, we wanted to experiment with the free market. We did Drawing Blood as a four-month miniseries. We put it in Previews like any other comic book. We put it in the Diamond system, and it went to comic book stories all over the country. It did okay. I’d say it did well for the first product from a complete indie publisher with no advertising budget. At the time the pandemic started, we had just solicited the first trade paperback that was supposed to be in stores at the end of April but there were no stores at the end of April, so right now we’re figuring it out.

The second volume was Kickstarted in August last year. We did just fine. We raised enough money for another four-issue run, and the stretch goal was a two-part, 40-page Rag Dolls comic, which we went to Troy saying, hey we want to do more Rag Dolls. He said I love you guys, and I love the Rag Dolls, but I will die if I’m inking Kevin Eastman. [laughs]

He suggested that since the Rag Dolls is a vehicle for commenting on the whole history of comics, how about if the next thing we do together is a mid-90s TV tie-in, like basically it’s the simplified version of the show for the Nickelodeon in our universe. Troy works a lot more in children’s worlds than I do, and he pitched a story I can say I never would have come up with in 100 years. It’s such a Nickelodeon cartoon story. He came to me with a very detailed outlined, and I re-wrote it a little bit. He drew it, and it’s gorgeous. It’s 40 pages and appropriate for small children. The Kickstarter people will get it at the same time they get Drawing Blood, and then we’re going to go back to Diamond with Rag Dolls once the Kickstarter fans have it. Then when the four issues of Drawing Blood are done, that will be a book that gets to Kickstarter people. Instead of floppies, we’re just going to go straight to the trade paperback with that one.

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Zack Quaintance is a tech reporter by day and freelance writer by night/weekend. He Tweets compulsively about storytelling and comics as Comics Bookcase.