TMNT co-creator teamed up with Lobo’s Simon Bisley to create a wild B-movie mashup, Fistful of Blood, that’s flown under the radar of fans for years.
As the co-creator of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Kevin Eastman is no stranger to creating something new by mashing up two concepts. Eastman and collaborator Peter Laird realized that the mutants of The X-Men franchise and the ninjas in Frank Miller’s Daredevil were the most popular comics of the early ’80s and created a concept that married the two aspects.
While Eastman has remained active with the TMNT franchise, including contributing to IDW’s TMNT comics like The Last Ronin, he’s had a productive career outside of it. That includes purchasing venerable sci-fi comics anthology Heavy Metal in 1992, which he also served as the publisher of until 2020. It was in the pages of Heavy Metal that Eastman collaborated with famed Lobo artist Simon Bisley on another kind of genre mash-up; the sci-fi/horror/spaghetti western parody Fistful of Blood.
Fistful of Blood makes no secret of its biggest influence. The plot is taken wholesale from the classic Sergio Leone directed spaghetti western A Fistful of Dollars. A mysterious gunslinger wanders into a town controlled by two rival factions. With both factions vying for the gunslinger’s services, they proceed to play both sides against each other, ultimately wiping them all out.
The story took that framework and moved it further into B-movie territory than its inspiration already was. Its rival factions were a group of zombie cowboys and vampires that prey upon unwitting tourists who wander into their ghost town. In place of Clint Eastwood’s “Man With No Name” is a voluptuous blonde woman of even fewer words. Her origin is revealed in the story’s final pages, giving the story its sci-fi twist and the unnamed protagonist something in common with Lobo.
Fistful of Blood was originally serialized in black and white in Heavy Metal. A trade paperback collecting the series was released in 2002. A remastered version, colored by Tom Varga, was released in four single issues by IDW in 2015 and later collected into a trade of its own. While the story remained the same, there was some self-censorship on Eastman and Bisley’s part. The casual nudity and swearing that’s part of the Heavy Metal experience were censored for the remaster. Beyond that, the remaster also featured a sizable amount of backmatter about the comic’s development and an apparent ambition to adapt it into a live-action movie.
Fistful of Blood is exactly as over the top as it sounds. It’s not for anyone who can’t stomach an additional helping of genre cheese on their spaghetti western, as well as the conspicuous amount of female objectification that comes from originating as a Heavy Metal feature. There is something to be said for a comic that knows exactly what it wants to be and does that to the fullest, which fits Fistful of Blood to a tee. While it’s something Eastman wanted to adapt to live-action, it’s not the hollow kind of proof of concept comic. It also helps that it doesn’t overstay its welcome and tells a complete story.
The main appeal of Fistful of Blood is Bisley’s artwork. His style is perfectly suited to the material, and Eastman allows him to play to his strengths without bogging things down with more exposition or dialogue than necessary. Bisley’s style, like Fistful of Blood itself, will either work for readers or it won’t. If it does, it’s worth a read. That’s especially true if you’re still a Comixology Unlimited subscriber after the company’s recent woes since it’s currently available to borrow. If that leaves you wanting more, there’s another Eastman and Bisley collaboration starring TMNT’s Raphael and Casey Jones, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Bodycount, which definitely lives up to its name. It’s also available to borrow on Unlimited.
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