If you’re a hardcore Power Rangers fan but you’re only a casual Ninja Turtles fan, or vice versa, I wanted you to be able to pick up the book and enjoy and not wonder who these new characters are, which is one of the reasons why Venus isn’t in it. It’s one of the reasons why Jennika’s not in it. It’s one of the reasons why Matt isn’t in it or Dayne isn’t in it.

I don’t want you to have to take this book and go, “I don’t know who any of these characters are.” So we tried to keep it as a love letter to the original two shows that I love. It’s sort of a re-imagining of those two shows, if there had been a crossover episode between season one of Power Rangers and season one of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

You have the Ninja Turtles characterized in a different way from even, say, the 80’s show or any of the many iterations of them. Where did you draw your characterization of the Turtles? Was it from the recent comics or was it just your general memory of them?

We actually had a long conversation about that, because at one point we were like, “Are we going to do the Turtles from the comic book?” And I think the conversation was, “Let’s do an updating, the same way that we updated the Power Ranger’s in Go Go,” where it was like, that was the character from the original series, but let’s update them in a little bit more of a modern context. Let’s update them with modern personalities a little bit. Let’s do the same thing with them. Let’s reimagine them the same way we would if we were doing that for the Ninja Turtles.

So in that way, it ended up becoming a little bit of my own version where I had to do a little bit of the show, a little bit of the movie, and then a little bit of the original Eastman/Laird comics which I wanted to make sure that I stayed true to that a little bit, too. It was a little bit of hodge podge with all of that. I will say, there were a lot of references to the TV show. There are direct lines and references to the movie because I am a huge fan of the first Ninja Turtle movie. I think it’s fantastic and it still holds value. If you’re like me and you grew up with that sort of thing, hopefully they stay true to the voices of all of those mediums put together.