TURTLES SOUP

Posted By: Peter DavidPosted On:

I have been informed by the fine folks at Dreamwave that they are suspending publishing on the animated Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles series, with issue #7 (the second half of a two-parter) being the last one to ship. Issue #8 was to have kicked off the four part “T4: The Turtlenator,” which Dreamwave has been advertising. Instead that storyline, currently being written and drawn, is being halted halfway completed with an eye towards possibly relaunching in the summer.

As fun as the series has been to produce, writing the first four issues under the constraint that they had to be based on the first four animated episodes resulted in issues that were, I think, not representative of what the series could have been. Plus, of course, one runs the risk of seeming superfluous since you’re just rehashing stories people can see animated and for free. Issue #5, starting the run of wholly original stories, was the first issue I was completely happy with, and it was very well received…but not by enough readers. Particularly when one considers that Dreamwave has to pay licensing fees and thus has to sell a lot more copies than a creator-owned title in order to turn a profit.

I suppose sales on issues 6 and 7 will help determine whether we’ll be seeing another run at the Dreamwave TMNT during the summer.

PAD

28 comments on “TURTLES SOUP”

  1. Would that I had the money to buy more than one copy of each issue.

    I wish you and the folks at Dreamwave luck in this, Peter. I was looking forward to this series and wanted it to succeed. I’ve been enjoying the series (even the pilot-derived stuff — you had much better material to work with than the old Archie comics TMNT series I’m so fond of).

  2. Well that’s dissapointing.

    I was really enjoying the series, especially once you got to start piloting the issues instead of sticking to recapping other stuff. You really seemed to have fun with the characters which made it enjoyable to read.

    Long live the Turtles!

  3. Sorry for the tangent here, but I figured this was the best place to post my question.

    What is the best online source for finding out if a book is being/has been canceled? As far as i can tell, they never list these things on the publisher’s sites (at least not DC or Marvel). For example, Hunter: The Age of Magic just stopped coming… what’s the deal?

    Thanks for the patience and by the way, I love the way Fallen Angel is progressing. I panned the first issue, but it’s grown into a fantastic book (IMHO).

    Cheers.

  4. Ðámņ, this news really stinks. I was loving the series. The first four issues were good, but the last two were fantastic!

    Now I’ll have to move that title from my PAD active titles to my 3 boxes of PAD inactive runs.

    For shame!

  9. No WONDER I didn’t like it when I read issue#1! It wasn’t your story, Peter! (That, and the substandard art.) Hmm..oh well. I’m really sorry that it’s being cancelled, but at least now I can search out issues 5-7, in the hope that since they’re your original stories, I might like them better than issue 1.

    But really…………who the hëll hires a writer like Peter David just to adapt someone else’s stories for a comic book??? Maybe it works for the movie novelizations he’s done, but that’s largely because they’re told in a completely medium, from a differnet person-POV-narration, leaving plenty of room for the writer to make the story his own, and embellish in areas where the different medium has advantages. A comic book is much closer in terms of the visual medium and the need for succint dialogue, and I can’t imagine why someone would waste getting Peter David for rehashing episodes, when they just could’ve brought him on with issue 5. Maybe it was to get his name on the book. 🙂

  11. Just wish that I had been able to find a copy of this book somewhere. Since I don’t have a local comic shop I have to depend on bookstores, and I never saw a single issue there. Seems like Dreamwave dropped the ball on getting it out to the newsstands, I’m sure that would have helped the bottom line for the series.

  14. 7 issues is longer than most of Dreamwaves’ non-Transformers books get. That’s quite an achievment in itself.

  15. PAD, while I bailed on the series (due to that godawful coloring which I think I’ve mentioned once or twice before), it seems incredibly absurd that Dreamwave would suspend publishing the series unless the COMPANY did something foolish in terms of the licensing agreement at the outset.

    I did some checking on the sales of both TMNT series (Dreamwave’s and Mirage’s), and found something incredibly interesting: Dreamwave’s book has been consistently outselling Mirage’s by a better than 2 to 1 margin.

    Figures for the Dreamwave
    #1 (06/03) 32,273 copies

    #2 (07/03) 22,371

    #3 (08/03) 21,319

    #4 (09/03) 19,567

    #5 (10/03) 19,071

    While there seemed a substantial dropoff from #1 to #2, if memory serves, #1 had multiple covers. Even if that’s not the case, your book hasn’t suffered the typical dropoff in sales that other books have–only losing a little over 3000 copies from #2 to #5 (just under a 15% decline in sales).

    Compare those figures to the Mirage title’s sales over the same 5 month period (the Mirage book is bi-monthly, so only three issues came out):

    #10 (06/03) 7,073 (at a $3.95 cp)

    #11 (08/03) 6,694 (at the regular $2.95 cp)

    #12 (10/03) 7,232

    Since I don’t read the Mirage series, I have no way to explain the sales dip between #10 and #11 (a bit over 5%) or the increase between #11 and #12 (just over 8%). The Mirage issue #12 earned over $21,000 at retail; the Dreamwave issue #5 earned more than $56,000 at retail. The first comparison month has an even greater disparity–just under $28,000 for the (higher cover priced) Mirage issue #10, compared to the $95,000 for the Dreamwave premiere issue. While it’s not easy to directly compare figures for each title’s number one issues (the sales reporting data has changed slightly since the Mirage series debuted), Mirage’s current series was listed as selling only 11,501 copies of its first issue..

    If Dreamwave’s effort is considered a failure, it has to be the company’s failure, not yours, PAD. They are licensing the title, it’s true, but from whom? Where does the money go? Eastman and Laird? Mirage? The TV show’s producers? How much is going to these people? Could Dreamwave have misjudged the Turtles’ popularity and overreached themselves in the licensing agreement?

    I’m sorry your stories are being put “on hiatus” (a better color job would have kept the title on my pull list), since the last two issues were actually good stories though continued to be brought down by mediocre art and horrible coloring. I can understand Dreamwave’s wanting to start the series with adaptations (it doesn’t make it a particularly good idea for 4 issues–2 or 3 would’ve been sufficient), but the company should have allowed the series to have at least as many original stories as adapted tales before deciding on “suspending” the book–especially as your first original story only dropped fewer than 500 copies (out of 19,000!).

    Oh well–I guess this now officially proves that “Peter David can’t sustain a title”.

  17. Man, Peter that really sucks! I’ve loved the series from the very start and I’ve said so in my reviews of recent issues on http://www.paperbackreader.com. I’m sorry to hear that the word is not getting out as quickly as I’d hoped.

    I hear what you’re saying regarding the original stories vs. rehashing the events from the cartoon. Just the same, I’ve been unable to catch the cartoon, so I’ve found a good amount of value in the comic book, but I suppose most people are able to catch the cartoon.

    I hope sales pick up on this series and it can continue!

  18. That’s really too bad. The book was just picking up steam. The last two issues were what I expected the entire run to be like. I hope things work out for a volume 2… though a different coloring team might benefit the book. The first few issues were particularly hard to tell what was going on.

  19. Hope that doesn’t stop Dreamwave from publishing GLORY B…

    I’ll miss TMNT written by you. Maybe the folks at Dreamwave are going to think about this.

  20. For all that I was always having to babble embarrassed explanations when someone would see TMNT in my stack, I was enjoying the book quite a bit. Sorry to see it go.

  21. There’s a “Save TMNT” campaign on newsarama, which doesn’t really do much, just to persuade everyone into buying issues 5 – 7, so Dreamwave will see that there is demand.

    Let’s hope it works.

  22. I’m sorry to hear that news, as I’ve been enjoying the series. I haven’t seen the cartoon, so I don’t know how closely the first 4 issues mirrored it, but I thought that #5-6 were significantly better.

    I’d say the general theme so far has been “actions have consequences”, often taking a more serious look at something that seems humorous. For instance, the scene with the guy who invented the Mousers (in #2?) who said “Oops, mustn’t gloat so loud”, then spent three days in hospital. Then the business with the young girl in #5 (which was explicitly brought up in the text, with the comparison to the Superman film).

    I also liked the link between Casey Jones and Raphael, of people who mean well, but don’t do so well. It reminds me of Nite-Wing

    (from “Nightwing”), who seems worryingly close to the vigilante that many comic readers might become. (Although maybe I’m just projecting there.)

    And speaking for myself, I thought that the discussion about sparring vs fighting in #6 was very accurate.

    Anyway, I hope that this comic does resume after the hiatus – SpyBoy did, so it seems plausible that this one will too.

  23. yeah but i mean, SpyBoy is published by dark horse.

    dreamwave is infamous in their not eing able to keep a series up past 5 issues:

    arkanium

    limbo city

    fate of the blade

    sandscape

    necro war

    echo

    warlands

    shidima

    dark minds

    megaman

    and now TMNT

    not a good sign considering at least 8 of those titles were launched and cvanceled within a span of one year, which means Dreamwave is not shaping up well with retailers….

  26. Thanks for pulling up those numbers, Joseph.

    I admit I’m starting to feel somewhat frustrated. I mean, “YJ” was in the top 100 when it went away (you’d think being in the top 100 would be enough to keep you around). “Supergirl” posted a sales increase of almost 50% over six months–jumped like 40 spots in the sales ranking–and that went away. My version of TMNT outsells the Mirage version by almost 3-to-1, according to what Joseph posted, and *that’s* going away. “Fallen Angel” gets rave reviews, but on the one hand I get retailers e-mailing me telling me that readers won’t even sample it while on the other hand readers e-mail me telling me their retailers didn’t bother to stock it.

    Candidly, I feel like I’m doing some of the best work of my life, and I simply can NOT catch a dámņëd break. The criteria keeps shifting so that, even when I’m succeeding, I’m not succeeding by enough.

    Sometimes I think other writers have the right idea: Either work on a book for a year or two and then bail so that you don’t get pegged as unable to sustain a book, or just leave comics altogether and then be treated like hot stuff ten years later.

    PAD

  27. There’s always a risk of a Dreamwave book getting cancelled, no matter the quality. Of all Dreamwaves non-Transformers books, I think only Warlands was actually completed, in a non-shortened, non-bášŧárdìšëd way.

    It’s a dámņ shame, but quality never comes into the decision whether to keep a book going or not.

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