Some notes on IDW's Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Ultimate Collection line

Eastman's cover for Ultimate Collection Vol. 5

I was looking for a particular image from Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird's original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles comics the other day, and checked out one of IDW's Ultimate collections from the library and, before long, I fell into something of a rabbit hole--well, turtle hole, I guess. I ended up reading the first six volumes of the publisher's Ultimate line--there's a seventh volume, apparently just featuring covers, on the way--as well as re-reading Mirage's full-color, short-lived second volume of TMNT in comic book form.

These ultimate collections are nice-looking books, and I'd certainly like to own copies of my own some day, but I'm at the point in my life where I think I need to buy a house in order to fill it with bookshelves in order to fill those with graphic novels. My one-bedroom apartment is just about at capacity now, and I really shouldn't try to squeeze six or seven atlas-sized collections of comics I already own in several formats in here if I can avoid it.

The books are about 8.5-by-12 inches in size, so the comics within are presented at a notably larger size than usual. The many splash pages and double-page splashes of the earliest TMNT comics are basically big enough to be placed in frames and hung on walls like piece of fine art. Only the covers for the individual issues aren't blown-up within these collections, which I found to be sort of irritating (although if that seventh volume is going to be devoted to collecting the covers, maybe that was the reason why they are presented so small within).

Each collection features a new, original wraparound cover by Kevin Eastman, who is still working surprisingly closely with IDW on their fifth volume of the comic. These covers are all essentially collages of the contents of the volume. These are kind of fascinating in that they reveal the way Eastman draws the characters now, without the visual input of Peter Laird or any of the other Mirage artists he would collaborate with (like Jim Lawson and Eric Talbot, for example), and while his style hasn't changed too drastically over the last three decades or so--that is, Kevin Eastman's artwork is still immediately recognizable as Kevin Eastman's artwork--it is interesting to note those changes.

Also, it's fun to see him draw characters he had no or little input into before. So, for example, the cover for the second volume features his drawing of the Kirby character from 1986's Donatello, which Laird did much of the work on (and comparing the Kirby in the comic to that on Eastman's cover makes this clearer still), and the third volume (above) has Eastman's "cover" versions of Doctor Dome, the Domeoids and the Justice Force superheroes from 1988's TMNT #15, an Eastman-free Laird and Lawson issue.

Aside from the blown-up size and the original covers though, the comics are also all annotated by Eastman and Laird, with every issue being followed by a page or more of memories, reactions and behind-the-scenes notations from the two creators. If you've read these comics at least once before, then the ultimate collection probably provide the ideal way to re-read them, as the effect is a little like having Eastman and Laird reading along over your shoulder, and volunteering their commentary.

All of that stuff is pretty fascinating, and, I'll be honest, sometimes a little shocking. For example, when I was reading these comics as a teenager--I think 1991's TMNT #37 was the first issue I bought new at a comic shop, and after that point I started hunting for back issues while keeping up with new stuff as it was released--I had no idea the pair ever had a falling out of any kind.

They don't detail the ins and outs of their disagreements herein, although they allude to not speaking to one another or being unable to be in the same room with one another quite a bit. That was pretty surprising to hear, although I guess it explains why their collaborations dwindled to almost nothing for a while.

So after 11 issues of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (and the four character-specific one-shot "micro-series" and sundry short stories)  published over the course of  three years in which the pair worked as an exceptionally entwined creative team, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles #12 was a Laird solo issue. TMNT #13 an Eastman solo issue (with Talbot assisting on inks). TMNT #14 was the first of many fill-in issues,  and then  #15 was Laird and Lawson, #16  was another fill-in issue and then #17 was Eastman and Talbot. It wasn't until #19-#21 that Eastman and Laird collaborated again--that was the "Return To New York" story arc--and even then it wasn't just the two of them, as Lawson and Talbot were heavily involved in those issues.

Despite the now decades-old disagreements though, the pair seem quite effusive in their praise for one another's respective skills throughout (although Laird never seems to miss an opportunity to point out when there's a typo), and neither seem too terribly eager to re-litigate their conflicts. I guess I'll wait to their biographies (And man, I do hope someone is writing their biography, and that they are both gradually working on their own autobiographies, because what a fascinating story those two lived!).

A couple of things that occurred to me while reading this volumes, and re-reading the comics within for, like, the hundredth time...

Laird's inks on Lawson's pencils over Eastman's layouts in 1989's TMNT #19

•I've talked before about the fact that one of my favorite aspects of these comics were how homemade they feel, and the fact that the particular, long-mysterious-to-me system that Eastman and Laird employed in their creation meant that each issue had a sort of alchemical style, a fusion of each of their significantly different personal styles...sometimes with those of other studio mates also transmuted into the resultant comics.

Sometimes it's quite clear who did what, and thus how each artist's style might have impacted the art--the three-chapter "Return to New York," for example, were inked by Laird, Talbot and Eastman respectively--other times, it seems like two-to-four pencils and pens were involved with every page, and a comic might have a "Mirage Studios" style rather than anyone's personal style.

The notes detail that Eastman and Laird did have a system, although it is interesting to hear them discussing the very earliest issues, particularly TMNT #1, in which neither is exactly clear on who inked a particular page, and it seems that both of them contributed pencils and inks to each page.

The system they ultimately settled on seemed to be this, according to Laird:

1.) They would initially "write" the story in conversation with one another, hammering out a plot together.

2.) Eastman would handle the layout, on which he would include rough dialogue.

3.) Laird would do finished dialogue.

4.) They would pencil the comic based on Eastman's layouts and, after the final dialogue was lettered--originally by them, later by Steve Lavigne--they would ink the art and add toning (that last bit is something I never realized was involved with the construction of these comics, and helps explain the gritty, textured look of the black and white art).

As Laird explained it, they were ideally communicating throughout the entire process, so even though layouts might have been Eastman's "job" and finished dialogue Laird's, they both had and took opportunities to address any and all concerns as they were going.

In the earliest issues especially, Laird said, they tried to make sure they each penciled and inked a piece of each page or panel, and that this would take place by the pair literally handing pages back and forth between them in order to get a true blend of their styles.

Repeatedly throughout these annotations they each note that when they would meet readers at conventions, they were always being asked about how they worked together and who did what. Comics readers in the early 1980s apparently couldn't get their heads around the idea of two writer/artists working on a comic book together as writer/artists, perhaps because so much comics production fell into either the assembly-line method established in the Golden Age (with a writer handing a script to a penciler, who handled his pencil art to an inker, who then gave the finished art to the colorist, etc) or a solo cartoonist doing everything herself.

It is an unusual method, though, one that requires pretty much constant proximity to one another--which I suppose was likely a factor in the eventual strain in their relationship.

Eastman and Laird's final page of 1984's TMNT #1

•The focus of these books is the issues of the original series that Eastman and Laird worked on, to the exclusion of all the fill-in issues. It was striking to see how many times throughout that relatively short run of comics by the pair themselves--just 38 issues total including the one-shots, out of the 62 issues that the first volume of TMNT ultimately ran--that Eastman and Laird seemed to reach natural, organic would-be, could-be endings for their series.

It's pretty common knowledge that they never really anticipated TMNT lasting longer than a single issue, and despite the fact that they both desperately wanted to succeed as comics creators, they were caught off-guard by how successful that lark featuring a silly idea and elements of parody and homage of Frank Miller's Daredevil work ended up being, and how much market demand there was for what such a weird concept.

Re-reading 1984's TMNT #1 with that thought placed in your mind, it's abundantly clear that the comic was created as a 40-page complete story unto itself. There's no cliffhanger, no dangling plot lines, no questions yet to be addressed. In those pages, the pair thoroughly introduce and explain the characters' origins (built atop the origin of Marvel's Daredevil, of course), the history of the enmity between their master and his archenemy and then there's a huge, action-packed, 10-page ninja battle ending with the death of their enemy and the resolution of the conflict that we are told was their life's mission.

Yeah, it's a pretty complete story, and it's not hard to imagine that, had it not caught the imagination of comics readers and, eventually, cartoon-watchers and toy-players-with, it might have just ended up being a strange stepping stone to other endeavors by two talented creators.

Once they committed to a second issue though, a story arc quickly emerged. In issue #2, the TMNT met their first human friend April O'Neil and their father/sensei Master Splinter went missing, all a result of villain Baxter Stockman's robotic mousers. In the following five issues, the guys move in with April and search for Splinter, unwittingly uncovering details about their origins, travelling to outer space and having a rather wild, pulpy adventure that concludes with a reunion with Splinter and the formation of a new configuration of a family, now including April.

It is very easy to imagine Eastman and Laird's TMNT ending with issue #7 then, too, as #1-#7 tell a pretty complete story that ends happily (Raphael, which came out between #2 and #3, doesn't really play into that arc at all, but is more of a side story focusing on his personality...and introducing Casey Jones, who wouldn't play a part in the series for a while yet).

After that, there are some done-in-one stories, including the Michaelangelo and Donatello one-shots, the epic 45-page TMNT #8 featuring a crossover with Dave Sim's Cerebus (and introducing Renet and Savanti Romero), and a rather Splinter-centric flashback to the Pre-Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles in #9.

A continuing story arc reemerges in Leonardo, the most action-packed issue up until that point, as it is basically one long fight scene, which leads directly into #10, an unexpected rematch with the supposedly dead Shredder and the Foot Clan, featuring a last-minute save by Casey Jones, who at that point joins the team and their narrative on a permanent basis.

Eastman's cover for 1987's TMNT #11

TMNT #11, set at the farmhouse in Northhampton, is another natural "ending" to the story, as it has the various characters struggling to process what just happened to them in New York City, and, gradually, all making their peace with it to some extent. It has a pretty happy ending, and it's not a bad place to end the story, really, although it does suggest that our heroes have lost...at least in terms of their battle against the Foot Clan, if not at life in general.

The first time I read these comics--hell, the first 40 times I read these comics--it was in a big, fat, phone book-sized collection featuring the four micro-series and the first 11 issues of TMNT. It's easy to see why they collected them in this fashion, as they do read as a complete (even completed) unit.

Then, after a series of adventures mostly set in rural New England as opposed to New York City--the previously mentioned efforts by the then sort of split-up Eastman and Laird team of #12, #14, #15 and #17, plus fill-in issues  by Michael Dooney, Mark Martin and Mark Bode that aren't included in the ultimate collections--Eastman, Laird and their Mirage Studios partners reunite for "Return To New York." That three-issue arc really resolves our heroes' defeat at the hands of the Foot in #11. They have re-killed The Shredder, this time once and for all--the resurrected Shredder isn't quite the same one they killed in #1, of course, as is explained--and they have re-fulfilled their mission in life and are able to move on. At that stories end, the four brothers are in New York, burning the body of The Shredder, and are apparently now free to go wherever they like or do whatever they want.

Again, this too seems like a natural ending point for Eastman an Laird's TMNT narrative. And, in a way, it was. The title kept going, of course, but it would be another three years and 26 issues before Eastman and Laird returned to the book, and for the rest of the 62-issue volume they would only draw a single issue issue together and then share writing credits on 14 issues, the job of drawing the turtles now falling to Lawson, with new inker Keith Aiken, and assists from Talbot and a few others.

The end of that epic storyline would, of course, be another natural ending point--and finally was. The book ended when the 12-issue "City At War" did, only to be relaunched for an ill-starred, 12-issue, full-color run that now seems to be even more forgotten than the Image series was.

Veitch's cover for 1989's TMNT #24

•Because the focus of the ultimate collections is the Eastman and Laird issues of Eastman and Laird's Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, that means that many issues of the series are left out. So Dooney's #13 Martin's #16 and Bode's #18 aren't here. And none of the issues that fell between the end of "Return To New York" and  the two-part "City At War" lead-in story arc "Shades of Gray" are included here. That's a lot of TMNT, and a lot of great comics: Two more Mark Martin issues, Rick Veitch's three-issue "The River" arc and a later done-in-one, Michael Zulli's gorgeous but weird "Soul's Winter" story arc, a three-issue arc by Rich Hedden and Tom McWeedy, comics by Steve Murphy, Michael Dooney and Keith Aiken, Dan Berger, Rick Arthur, A.C. Farley, Mark Bode and, my favorites, #37 and #42 by Rick McCollum and Bill Anderson and #41 by Matt Howarth.

There is some reason to quibble with the curation of these ultimate collections.

Some of these guest comics are pretty far afield of those told by Eastman and Laird, the more "canonical" ninja turtles stories, and are best read as the Mirage equivalents of Marvel's What If...? or DC's Elseworlds or Silver Age "imaginary stories." Just before and for a long time after "Return to New York," TMNT was basically an anthology series, akin to Legends of The Dark Knight. Like LDK though, if some stories strayed too far to be considered in continuity, others fit in perfectly well with Eastman and Laird's stories. Many of the above stories are set in and around the New England farmhouse, for example, and others have the characters re-encountering characters from earlier in the series, like Renet, Savanti Romero, Romero's previously unrevealed wife and the superheroine Radical and supervillain Carnage.

By excising all of these from the ultimate collections, there is a rather strange compressing of time, and a reader doesn't get the sense that the characters were ever really lost in the wilderness, trying to figure out their next move after their defeat in #10. When Raphael starts fighting with his brothers in the first chapter of "Return," complaining about how long they have been hiding out in New England while Shredder and The Foot are alive and well in New York City, here only some 186 pages and four issues, instead of twice that.

And even less time passes between the conclusion of "Return To New York" and the beginning of "City At War"; in fact, because "Shades of Gray" is basically an unofficial first two chapters of "City At War," both of the big, Eastman and Laird-written storylines about the turtles returning to New York City to sort out matters with the Foot Clan happen back-to-back in these collections.

I don't know what, exactly, would have been a better solution, I just know the series reads very differently when presented with all of the fill-ins excised like this.

Talbot's cover for 1988's TMNT #17

That said, I thought the inclusion of #17 was somewhat surprising. That's the Eric Talbot solo issue, the bulk of which is a rather weird, random stream-of-conscious fantasy story set in in feudal Japan and starring a version of Michaelangelo....although it turns out to be a dramatization of a story Michaelangelo himself is writing. Eastman is credited as a writer on it, both in the collection and on Mirage's website, but Eastman himself seems surprised by the credit in his annotations of the issue, and doesn't remember having done enough work on the book to have deserved the credit.

Meanwhile, Eastman did contribute to the Mark Bode issues--#18, which he co-wrote and helped ink, and #32, which he helped ink--but neither of those are included herein (Those are both really fun ones, too, sending the Turtles overseas to Hong Kong, where they kinda sorta team-up with a Bruce Lee stand-in, and to Egypt, where they fight Anubis and other characters of Egyptian mythology. I really liked Bode's Turtle designs, and the way he handled dialogue, the balloons and sound effects all appearing above the panels).

I suppose both of those issues lean pretty hard away from the canonical Turtles, of course, but if the organizing principle here is the complete Eastman and Laird TMNT and co-writing #17 was enough, to qualify, well...

Splash page by Lawson and Aiken from 1992's TMNT #51

•When we get to #48 in Ultimate Collection Volume 4, Jim Lawson has become the official Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles artist and, in fact, it is his art we will see for every issue included in the next two volumes, with the brief exception of the 42 pages of TMNT #50, in which Eastman and Laird reunite on both story and art.

I remember it being a real treat at the time the book came out--I had signed up for a subscription of the book at the time, and that was and remains the only time I ever had a subscription to a comic book series--although looking at it now, it sure is jarring to see the Lawson art get replaced by the infinitely darker, busier, more textured Eastman/Laird art, only to give way almost immediately to Lawson's more streamlined, abstract and expressive art (Confession: I used to hate Lawson's TMNT art. Now he's one of my favorite TMNT artists).

Lawsons' cover for 1987's Tales of The TMNT #2, introducing Nobody

"Shades of Gray" sticks out a bit in this curation of the series, if only because the character Nobody plays a rather significant role. A more traditional vigilante/superhero based in Springfield, he was introduced in Tales of The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles #2 (written by Eastman and Laird and drawn by Lawson and Ryan Brown), and, because no issues of Tales are collected here, isn't really introduced to the narrative properly, but rather just appears.

Still, those two issues--TMNT #48 and #49--are pretty important, as they include the events that kick off the splintering of the TMNT family that sets up "City At War." The first official chapter of which, #50, is silent.

Eastman and Laird's cover for 1992's TMNT #50

•"City At War" is an extremely unusual story arc for even this extremely unusual comic, lasting 12-14 issues, depending on if we count "Shades", and dwarfing the longest sustained story arcs from the book's previous 50 issues. (Remember, "Return to New York" was just three issues, albeit 40-ish page issues, and the unofficial search for Splinter arc was just about six issues).

It was also probably the most emotionally mature of the TMNT stories, with Eastman, Laird and Lawson splitting the characters up into four different units, each experiencing their own story arcs. In the case of the two human characters, their storylines are positively mundane--Casey moves away, meets a woman, falls in love and tries to settle into a normal-ish domestic relationship with her, while April moves to Los Angeles to live with her sister and start a life free of mutant ninjas and their attendant secrets.

Meanwhile, Splinter finds himself in extremely dire straits and faces death alone, and the Turtles themselves return to New York City and find themselves trying to sort out a massive gang war involving warring factions of The Foot Clan...the result of their having cut off the head of the organization when they killed Shredder for the second time.

And then there's a random New Yorker who was caught in an explosion during the Foot's initial war against itself, and we follow his recovery throughout, a somewhat frustrating element because a reader keeps expecting him to turn out to be someone important to the plot somehow, but he is instead just there to dramatize a real person who suffers during wars in general--a point that was made in the first issue, and thus didn't really need 11 more issue's worth of example.s

I recall finding the story somewhat frustrating the first time through, read in monthly installments--again, this story was a huge change from the 50 or so TMNT comics that preceded it, as they were mostly big done-in-one adventures--and even the second time through, but this time I found it pretty engrossing. I started it late at night, with the intention of reading the first few chapters, and ended up staying up late enough to read the whole thing in a fit of pure can't-put-it-down-ism, blowing way past my bedtime.

It's kind of striking how unusual the story felt for a TMNT comic, given how basic, even generic elements of April and Casey's plot lines were, and how simple what Eastman, Laird and Lawson ended up doing really was. While the A plot was basically that of the ninja turtles doing ninja turtle stuff and questioning their purpose in life more than ever, starting to come of age in a way that felt uncomfortable in the context of everything that came before, the overall purpose of the story was simply to break up the characters' extended family, send them off in different directions to learn why they are together in the first place, and then reunite them via soap opera like events and coincidences.

This storyline gave us the character Karai, who isn't too terribly well-developed here, but would play a pretty large role in TMNT mass media adaptions in the 21st century, and Shadow, who would be a recurring character in Laird's fourth volume of the TMNT title...a character with a lot of potential that I don't think ever ended up being met (Actually, I suspect there's a lot of unrealized potential in the space between the time jump of TMNT Vol. 2 #12 and TMNT Vol. 4 #1, a great deal of which was explored in Tales... Vol. 2, which ran alongside TMNT Vol. 4. (I mean, a teenage girl named Shadow raised by sports equipment-wielding vigilante Casey Jones, with four ninja masters for uncles and a fifth ninja master as her grandfather...? She'd basically be a blend of the Casey and April characters, with skills on par with the mutant ninjas).

Eastman and Laird's cover for 1987's Anything Goes #5

•Now Eastman and Laird made a lot of comics between the time 1984's TMNT #1 became a hit and when issue #62 shipped in 1993. Even if one ignores all the comics they merely had a hand in, while other Mirage Studio artists did the heavy lifting, the early days of their characters saw them contributing short stories to a variety of anthologies and original content to the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Other Strangeness role-playing games source books (which I liked better than Dungeons & Dragons back in the day; it's been a while since I looked closely at RPGs, but I remember the Palladium system being a lot easier and more intuitive than what was then the TSR Advanced Dungeons & Dragons system).

In figuring out how to collect all that stuff, IDW apparently opted to publish it all after the stories that ran in the main TMNT title (and the four one-shots). Thus, the first five volumes collect the most Eastman and/or Laird-heavy issues of TMNT, while the sixth, epilogue-like volume is stuffed with about 30 short comics of various short lengths, all produced between 1985 and 1989.

They're culled from all over, too: Back-ups from TMNT reprints, the Palladium source books, the Mirage-published anthologies like Turtle Soup, Shell Shock and Gobbledygook, a Grimjack back-up, the Fantagraphics-published Anything Goes and some benefit books.

In addition to the guys who have their name on the cover, there are comics included in here from many Mirage Studios regulars, like Lawson, Talbot, Michael Dooney and Ryan Brown, all working in various configurations in terms of who was doing what and with whom. There are also some stories by artists not as closely associated with the characters, like Stephen Bissette, who writes and draws an extremely eight-page story entitled "Turtle Dreams" (and those dreams are much scarier than the those in Matt Howarth's TMNT #41); Michael Zulli, working solo on one story and with his Puma Blues partner Steve Murphy on another; and Richard Corben, who inked a four-page Eastman-written and -penciled story that was created specifically so that Eastman could work with Corben (Zulli and Corben would both later do more TMNT, of course; the former drawing the aforementioned "Soul's Winter" arc featuring the most dramatically distinct version of the Turtles to ever appear in their own comic, and Corben collaborating with Jan Strnad on TMNT #33).

I've read many of these, but there were a few that were brand new to me, and thus quite welcome surprises. For example, there's a 10-page turtle-less Triceratons story by Laird that appeared in a Mirage anthology entitled Grunts that I had never heard of, and an Eastman and Laird collaboration entitled "Casey Jones, Private Eye" from a Mirage mini-comics project that I was similarly ignorant of. The latter's nothing special, really, and the format doesn't flatter artwork obviously created to be read much smaller, but the Triceratons story was pretty interesting, and introduces a race of humanoid bears that oppose the Triceraton Empire. I'm actually a little surprised they didn't show up in the last TMNT cartoon, given how diligently it scoured the comics for inspiration.

While the first six volumes of this series were devoted to following the canonical Turtles story of their creators as closely as possible, focusing on the work they themselves did more than the many, many comics they simply had a hand in or sanctioned, this volume really gives a good sense of what the title was like for a portion of its run, what the studio's output was like, and just how fertile the characters and concept were as a springboard, and how generous Eastman and Laird were with their creations and their work.

In a sense, this is actually a good volume to start with, as it is the one that gives the best idea of what the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles comic was like and what Mirage Studios was like. I mean, it's probably a pretty lousy place to start in terms of the story of the TMNT, but it's a perfect place to get a feel for the Turtles and the guys that made them.

And to return to that aspect of the Mirage Studios comics that I mentioned earlier, regarding the who-did-what-where nature of their output, and how first Eastman and Laird and then as many as a dozen different collaborators would conceive of a flexible Mirage "house style" that slid along a particular spectrum, this is practically a text book for that, as there are so many different combinations of the Mirage Studios artists, all appearing within the same covers.

Some of these shorts absolutely fit into the "real" TMNT story, being the work of Eastman and Laird and tied closely to the events of the monthly--there are several set during their time in space, for example--others are of the sort of off-to-the side larks or riffs of Tales or the micro-series, and some need to be massaged into the narrative, but nothing herein seemed to really not fit in with the extremely broad mandate of the Mirage Studios Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles comics which, at it's most basic was basically just, "Whatever, just so long as it has at least one teenage mutant ninja turtle in it."

Among the stories I most enjoyed reading or re-reading in the sixth volume were the Eastman/Laird Anything Goes story in which the guys go on a secret stealth mission...to see Aliens at the drive-in, which I long ago managed to find at a garage sale in Ashtabula after many summer afternoons of studying the Overstreet Price Guide for TMNT appearances; the Eastman/Laird Grimjack back-up story which I recalled similarly looking for but never actually finding; the Eastman/Corben collaboration; the Laird story "Technofear" from 1986's Gobbledygook, which featured what I guess is now vintage computer art; and Zulli and Bissette's strange versions of the characters.

I'm looking forward to the seventh volume, and am curious if there will be a volume eight or beyond. After all, for volume four, Laird did much of the writing, and, for IDW's volume five, Eastman was rather heavily involved, although IDW has plenty of collections of that already...

Anyway, let's meet back here to discuss volume seven once that's released, and maybe we can talk about the 12-issue TMNT series that immediately followed the conclusion of this one, since that's still pretty fresh in my head.

Well these are pretty cool.

I was a in a toy store this weekend, picking up a very large gift that my sister had ordered for my nephew but didn't want to pay for postage one (But shhh! Don't tell him! It's supposed to be from Santa!). Anyway, me being me, before I picked that up, I spent about two hours wandering the toy store, looking at, well, everything.

Star Wars stuff is still ridiculously omnipresent. Both Transformers and, in particular, G.I. Joe seemed to be on the wane. There was a bit of superhero stuff, but Guardians of the Galaxy toys accounted for the vast majority of it. And there was a surprising amount of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles toys there, I suppose the Nickelodeon cartoon and the live action movie made for multiple reasons to stock toy store shelves with Turtles toys (although most of them seemed associated with the cartoon, not the film).

Anyway, I was kind of surprised and delighted to see the above figures. These are "Original Comic Book Leonardo" and "Original Comic Book Michelangelo"*. There were also "Original Comic Book" versions of Donatello and Raphael.

They are basically exactly what they sound like, toys based on the Turtles as they appeared in the original comic book, rather than in any of the cartoons or movies that followed, each with a red headband, no distinguishing initial on their belts and so on.

You probably can't see all that well in this shoddy cellphone image, but there appears to be some scoring on them too, as if to suggest cross-hatching.

It's a pretty neat idea. Sure, it might have been neater if they were black-and-white, but whatever; I would have been fascinated with these in junior high, and would have wanted to buy 'em in high school (If you look at the art on the packaging, that appears to be a Peter Laird penciled image of a ninja turtle, or someone drawing in Laird's style.

They came sold in two different ways. You could get just the figure for something like $7 or $8, I think, or you could get the figures packaged with a comic book for $14. The comics are the one-shot "micro-series" featuring each Turtle, from the original Mirage run, although these seem to be the IDW reprints of the same...in fact, you can see the IDW logo on the covers (Huh, I wonder if they're colorized or in the original black-and-white...?).

I imagine those comics, should they fall into the hands of children, would have the potential to blow some young minds. The Michaelangelo and Donatello ones are innocent enough. The 1985 former is called "The Christmas Aliens," and features Mikey busting some criminals who have hijacked a truckload of that year's must-have Christmas toy, the 1986 latter is Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird's most direct Jack Kirby tribute, as Don meets a cartoonist named "Kirby" who has a magical crystal that allows whatever he draws to come to life (these are mostly crazy, Kirby-esque mechanical/organic creatures).

But the Raphael and Leonardo issues are pretty hardcore. The former, also from 1985, begins with a scene in which Raphael loses his temper so badly with Michaelangelo while sparring that he nearly murders him with a wrench and then, when going out to cool off, he meets insane vigilante Casey Jones, and the pair bond by beating the hell out of each other.

The latter, from 1986, is one of the most visually accomplished, dramatic and action-packed issues of the original run. Entitled "What Goes Around...Comes Around," it's the only one of the four that has more folks credited than just Eastman, Laird and letterer Steve Lavigne. [Stephen] Bissettem, [Michael] Dooney, [Jim] Lawson and [Ryan] Brown are also credited, although it's hard to tell who did what, as is so often the case with early Mirage comics.

The narrative is split into two, with one strand featuring Leonardo out in the snow alone, fighting and killing his way through a gauntlet of Foot ninjas and the other featuring April and the other three turtles at home in her apartment, decorating the tree and beginning to celebrate Christmas. The fight scenes are much more textured and inked and shaded, while the celebration scenes are brighter and whiter and slightly less detailed (If I had to guess, I'd guess Lawson penciled the celebration scenes and either Brown and/or Eastman finished them, while the Leonardo scenes look like everyone might have had a hand in them).

Anyway, it's about 30 straight pages of ninja fighting, ending with a bloodied and beaten Leonardo being thrown through the apartment window in a three-panel, slow-motion sequence—"KER- RASS- SHHH!"—and laying on the floor gasping...

Kind of a down note to end on, huh? Oh, and good luck finding  an issue of the 28-year-old "T.M.N.T. #10!!!" kids! (If you do manage to track it down in an IDW reprint or collection of some kind,  it's, like, the ultimate low point in TMNT history. That's another issue-long fight, in which The Shredder and The Foot Clan break into April's apartment, beat the shit out of everyone and burn the place to the ground, with only the timely intervention of Casey Jones allowing our heroes to flee to safety in Northampton, where they will remain in hiding from their enemies for 12 issues or so. At that point the Turtles return to New York to kill a bunch of Foot ninja and re-kill The Shredder.)

I looked on the back of the box to see if these four figures were part of a whole line of toys based on the original comics—I'd love toys of Dave Sim's Cerebus, Renet and Savanti Romero or the Turtles with their pre-teen variant weapons from #9!—but no dice.

Still, it's nice to see toys so closely based on the original designs out there for mass consumption and, especially, mid-1980s, independent comics attached to many of them, primed to blow the minds of any kids who read them and, hopefully, set them upon the path of discovering the original TMNT comics and, through them, the world of comics in general. Eastman and Lairds' Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles was one of my original gateway comics, and look where I am today!

...

On second thought, maybe that's not such a good thing...



*Fun fact: Michaelangelo's name was "Michaelangelo" originally because, despite the fact that Splinter named his four sons after favorite Renaissance artists, Eastman and Laird misspelled "Michelangelo," adding an extra "a" where one didn't belong. I know that in in volume 4 of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, the Peter Laird-helmed Mirage series that was published right up until about the time he sold the characters to Nickelodeon, he changed the spelling to "Michelangelo," thus fixing his mistake...and, incidentally, retconning the spelling of the character's name about 20 years too late. I'm honestly not sure how it's typically spelled now in various merchandise and media—I could pull an IDW trade off my bookshelf and do some Internet research if I wanted to know terribly badly, I suppose—but on the toy packaging it's spelled "Michelangelo," the correct spelling of the name of the artist he's named for. But if you notice the cover of the comic book behind the figure, it's spelled as Eastman and Laird originally spelled it, "Michaelangelo."

On Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Vol. 4

In 1993 Kevin Eastman, Peter Laird and Mirage Studios relaunched their seminal Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles comic book series as a full-color series with a new number #1, a regular creative team (Jim Lawson penciling and writing, others helping him on inks) and a television-like ongoing, serial narrative. As discussed previously, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles volume 2 lasted only 12 issue, and Mirage seemingly suddenly ceased to be a comics-producing concern in 1995.

As for the Turtles, they moved into a new black-and-white comic with a new #1 at Image Comics. The series, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles vol. 3, was written by Gary Carlson, drawn by Frank Fosco, and featured covers by Image's Erik Larsen. It lasted just 23 issues before being canceled in 1999, due to poor sales (according to Mirage's website).

After that strange interlude, a series which saw the main characters often injured and mutilated in various ways that forced radical changes in costume and appearance, the Turtles came home to a new and rejuvenated Mirage in 2001, with the launch of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles vol. 4 (The new logo reading "TMNT" in big, bold letters, while the words the acronym stood for ran in much smaller font below it).

I admit that I didn't really give he new series much of a chance when it was originally being released on a bi-monthly schedule; I read maybe the first seven issues before deciding to drop it and maybe pick it up in trade someday. I never did pick it up in trade—I don't know if they ever actually collected any of it in trade—but I did just buy a huge chunk of it in back issue form (#1-8, #10-13, #15, #16, #18, #19, #21 and #22).

The book was a rather strange beast. It was a Mirage Turtles comic through and through, but perhaps because of the time period when it was being produced (and who I was and what my relationship with comics was at the time), it no longer seemed quite as weird or unusual, as indie or underground, as the first volume of Turtles comics from Mirage (and, to a lesser extent, the second volume).

It was black and white like the original comics, but it told an ongoing narrative, with no breaks for story arcs the way most superhero comics (and comics from superhhero publishers) are told—it wasn't being written for the trade, but was a comic book created in spite of trades. And, in that arc-less-ness, it also resembled TMNT Vol. 2.

It was a pretty nice all-around package, of the sort it's hard to think of any other books quite like it. Each issues cost $2.95 and the page count could vary rather widely, but was generally in the neighborhood of at least 32 pages (one notable exception was #10, which was sixty pages long, and thus cost $3.95). (The flexible page count really allowed every book to function as a distinct story unit of its own, and to let the scenes really breathe visually; while it's true on one hand that strict page counts force a sort of creativity and economy from creators, the opposite is also true, and it was refreshing to see scenes paced as leisurely as so many in this volume are. The third issue, for example, where something pretty momentous happens, is 48-pages long, but the price doesn't jump from $2.95).

There were never any ads in any of the books save house ads in the backs of the books, and they generally had very substantial letters columns that stretched over several pages, with Peter Laird answering the mail, sometimes at rather great length.

Yes, Peter Laird. And that was the other odd thing about the book: It was very much a Mirage comic, save for one glaring, obvious omission. Laird was quite heavily involved with the book, more heavily involved than at any time since the earlier issues of the first volume of TMNT comics. He wrote every issue, he handled the letting, he inked the art, and he also handled the toning (although, as the book progressed, the toning would disappear in favor of more stark black and white art).

The rest of the creators involved were as familiar to readers of Mirage comics as Laird was. Jim Lawson handled all the penciling once again and, with the exception of the first cover, each cover was painted by Michael Dooney, taken from a blown-up piece of Lawson's art in the interior pages. Soon, Eric Talbot would join the regular team as an inker, and Dan Berger's name appeared as production assistant.

The only name missing was Kevin Eastman, which I suppose I have mixed feelings about. On the one hand, it's interesting to see what a Peter Laird Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles comic would look like without Eastman, but it also seemed to be missing something...at least, to a certain extent. Eastman is so ingrained in the DNA of the characters that even when he's not there and actively contributing, he's still there, in the same way that when various creators would take on Eastman and Laird's characters during the artists showcase periods of the first volume (#16-18, #22-47), the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles still felt like Eastman and Laird's Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (I will say that the Eastmanless-ness of this volume seems much less wrong now that IDW has begun publishing a fifth volume of the series, as Eastman has been involved in that series, while Laird has not; in a sense then, we've now seen what each creator might do with their characters were the other not there actively contributing).

That's all behind the scenes stuff, of course. On the pages themselves, perhaps the most interesting creative choice of all was, beyond how much of himself and his longtime collaborators Laird poured into the book, was to pick up right where he, Eastman and Lawson had left off with the characters...but with the 15 years that had elapsed factored in.

So Volume 4 is continued from Vols. 1 and 2 (Volume 3, the Image Comics volume, is ignored, Laird explains, not because he didn't like it, but because it diverged so far from "his" Turtles, and it made more sense for him to continue the story he and Eastman had begun telling). But it is set in 2001, meaning that there was some 15 years or so that had passed in the characters' lives since the final issue of Volume 2 shipped.

Unlike all those superhero characters the Turtles have shared comic shop shelf space with over the years then, they were aging and had aged in real-time; the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles were no longer teenagers, but in their early 30s (Not that the title would be changed to reflect that, although perhaps that had something to do with the emphasis of "TMNT" over what the acronym stands for on the new logo). This meant that Shadow, Casey and April's adopted baby, was now a teenager herself. It meant that all of the characters were much more grown-up, and the four brothers had a greater, fuller sense of themselves; each seemed more of an individual, and older and wiser (Even Raphael's angst and anger are dialed down).

And, of course, there was a decade and a half of untold stories to be built on or referred back to. Not too long after the launch of this volume, a sister title Tales of the TMNT would launch, and many of those comics would focus on filling-in adventures from the missing years (I'm working my way through that series now; you can expect a bunch of posts on it in the near future).

Laird and Lawson's first issue is filled with rather deliberate call-backs to the first issue of the original volume, with the Turtles facing down a New York City street gang, some of their poses and dialogue directly echoing their first fight against the Purple Dragons in 1984's original outing.

The four of them live in a sewer lair in New York City, Casey and April are still together and trying to have a baby of their own together, and teenage Shadow lives at the farm house with her "grandfather" Splinter. Karai and The Foot Clan are still around, but have gone more-or-less "straight" now, and serve as ninja security contractors.

Laird presents a very big paradigm and premise shifting event almost immediately in the new series, however (In fact, the first pages of the first issue begin teasing it). The Utroms, the squishy-looking, tentacled aliens that look like brains whose chemical waste was the chemical that mutated the turtles and Splinter, return very openly, very publicly to Earth.

The scenes of alien ships arriving outside of New York City, and a rapt world watching the events unfold on television, had a very 9/11 feel to them, and, intentional or not, those televised events similarly altered that world forever: Actually, while the scenes of the characters reacting felt like 9/11, the changes wrought on the fictional New York City were obviously much bigger.

With alien visitors quickly becoming a part of every day life in New York, the Turtles are free to walk the streets openly.

Laird builds on past events quite a bit: There are Metalhead and other members of Justice Force from 1988's TMNT #15, mention of Baxter Stockman injecting April in vol. 2, talk of Triceratons, Renet makes a couple of appearances. He also engages in a great deal of world-building, which includes a passel of superheroes, a superhero hospital named for Jack Kirby, and some Kirby-esque alien life forms later on. One need not know who all these characters are, or be completely familiar with all of their past appearances, to make sense of the story at hand, however. It's enough to know that there's this make-shift family group of sorts—four mutant ninja turtles, their father/sensei mutant rat and three human beings—that have lived all kinds of wild and crazy adventures, and for whom nothing is out of the ordinary.

In fact, Laird even intentionally plays up the fact that one need not know everything about everything in one of the bigger events of the series. When one of the main characters die, the funeral is attended by familiar characters from throughout the various series...plus a few new ones created just for the scene that Laird explains in a later letter column he hopes to introduce in a flashback story in Tales at some point.

As the series progresses, the four turtles start to go their own ways, or at least get their own story arcs. Donatello joins the Utroms on an exploratory mission of a "lost world" in South America, where they find intelligent raptors that talk like Gollum and maybe the most bizarre design Lawson or Laird have ever come up with for alien creatures.

Leonardo finds himself working with The Foot.

Raphael gets attacked by some kind of vampire and mutates into a bestial, mostrous form.

And as for Michelangelo? (Yeah, here it is "Michelangelo" rather than "Michaelangelo"; Laird changed the spelling of his name, saying he did so to correct the mistaken misspelling back in 1984 that had since stuck). He is a sort of Earth tour guide for visiting aliens, since he looks alien but is actually an Earth native, and he gets involved with the weirdest plot of all...

As I mentioned, I'm missing large chunks of this particular volume, and the last one I read was #22, so I don't know exactly how it all ended, or if it did get a proper ending before it was canceled, the Turtles sold to Nickelodeon, and IDW's Volume 5—a hard reboot of the characters and their story—was launched. (If not, it would be cool if IDW hired Laird and Lawson to write the "end" of their story in a miniseries or original graphic novel at some point).

But I really liked what I read. These comics won't be the ones Peter Laird is remembered for simply because of the impact of his earliest work on the comics industry and pop culture in general, but these comics feature some of his strongest writing, and the artwork may represent the best of Lawson's non-Paleo artwork. But with Lawson it's really hard to say, as I tend to think that whenever I encounter new work of his. That huge chunk of Tales of the TMNT I've also recently acquired? Lawson does some downright stellar artwork in that too, particularly #5, which read like a response to that classic G.I. Joe #21, the "Silent Interlude" story, only dealing with a different sense.

At this point in my comics-reading career, I don't really have any interest in collecting comics as much as reading them, which is generally easy enough to accomplish, thanks to the current ubiquity of trade paperbacks and collections of all kind, but this is a series I'm going to continue looking in long-boxes at comics shops and shows for, because there's a lot of the story I still haven't read, and that is, apparently, the only way to read it.

Define "definitive": A kinda sorta review of Turtle Power

The sub-title to the direct-to-DVD documentary Turtle Power: The Definitive History of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles proves to be wildly inaccurate, although one has to actually watch the movie to find out just how inaccurate.

The "history" only really covers the first decade or so of the 30 years that have now passed since Peter Laird and Kevin Eastman published 3,000 copies of the first issue of their black and white comic book, and this coverage more or less climaxes with the surprise success of the first live-action movie in 1990. From there it winds down rather quickly, with the briefest of mentions of the second and third films, Peter Laird and Mirage's Kevin Eastman-less fourth volume of a TMNT comic, and a vague, tacked-on bit about the sale to Nickelodeon.

There's no mention at all of the Image Comics third volume of the comic (1996-1999) or the still ongoing IDW fifth volume (which saw Eastman returning to the property, now without Laird or any of his old Mirage studiomates). There's no mention of the 1997 Ninja Turtles: The Next Mutation TV show, the 2003-launched second version of a television cartoon, the 2007 computer animated feature film, or the current, third version of a television cartoon show. Nor is there any mention of this summer's live-action reboot of the film franchise, the release of which apparently goosed this long-simmering project's completion and release (The exception to all this is in brief graphic packages that occasionally appear, and will use an image of, say, Michaelangelo from the 2007 film in the background, or a poster from the 2014 film).

This will likely come as a surprise given the sub-title, and a thunderous disappointment given how damn thorough the filmmakers were chronicling the early years of Eastman, Laird and Mirage, as well as the big three developments that changed the characters from the stars of an excellent, off-beat comic book to a pop culture franchise and merchandising juggernaut: The Playmates toyline, the original cartoon series and the first film.

Had they just tweaked that sub-title to better reflect the more narrow focus of the film, the rise of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles from the innocent goofing around of two artist friends to an at-times frighteningly omnipresent cultural force, then the film's rather sudden and limp, almost weightless ending wouldn't seem such a surprise or such a disappointment.

The film was quite obviously in-development and on-the-shelf for a very long-time—you can see the elapsed years on the faces of Eastman and Laird between their interviews for the film and a scene shot on-location of their joint appearance on the occasion of the franchises 30th anniversary—and while the filmmakers do an admirable job chronicling the rise of the Turtles' star (and that of their creators), they skip almost entirely its fall and later, littler rises and falls. The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles have never really gone away, not from any of the media they've dominated—comics, television animation, film—but they were never as big as they were in the early 90s.

Additionally, there was apparently a lot of behind the scenes drama, but either because Eastman and Laird didn't want to talk about it, or the filmmakers didn't have the time, inclination or resources to follow through with it, it seems like an awful lot of story is left untold, present but unexplained.

Eastman and Laird have nothing but nice things to say about one another on camera, but they did break up, with Eastman selling his portion to Laird at one point, and they're never interviewed together for the film.

Whatever caused the split, it is merely mentioned in passing, with Laird noting that they were growing apart, and with a huge swathe of the country's geography between them (they were quite literally working side-by-side at the outset), it became difficult to continue their partnership.

Laird also mentions—somewhat sadly, even regretfully—that his 2001 return to the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles comic, published bi-monthly through Mirage with Laird working on every issue with original Mirage studiomates Jim Lawson, Eric Talbot, Michael Dooney and others, didn't quite capture the same spirit or magic that the original run with Eastman did, something he says he kept hearing from fans (For the record, I just read much of that volume of comics in one big gulp, and those were actually some pretty great comics, and I hope to put together a post on TMNT Vol. 4 sometime soon).

And as for the sale of the property to Nickelodeon—which lead to the current IDW comics line (with Eastman rather heavily contributing to TMNT comics for the first time in years), the current cartoon series and the Michael Bay-produced, Megan Fox-starring feature film—there's only a vague, rather oblique mention (In fact, I'm not entirely sure the word "Nickelodeon" even appears in the film).

Nevertheless, what the film does do, it does rather well.

The origins of the comic book will likely be familiar to most fans of the comics. After the much younger Eastman, who discovered a black-and-white, newsprint anthology comic someone left on a bus got in touch with the guy who was putting it together, Peter Laird, the two formed their Mirage Studios (so named because there wasn't really anything there).

One night Eastman draws a turtle standing upright with nunchucks strapped to its forearm and wearing a bandana-style mask. Laird responds by drawing his own version of the same character.

Eventually, they draw four turtles in masks with different weapons, under the words "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles"...

...and the pair decide they need to tell the story of where these characters came from. Pouring everything they liked about comics—but, at that point, a whole lot of Frank Miller and Jack Kirby and a dollop of Dave Sim's Cerebus*—into Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles #1.

As a fan of the comics first and foremost, this was obviously my favorite part of the film, and it was great to see Mirage Studios guys Jim Lawson, Steve Lavigne, Ryan Brown and Michael Dooney interviewed. Eric Talbot appears, being named by Laird (I believe) while there's a shot of him drawing a ninja turtle over his shoulder, but he doesn't have any lines.

Later in the film, Ross Campbell and Mark Bode are both interviewed too, but only as fans and artists; it's not mentioned that Campbell has worked on bits and pieces of Volume 5 (although maybe he hadn't when they interviewed him...? Or maybe that was just someone with the same name as the comic book artist "Ross Campbell"...?) or that Bode did a couple of issues of the original volume (#18, #32 and one-shot Times Pipeline).

Eastman offers a bit of insight about what made the original comics he and Laird produced so special, noting that they had decided early on that every single page would have at least a little bit of both of them on it somewhere, in the writing, penciling, inking, toning, whatever, so that one couldn't tell where one of them left off and the other began (It's strange; I can spot an all-Eastman or all-Laird image easily now, but in those first handful of issues especially, when they're styles were still forming, it is fairly impossible to pull out who did what on what panel).

Eastman noted that April was based on a girl who used to date, that Casey Jones was based on Kurt Russell from Big Trouble In Little China (the vigilante inspired to fight crime by crime movies and bad television named Casey Jones whose weapon of choice was a baseball bat was Eastman; the hockey mask and golf bag full of sporting equipment with which to bludgeon people was Laird), and the reason they killed off The Shredder in the very first issue was that there wasn't supposed to be any more issues. The original plan was to just make the one comic, because they wanted to make a comic, and that's what they had come up with.

That their weird, violent little comic became the big deal it eventually would, that it would go mainstream at all, does rather boggle the mind, despite the goofy appeal of that almost-magical four-word title: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. That it did owes a lot to licensing guy Mark Freedman, who is present in the documentary almost as much as Eastman and Laird are.

He shops the property around, eventually finding interest in a toyline at Playmates and, this being the late '80s, toy lines were sold not with commercials so much as animated television shows that functioned as commercials, and so animation producer Fred Wolf (also interviewed extensively) put together the first five episodes and y, was, really, going to be it. Playmates told Eastman and Laird they could expect a three-year lifespan for the toyline if it was successful, and the cartoon people made a five-episode miniseries.

Obviously, both were wildly popular, and lasted far longer than that.

The toy stuff was particularly interesting for the roads not traveled (and, as it reached its waning years, the weird-ass roads it did travel), and how it changed and informed (mutated?) the original characters who, in the comics, were indistinguishable from one another. Now they had to have different-colored masks and initials on their belts (otherwise, you could just buy one or two turtle and some accessories). The cartoon development stuff, conducted mostly with Fred Wolf and writer David Wise, likewise for how it moved the characters and concept.

Everyone realized rather early on that it was a little too adult in its comic form—the logo for the first issue had a blood-soaked katana in it, after all—and they really seemed to glom on to certain aspects of the franchise, like the fact that the characters dwelled in a sewer (which informed the aesthetic of all their vehicles and such-like) or that they were teenagers (that's where their love of pizza came from, Wise said, as he tried to think about what it was that teenagers did; he also seems to be the primary developer of Michaelangelo's extra-comics personality, as he said he tried to make Michaelangelo the character who most embodied the "teenage" part of their name**).

Turtle Power stages a reunion of the vocal cast of the original cartoon, which was...weird, really, seeing those familiar voices coming out of the faces of middle-aged human adults (Particularly hearing Donatello's voice cominng out of Barry Gordon; Gordon didn't really do anything to his voice to play the turtle; he just talked like himself. I remember being disconcerted by this even as a child, since his was also the voice of the Quick Bunny in my youth). Also of interest? Townsend Coleman based Michaelangelo's voice on that of Sean Penn in Fast Times at Ridgemont High and Pat Fraley played Krang as his impersonation of a Jewish mother because it amused him to do so.

The section on the 1990 film is even more extensive still, and, while it's been a while since I've seen it, and the film certainly made me want to see it again, it was fairly fascinating to hear just how technically difficult it was to produce (in the days before computers, there were stuntmen in rubber suits, and radio-controlled, robot/animatronic heads on the turtle actors) and how risky a film it was—or at least how risky it was presented as by the producers, directors and others involved, perhaps to add drama to the documentary.

After that, the film begins its petering-out phase, with brief mentions of the second and third films, a surprisingly extensive segment the "Coming Out Of Their Shells" live tour in which the Turtles held rock concerts (In the documentary's biggest surprise, The State's Michael Ian Black and Robert Ben Garant*** are interviewed about their involvement in that), a montage of the range of "Turtle Mania" and a quick, final check-in with Eastman and Laird, including their previously mentioned joint appearance.

It's far from perfect—What film with the words Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles in it has been?—but there is a lot of interest in it, and it likely goes down smoother when you know what to expect.

I think what I found most compelling about the film is how big the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles got, how fast they got there and how much of that success their creators were able to enjoy in their life time. And the fact that Eastman and Laird didn't seem to be trying for any of that success makes it all the more compelling. Which isn't to say that they weren't smart and savvy businessmen, or that they didn't work their asses off, but, at the start, they didn't sit around thinking of how they were going to come up with a blockbuster multi-media franchise.

They were just writing and drawing the comic book they wanted to write and draw and, when they saw that it was successful enough that they could earn a living just writing and drawing a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles comic, they kept doing it. Everything else was just so much gravy-so, so, sooooooo much gravy. This seems to be the opposite of how so much of the comics industry and so many aspiring comics creators approach comics today wherein concept after concept and title after title reads like a spec script for a Hollywood film, getting storyboarded and test-marketed as a comic book to the direct market.

Most of those fail, of course, but I've lost count of how many I've seen in the last 10 years or so. The strange set of right place, right time circumstances that lead to the creation of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and their re-creation as a family friendly franchise, isn't really something anyone could set out to try and repeat. But if there's a lesson for aspiring comics creators to be gleaned from this film, it would appear to be that you write and draw what you want to write and draw because it's what you want to do, and if it turns into something more, count yourself lucky or blessed.



*Sim and Cerebus are mentioned by name, and Sim appears via photograph an Cerebus via a drawing, but Sim is not interviewed or anything. There's no discussion of Eastman and Laird's collaboration with him on Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles #8, the Cerebus team-up issue that introduced Renet and Savanti Romero, either.
It's a huge, and hugely unexpected success.

**He also claims responsibility for the catch phrase "Cowabunga!" I don't recall seeing it in any of the earliest comics, so I'm not going to argue. There's a scene in those first five episodes where a building floods, and Michaelangelo rides a desk like a surfboard. Wise said he got the line from Snoopy in Peanuts.

***Both have gone on to do bigger stuff they are both better known for, and I know from recent conversations with twentysomethings that there are a lot of people who don't know what the hell The State is, but they will always be "Two of the guys from The State" to me, dammit.

On Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Vol. 2

The comics industry of 1993, it goes without saying, was a much different one than that of 2014. In fact, it was likely almost as different from today's as it was from 1984's, which is the industry that Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird launched their Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles comic series into, coming up with a surprise hit that had myriad, unpredictable consequences, not the least of which was making that unlikely collection of nouns into a household name.

Looking back from the year 2014, it's difficult to tell, or even guess or theorize as to what exactly went wrong with Eastman, Laird and their Mirage Studios' second volume of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, a full-color series that launched in the wake of the 13-part "City At War" storyline that brought the first volume, which ran for 63 issues over almost a decade, to a close.

Sure, it had new #1 issue (generally thought of as a good thing, even to this day), and yes, it was now in full color for the first time ever (Certain Turtles specials and reprint projects aside). The logo was new-ish, but it was the same one that had been adorning Mirage's TMNT book since "City At War" kicked off with the fiftieth issue. The creative team hadn't really changed at all since "City At War"; Jim Lawson was still drawing and writing it (Eastman and Laird were apparently overseeing he storyline closely, but didn't get writing credits). Jason Tumjin Minor was still inking it, when other Mirage regulars like Eric Talbot weren't.

Heck, "City" cover artist A.C. Farley even provided the first cover, although after that cover duties were taken over by Peter Laird and Kevin Eastman, who would really be the ideal artists to draw covers for a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles comic, no?

And, like the last year or so of the first volume (and the fourth volume, that would follow almost a decade later, in 2001), there weren't really discrete story arcs with beginnings, middle and ends, but rather,t he storyline just kept going on in an old-school, truly serial fashion.

So why did the second volume of Eastman and Laird's TMNT last only 13 issues, the same length as "City At War"...?

I have no idea, and I wonder if it might not have had more to do with external forces than any particular rejection of the book by the comics market of 1993-1995, or any sort of creative exhaustion of the concept.

Reading it all at once for the first time though, I can tell you that it was not very good. Of the three Mirage-produced volumes of the series, it is probably the weakest, but I'm guessing it was something more akin to external forces that cut the series short, based on the fact that Lawson really seemed to be setting up future directions for the characters, as the four title characters were starting to go their own ways, even finding new places to live, before they were quite quickly brought back together to resolve all of the dangling plotlines in a rather abrupt fashion.

The series begins more-or-less where the last ended. Donatello, who broke his leg in the climactic fight with the Foot Clan in "City At War," is living in a cave in rural Massachusetts with Splinter. The other three Turtles are living in New York City, in the basement of the new apartment building owned by April and Casey, who are living together as a couple and raising Shadow, the baby Casey adopted from his dead lover Gabrielle, as their own.

This first issue—the one with the striking, wraparound Farley painting of the Turtles racing through a dimly-lit sewer for a cover—is entitled "Memories of the Future," and serves as a sort of dreamy preview of the series, consisting almost entirely of scenes of the cast between disturbing visions and dreams, some of which presage events to come in the following 12 issues, some of which ultimately go nowhere—perhaps because plans changed, or perhaps because the book ended earlier than intended.

Splinter dreams of himself bloody and beaten at the feet of one of the Turtles, whose right hand is stained in blood. When he and Donatello meditate on it further, Don sees himself in Japan in the future, but he can't imagine why he was there; "To bury me," Splinter tells him.

Casey dreams of a big, monstrous verson of himself in a black hockey mask; a sort of Casey Jones-specific grim reaper.

April has a nightmare of her old, evil boss Baxter Stockman rescuing her from marauding Mousers.

Raphael is running around the sewers, where he encounters a giant rat. Leonardo is strapped to a table, a blue (Blue? I always thought they were orange) Triceraton and an alien injecting him with a shot. And Michalengelo? He was watches TV.

Though the creative team doesn't change too significantly throughout the rest of the series—Talbot will occasionally ink, colorist Eric Vincent will occasionally get assistance from "Altered Earth,"—this is for whatever reason the best-looking book of the volume. Perhaps it owes to the fact that there was the greatest lead-time, given even the apparently always-fast Lawson time to linger over the pages longer than usual, or perhaps it owes simply to the fact that story and plot are almost incidental to the issue, making for a greater emphasis on visuals.

For whatever reason, the story of the second volume begins in earnest in the next issue.

The Turtles start to go their own ways, with Raphael deciding to move out (he finds a nice abandoned storage attic atop a cathedral, but never actually gets to move in), Leonardo returning to the sewer lair (where he has an adventure of his own featuring a gigantic, monstrous, almost Gamera-sized snapping turtle and a fish-creature akin to those from TMNT #28 and/or the syndicated newspaper comic strip. Michelangelo, for his part, plans to stay in the basement apartment, close to Shadow.

The main villain of this volume is the mad robotocist and Mouser inventor Baxter Stockman, not seen since the first handful of issues of volume one (The current IDW series, and the cartoon shows, made much greater use of the character). He has apparently been held all this time at a secret Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency facility, where he built himself an incredibly powerful robot body...and then cut his own brain out and installed it into the body. From there, he headed towards New York City, to finally get his revenge on April and the Turtles.

Federal agents and a mysterious bald guy are, understandably, interested.

Stockman's revenge on April involves jabbing her with a syringe full of...something (it would take ten years for that to resolve itself in Vol. 4), but the battle with the Turtles is a bit more traditional, involving guns and rockets on rooftops.

The three Turtles are eventually joined in the battle by Donatello and their Massachusetts vigilante friend Nobody (now sporting a very '90s costume, one which replaces the cape with a bunch of pouches and makes him look more like an off-model Snake Eyes than a logo-less or branding-free Moon Knight or Batman type vigilante).

The good guys win, and Stockman's robot body (and the human brain inside it) are eventually completely destroyed, but not before Stockman can hurl Raph off a rooftop.

He survives, but ends up being taken by...someone.

The final few issues of the series deal with the Turtles and their friends—Nobody, Casey, and a mysterious bald psychic fellow who is able to deus ex machina them the location of Raph—arriving in the Nevada desert to infiltrate the DARPA facility and free him.

It turns out Raphael's being kept with a veritable menagerie of various aliens, including an off-model Aliens alien and a Triceraton (orange again). Despite the number of ninjas in the group, their entrance is very loud generates a great deal of attention, meaning they will have to try and fight their way out. Making matters worse, the Triceraton proves somewhat treacherous, and he has a ship full of allies not too far away, ones who would rather attack Earth in a kamikaze, world-ending fashion than admit defeat.

So what begins as an action-packed infiltration scene eventually transforms into a save-the-world type scenario.

Suffice it to say, nobody dies—well, Nobody dies, but nobody other than Nobody dies—the world is saved, and their new psychic friend even manages to put everyone back together with little memory of what actually happened. In the final scene, Leonardo awakes as if from a dream, and Casey has no memory of what just occurred. (I think it worth noting here too that the interior art really rallies in the last few issues, when Lawson begins inking his own work, and a great deal of detail returns to the pencil art that wasn't there in some of the previous issues).

I had mentioned that the book wasn't very good, but what, precisely, was wrong with it? Well, the little editorial-like introductions to the issues often signed by Peter Laird, and what commentary I've read from he and Eastman elsewhere indicated that with "City At War" and this volume they wanted to reassert control over the lives and stories of their characters, as the book had become more-or-less an anthology title for much of what occurred between #12 and #47 of the original series, with different creators offering wildly different takes and tones, some of which clearly didn't fit within anything resembling a greater continuity (Michael Zulli's three-issue arc, for example), even if they were awesome comics.

It's true, of course, but then, even when Eastman and Laird were doing pretty much everything themselves on the title, in the first dozen issues or so, it didn't exactly read like an ongoing storyline with a long-term plot or consistent direction. The characters were introduced, their origin told, they met their archenemy and killed him—end issue #1. The next few issues, they met a human friend in April, fought some robots, the end. They went into outer-space for a few issues. They travelled back in time—or to another comic book's universe—to meet and fight alongside Dave Sim's Cerebus the Aardvark, for one issue.

The series, from the beginning, was one that occurred more-or-less in fits and starts, with little in the way of issue-to-issue continuity. I think Rick Veitch's three-issue "The River" run was about as long as any storyline Eastman and Laird produced before "City At War." The Turtles characters, at least in the Mirage books, seemed to be a group of character that, collectively or individually (remember, key points of their history—the introduction of Casey Jones, the return of the Foot Clan and "The Shredder"—occurred in single-issue "micro-series) had weird stuff happen to them, quite often at something approaching random.

That's what made "City At War" seem so unusual and, I suppose, Volume Two so strange. It's another 13-part story arc, featuring characters that only quite rarely had story arcs, and almost never of that length, rather full of call-backs to earlier continuity which, again, isn't something that was too often encountered in Turtles comics.

Could that have been what went wrong? I don't know. Read all at once like this, the plot holds together fairly well, despite the few paths suggested and abandoned, but I imagine it was incredibly frustrating when read on its original monthly—or bi-monthly, I suppose—schedule, when the free-form, punctuation-free, endless narrative would likely seem to meander quite a bit (particularly at a time in comics when, if "writing for the trade" hadn't yet emerged as an everywhere-you-look phenomenon, at the very least story arcs were the dominant form of serial comics storytelling. Also,t hat weird first issue where nothing really happened that wasn't a dream likely didn't help get anyone too excited about issue #2, two months hence).

Personally, I enjoyed the plotting just fine (this time around), but there was little-to-no character development, which seemed rather strange given the big events in the characters' lives, like the four brothers being separated for the first time, or April and one-time practically insane vigilante Casey Jones being in a relationship with one another and trying to raise an orphaned child. Perhaps it's silly to want more out of a comic book called Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, but I felt like the plot and sophistication of the comics-making might have grown as I grew, but the storytelling hadn't...certainly not enough to justify scrapping the book Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles had become before "City" in an attempt to recapture a book it never really was, whether that was what it's original creators intended it to be or not.

I additionally found it a little weird that Splinter never reappears after the first issue, April has almost nothing at all to do for the entirety of the series and Casey goes mask-less and bat-less throughout, even when fighting, as in one instance where he attacks some federal agents...

and in the assault on DARPA plot that fills the last few issues, wherein he spend the entire time brainwashed into thinking he's Arnold Schwarzenegger.

"I planted a suggestion in Casey's brain that he was the world's best assault team leader," the mysterious bald psychic man says, by way of explaining some of Casey's action heroics.

I don't think color helped much, although I did appreciate the look of it in the first and final issues (Color on Lawson art is, I realized, something I've very, very rarely seen). The color on the covers tends to look pretty sickly though, which I think may have been more a result of the coloring technology of the time period than any sort of misapplication. Comics coloring was moving in leaps and bounds at that time period, and a lot of ugly-looking comics resulted. I like Laird's art, I like Eastman's art, I like the way their collaborative art looks, but a lot of these covers are pretty terrible-looking.

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Most of the issues contain back-up stories of varying degrees of quality. The first of these is "I.M.P." It's a three-part story by Eric Talbot and Lawson about a little black cat with white "socks" of fur trying to escape a high-security facility and doing so, despite all the guns fired at it.

A much longer one is the seven-part "Bog: Swamp Demon" by writer Ryan Brown and artists Matt Roach, which features a Swamp Thing/Man-Thing/Heap-like swamp creature, albeit one with a decidedly more supernatural and demonic twist. The Bernie Wrightson-like art features a "star" who looks more-or-less like your standard muck man from the neck down, but has a horrifying skull-like visage (atop of his head is actually see white skull peeking up out of the dark green skin), and a crown of gnarled branches emanating from its head.

The writing and art are very reminiscent of 1970s horror comics from superhero publishers, as Bog deals with his own tragic origin, fighting a human serial killer that isn't actually human, and plenty of other monsters and demons, including Satan himself.

The story is a little hard to follow, and not helped any by the fact that its chapters are printed out of order. The coloring shifts from dark and muddy at the beginning, to sharp and clear at the end, making it a lot easier to appreciate Roach's artwork.

I was tempted to devote a whole blog post to Bog, if only to provide more swamp monster content for comics retailer, blogger and muck-encrusted mockery of a man enthusiast Mike Sterling, but it sounds like he may be pretty busy in the near future.