nice faces^^

This was a series that I never picked up, probably because of the Archie imprint. Look at these now though, you manage to pique my interest.

they will rise again

One of my favorites. I believe I had you sign this one.

ohh mutanimals some of the reasons i readed the TMNT archie comic :D

People smoking, in an American comic book!

Is there a character bio anywhere?
So they had other people do the inking? Was that to speed up production?

That's a standard practice in the business, dating back to the shops of the 40's. Partly, it's a production line approach to comics, partly it's a means of attempting to produce top level comic work. Sometimes an artist is a top-notch storyteller or can draw with great precision, but can't ink to save his life; alternately, some artists are a bit weak on the layout end, but are solid inkers. Then, of course, you get artists who prefer to do one over the other.

On the artistic side, it's a crapshoot. Some penciler/inker combinations are brilliant, others are disasters. And not every penciler is pleased with the way his work is translated by the inker. In the end, it's usually the editor who makes the decision as to who inks who, based on time, money and personal preferences.

In Mike's case, I've seldom seen an inker who could ink his work better than Mike himself could. In fact, I don't recall any inker who did it better.

I was just thinking that, Mike's inking is great so I thought perhaps they got someone to do the inking while he did the pencils to speed things up.

I'm sure that thought factors in as well... but from I've heard elsewhere, that really doesn't work as well as some folks expect. A lot of times, the penciller, if he knows he will also be inking, will pencil very sketchily in order to speed up the process, knowing that he can fill in details during the inking -- essentially drawing in ink over the loose pencil drawing. But if he knows the book will go to someone else to ink, he'll take more time to pencil more fully, putting in the detail and complete renders. Meaning that the time spent on the drawing is roughly the same.

Note that a lot of this is changing these days with the arrival of the computer: most pros these days draw and paint directly on the computer screen. I've no idea how dramatically this changes the time equation -- though I can imagine that it alters it quite dramatically -- but I do have very solid opinions on the results, not all of which I find favorable.

That's a fair bit of work. Hope you were fairly compensated for it.