Kevin Eastman couldn’t have expected his career to explode like it did after he cocreated the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles in the early 1980s. And with his new graphic novel series for Image comics, Drawing Blood, Eastman and his collaborators take a look back at his and their careers in comics with characteristic creativity.

The “rollicking action-comedy,” per PW’s review of the first volume, Spilled Ink, was cowritten by Eastman and David Avallone and illustrated by artists Ben Bishop and Troy Little. The series follows the career of Shane “Books” Bookman as he rises “from a complete unknown to a global comics superstar as the cocreator of the Radically Rearranged Ronin Ragdolls” before crashing down to earth, where he “battles his internal demons—personified as the Ragdolls themselves.”

We spoke with Eastman, Avallone, and Bishop about how the book was conceived, their collaborative process, the line between truth and fiction, and more

How did Drawing Blood come together?

Kevin Eastman: Many years ago, I started this sketchbook diary of anecdotes, things that had happened to me and to friends like Dave Gibbons and Frank Miller. I came up with the idea of not doing a straightforward autobiography, since I’d lived that. I started circling the idea of this fictional character, where I could pull some elements from my actual life. With a fictional stand-in, you can build on those stories, make them more grandiose and over the top.

When we first put this out as a concept, people said, “So this is your autobiography, right?” And I’d say, “No, just look at the first six pages where the main character ends up in a gunfight. I’ve never been in a gunfight.”

Not yet, anyway.

Ben Bishop: Hopefully never.

KE: I initially called the book On the Shoulders of Giants. A few years back, David and I were at the San Diego Comic-Con. We were talking about ideas that we’d like to do someday, and I told him about this idea I had been working on for maybe ten years or more, and David got really excited about it. As we were walking back from the Bayfront Hilton to the convention center, he said, “You should call that story Drawing Blood.”

That was really the start of the story. We started speaking regularly, and my idea became our idea. David came on as the cocreator, and it became about his experiences as well as mine. We found the heart, soul, and vision of the story.

David Avallone: I sometimes do panels on networking at conventions, and I like to tell people the very first conversation I had with Kevin was about World War II comics published by DC in the 1970s. It’s not like my first thought was, ‘Someday I’m going to work on a book with Kevin Eastman!” In a million years I didn’t think that would happen.

But we established a bond over things that we loved. Our biographies are completely different, but we have these weird crossovers. I worked at Limelight Productions, which produced the first TMNT movie, and I literally quit a week before they started that project. So Kevin and I didn’t know each other, but we knew a lot of the same people. Kevin was in comics, I was in independent films, but we had a shared vocabulary of experience.

Why did you land on this project instead of straight autobiography?

DA: It always blows my mind when people make straight biopics. Have you not noticed that the most beloved film of all time is Citizen Kane, which changes the subject’s name and major details of his biography, all in the service of telling a great story? If you stick to the details of William Randolph Hearst’s life, you don’t get Citizen Kane.

Making our story about Shane Bookman, in a world where Kevin, Ben, and I are real people, makes it easier to comment on that world. Ironically, you can be more honest about things by using metaphors, cutouts, and fictional versions of people and what happened. In real life, there’s what happened to you and there’s what it felt like, and this story is what it felt like.

How did you find the artists for Drawing Blood?

KE: We were searching for an artist who could do what I couldn’t do. I know where my writing and drawing abilities start and where they end. I often find difficulty in conveying emotion and acting in my stories. This young upstart from Maine sent me a book called The Aggregate so he could ask me for a pull quote, and I fell in love with the book and his art style, and [my wife] Courtney suggested I should reach out to him. We picked up Troy Little along the way, and that’s how we got the band together.

BB: I was in North Carolina for HeroesCon, and one of the things you do at the end of the day is hang out at the bar, trying to yuk it up with whoever's there. We’d all had sort of a mediocre sales day, and I’d unsuccessfully been trying to make inroads with Erik Larsen, the publisher of Image Comics. I was still very early in my career—selling zines, selling prints, trying to get my work seen by publishers.

At the bar, my phone buzzes, and it’s an email from Kevin, apologizing for not getting back to me with a pull quote. Then he says, “What are you doing for the next year? Do you want to do a book together?” It was a life-changing moment.

KE: The final member of our team, Troy Little, is a fantastic human being and a fantastic artist. I’d seen his work on Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas for IDW, and it was just beyond cool. He had a great animated sensibility to his work. Ben designed Shane and all the characters that inhabit that universe. But we wanted to do something with Troy, too.

David and I had the crazy idea for the “Radically Rearranged Ronin Reptiles,” a weird parody thing I’d been developing and had shoved aside. David and I talked about what if Shane Bookman built his career on this TMNT-like property. We decided that we should actually make that comic book as a period piece, and we asked Troy to bring that to life.

The Ragdolls, the comic-within-a-comic we ultimately settled on, is a lot of fun, and we’ve all brought our own ideas to it. Originally they were going to be four reptiles, but I’d seen some crazy cat videos on YouTube, and I told David that we should change them to three female cats.

BB: And that didn’t hurt us on Kickstarter, either. Cats are very popular.

DA: Plus Kevin and I are cat owners, so that helped, too.

How did you strike the right balance between the parallel storylines featured in the series? What did incorporating different storytelling techniques and art styles allow you to do with the story?

DA: The storytelling in Drawing Blood takes place in three different spaces. There’s objective reality, and Ben draws that. There are flashbacks to the real life of Shane Bookman, and Kevin draws those.

Writing a book on comic book creators allows you to comment on the history of comic books, and not just on the history of the Ninja Turtles. We’ve got a character named Frank Forrest, who created Night Avenger, which allows us to talk about everyone from Bill Finger to Will Eisner to Wally Wood, the obvious inspiration for the character’s name and his unhappy destiny.

In the fourth issue, we have a 17-year-old webcomic creator who creates something called GTFO Girl, and that issue has a four-page sequence of GTFO Girl comics written by Amanda Deibert and drawn by Sky Partridge. It’s a freeing way to talk about comics history without just focusing on Superman or Spider-Man or Maus.

BB: It’s a big story. I think people are starting to realize it’s not just a parody, not just a spoof, not just an inside look at the comics industry. There are real stories from Kevin and David, commentaries on the business and creative sides. It’s a microscopic look inside the head of a comics creator—someone like Kevin Eastman, who went through all these aspects of the comics industry very, very fast.

DA: When I’m writing the scripts, I never think of it in terms of “I’m writing a parody of the Ninja Turtles,” or “I’m writing an exposé of the comics industry.” It’s just a story about a character. What dictates what happens to him is whatever Kevin and I think makes for good comedy, or good drama, and all that.

How do you feel about the series now that the first volume is out in the world?

KE: I’ve told the story about how [Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cocreator] Peter [Laird] and I met, and how there were so many incredible moments in my life that had to be 100% precise—had to happen at exactly the right time, like Pete moving twenty minutes away from where I lived in Maine—[for that to happen that] you had to ask, “Who’s actually running this show?” Although I’ve got a folder of ideas of things I want to do someday, everyone on Drawing Blood came into my life at exactly the right time.

If I hadn’t met David, if I hadn’t gotten Ben’s comic when I did, it wouldn’t have happened. Everything came together as it was supposed to happen. When it’s all done, of the many wonderful things I’ve been able to do over the course of my career, this will be right alongside Turtles and Last Ronin as my proudest career accomplishments.

DA: This is the most personal work I’ve ever done. It touches on things that you don’t often get to write about in comic books. I think there’s never been anything exactly like it. It’s about a very different kind of life than you get in a comic like American Splendor. It’s the Fellini’s 8½ of comics. I can’t speak for anyone else, but Fellini is a huge influence on how I write this comic—how I approach the idea of fictionalized autobiography.

KE: It’s our White Album.

DA: It’s the Fellini’s 8½ of comics.