Believe it—I was supposed to write a trilogy of novels starring the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles!

No, really.

In honor of IDW’s new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles comic book series hitting shops this week, I figured I’d share with you folks one of my “Tales of Development Hell”: behind-the-scenes stories of projects I was signed to write, but which never got past the development stage.

This particular project started with meetings around 2002 or 2003 between publishing house ibooks, inc. (where I was working as Editor-in-Chief) and Turtles co-creator Kevin Eastman, and eventually led to me being offered the assignment (they liked my pitch). In a rapid exchange of e-mails among myself, Kevin, and his creative partner Peter Laird, it was decided the trilogy—Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Jewels of Ishla’non—would be a sequel to a Donatello one-shot comic published back in the ’80s.

That comic dealt with Don meeting an artist named Kirby—who looked suspiciously like late comics legend Jack “King” Kirby—and the quick adventure they shared, with Kirby having come into possession of a mysterious gem that allowed his drawings to come to life. (How he got the gem was never explained, beyond saying he’d found it in a coal bin.) The one-shot ended with Kirby stepping through a portal he’d drawn, leaving him on a fantasy world where monsters were fighting humans; Kirby went to help the latter.

The first novel would have picked up the story from there and involved the discovery of a second jewel, culminating with the Turtles, April O’Neill, Casey Jones, and the jewel’s owner, a woman named Roz (a tribute to Jack’s late wife), journeying to that other world—Ishla’non—to find Kirby. With his help, they would try to prevent an evil wizard from gathering all seven of the fabled jewels and ruling the planet. And after the heroes ultimately won out the Turtles would return to Earth, and Kirby and Roz would live Happily Ever After in Ishala’non.

The cover artist chosen was Bob Larkin (now the cover painter of our Pandora Zwieback novels), As you can see from the cover sketch here, at the no-I-won’t-back-down-on-this-decision insistence of ibooks’ publisher, he was directed to draw a deliberate knockoff of the Brothers Hildebrandt’s cover painting for Terry Brooks’s novel The Sword of Shannara.

Let me tell you, Bob was not happy being told to imitate someone else’s art, but a job was a job and he tried his best, even though depicting mutant turtles isn’t really one of his artistic strengths. In fact, the “models” that posed for him were actually TMNT action figures that I bought at Toys R Us!

(BTW, you’ll find the un-watermarked illustration in our BOB LARKIN SKETCHBOOK, soon to be available exclusively through our webstore.)

As things turned out, however, the trilogy never got past the development stage. Although ibooks was all set to go on the project, the sales force for its distributor, Simon & Schuster, made it clear they weren’t interested in trying to sell what they perceived as a “kids’ property.” (Blasted breakfast cereals and toys!)

And so the Turtles quietly slipped back into the shadows like the ninjas they emulate…to continue making tons of cash for other companies!