[Watch the video interview on YouTube here]
Film Courage: What’s the relationship between Zen The Intergalactic Ninja and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles?
Stephen L. Stern, Comic Book Author/President of Storyboard Graphic Novels: Oh, yeah there’s quite a relationship.
In the mid-to-late 1980s the first issue of Zen came out in November of 1987. That period in the comic book industry was known as the quote unquote Black and White Explosion. The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles pretty much precipitated that entire movement. It was created in New England just as Zen was.
Dan [Cote] and I worked on creating the first issue of Zen for about a year and a half. The writing goes fast, the art is laborious and time consuming, and Dan did the entire book in full airbrushed color. This is when there was no computer airbrushing. I’m talking about an actual airbrush. The interior of that book was completely in full color.
So we’re getting ready to release the book and we go to the local printer and we find out that it’s quite costly to publish the book in color. However, it’s not expensive to print the book in black and white. This made preeminent sense because we were in the midst of the quote unquote black and white explosion.
This first issue of Zen, even though it was produced in full color, was printed and published in black and white. It became a bit of a phenomenon for us at least, if not for comic book readers, because we got very good orders for the book from the preeminent distributor which is called Diamond Distribution. They’re still that pretty much to this day, all these many, many decades later.
We got about 3500 orders which we thought was phenomenal. We had no idea. We thought maybe we’d get a hundred or something. That kicked off what we could kind of call the mini industry that Zen became.
Film Courage: You said 3,500 copies was the first sale and of course this was pre-internet, you said mid-80s?
Steve: Yeah.
Film Courage: With your advertising background did you have a hand in having that 3500?
Steve: Well, not in the 3500 but in what happened…(Watch the video interview on YouTube here).
About:
Stephen L. Stern is the president of Storyboard Graphic Novels. Steve is best known as the creator/writer of the indie comic-book Zen Interglactic Ninja that has sold over three million comics and graphic novels and been licensed for video games, action figures and numerous other products. He is also the creator of Shygirl and Frickin’ Butt-Kickin’ Zombie Ants, and the author of Beowulf: The Graphic Novel and the A Christmas Carol Graphic Novel, both published by the UK’s Markosia. His other works include Alien Hero, a collection of novellas and stories about Zen, and the upcoming Majestic Comics Graphic Novel. Stern is a native of New York and former advertising agency president with clients including Johnson & Johnson, Rosenthal China and The Singer Company. He lives in Los Angeles, where he launched Storyboard Graphic Novels in 2011, working with several of his longtime friends and associates—who just happen to be some of the highest-profile artists and writers in the industry today.
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