Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles #3
Written by Kevin Eastman & Tom Waltz
Script by Tom Waltz
Layouts by Kevin Eastman
Art by Dan Duncan
Colors by Ronda Pattinson
Letters by Shawn Lee
Covers by Dan Duncan, Kevin Eastman, Fred Hembeck, Peter Laird
IDW Publishing
Release Date: October 26, 2011
Cover Price: $3.99

If you’re looking for pizza and shouts of “Cowabunga!,” you might want to look elsewhere. OK, there technically IS pizza in this issue, but that’s beside the point. If your looking for a great comic, you’ve found it here with Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles #3. Some great character background stuff is revealed in this issue, so it’s one that you definitely won’t want to miss.

IDW Publishing seems to be making a big splash at San Francisco’s WonderCon this weekend, and one of their big announcements was that they will be bringing back Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles to the world of comics this Summer, with an new series of comics and graphic novels based on the original series. The comics series will be just the first part of an on-going plan to return the Turtles to prominence. Nickelodeon actually bought the rights to the Turtles franchise last year for a cool $60 million and there are also plans for a new CGI show to air on Nickelodeon starting in late 2012.

It’s being reported by Deadline Hollywood that Platinum Dunes, the studio behind the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Friday the 13th, and A Nightmare on Elm Street reboots, has been brought in to produce the new live-action Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie currently being developed.

Platinum Dunes is of course the company owned by Transformers and Armageddon director Michael Bay, as well as producers Brad Fuller and Andrew Form.

In April of 2009, The Mirage Group made the announcement during the 25th anniversary celebration of Ninja Turtles that a brand new live-action movie was on the way. Mirage had brought us the decent (but just not the same) computer-animated TMNT before this, but nothing was more exciting than the thought of something closer to the original movies made in the early ’90s. Even better — it sounded as if this movie could just be the darker toned flick we’ve begged for over the years, based on Turtles creators Peter Laird and Kevin Eastman‘s original comics.

As we all know and adore, a new mostly live-action, semi-computer-animated Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie is on the way (Read: Brand New “˜Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles’ Movie Goes Green!). Now this movie has made it’s first official move, hiring John Fusco to pen the movie.

Fusco seems to be a pretty decent-fitting choice for the job with both action and martial arts-heavy films under his belt. He’s written movies like both Young Guns movies, Hidalgo with Viggo Mortensen, and the recent Jackie Chan and Jet Li flick, The Forbidden Kingdom. He’s also the man that was tapped for the impossible task of writing a Seven Samurai remake — though that one isn’t an official go yet.

Last year we learned that the long-awaited new Heavy Metal movie adaptation was finally moving forward and that Watchmen director Zack Snyder had joined David Fincher (Se7en, Fight Club) and Gore Verbinski (Pirates of the Caribbean) as directors on the project (Read: Zack Snyder Joins David Fincher & Gore Verbinski For ‘Heavy Metal’). Heavy Metal consists of multiple different chapters or sections, and the goal was to find a team of top-notch talent to handle these various sections.

Fortunately for us, the party does not end there: Film School Rejects have spoken to Kevin Eastman (Owner of the Heavy Metal Magazine, as well as Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles co-creator) who dropped the bomb that now a one Mr. James Cameron would be executive producing on the project, and that he would be directing one of the segments as well!

Eastman also shared that Kung Fu Panda co-director Mark Osborne would be doing a comedy segment of the Heavy Metal project along with Jack Black. They are really putting together one of the — if not THE — greatest collection of filmmakers ever seen; and this is just the directors — they still need to cast what I’m assuming will be all kinds of big name stars for the project.