The History of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Comics Part IV: Dreamwave Productions (2003)

After the new cartoon series started in the early 2000s, someone decided a tie-in comic series was required.  Enter Dreamwave Productions.  Dreamwave was a real comics-industry success story in the early 2000s, a small Canadian firm that came from out of nowhere to land some big licenses, like Transformers, and produce some of the best selling titles on the market. 

Editorial time: Dreamwave was basically a gigantic sham company, a true piece of shit.  The art style they employed was, while technically proficient, an extremely generic anime-style delivery.  The company spent huge amounts of money on office space and vehicles for the core staff while often bilking their creative talent out of their pay.  Fuck Dreamwave.  End editorial.

So for their new series, Dreamwave hired Peter David to write, an ironic choice given the fact that he’s Erik Larsen’s archenemy.  A talented unknown by the name of LeSean was hired to provide art.  David’s writing was usually very, very slow and boring, probably driving away most of the interested fanboys that would have picked up the series.  The series was colored using computers with mixed results.  While the images could sometimes be striking they also come across as rather stale.

Unlike the Archie series, Dreamwave had no mainstream distribution.  Their comics were sold exclusively on the same comic book store shelves as the concurrently running Mirage series, likely confusing many nerds.  In spite of that, sales were very strong but not strong enough for a piece of shit company like Dreamwave and the series was cancelled after 7 issues, in spite of averaging about 22,000 in sales per issue (aka $66,000 in revenue per issue).  It’s just as well that it was cancelled.  BORING.

Dreamwave Productions TMNT Publication History
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles #1-7 (2003)

kicknz

related posts:

• The History of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Comics Part I: Mirage Studios (1984-1995)
• The History of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Comics Part II: The Kids’ Stuff – Archie, Welsh, Creators (1988-1997)
• The History of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Comics Part III: Image Comics (1996-1999)
• The History of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Comics Part IV: Dreamwave Productions (2003)
• The History of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Part V: Mirage Studios Returns (2001-present)

click here for more tmnt related posts