In other news, water = wet
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Dark and gritty indeed, but there was also e.g. that one time they fell through a wormhole and had to fight in a galactic wrestling match for the amusement of a bunch of triceratops aliens. Or the time they ran into a bored time traveler and got sent back in time to cross over with Cerebus the Aardvark. The tone was never really consistent.
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If they make a Turtles movie with Cerebus Iâll go see itâŚ
You can blame Michael Bay all you want, but I rather blame the people that keep giving him money. If you want there to stop being stupid Michael Bay movies that are terrible, first you have to convince the audience not to pay for them.
If you make a terrible product, and people keep giving you millions of dollars for it; are you really going to stop making a terrible product?
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In between Daredevil and Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, Frank Miller created a miniseries/graphic novel titled Ronin, or as the cover proclaimed it, Frank Millerâs Ronin. In addition to being more violent than Millerâs work on Daredevil (which itself pushed the limits of the Comic Code Authority, still in effectâa couple of issues concerning drug abuse were kept from being published, for a while), it represented an advance in Millerâs style which in turn was a radical departure from the more traditional cartooning of people like John Byrne and George Perez. I donât think that it was that successful, in sheer numbers of copies sold, but it got a lot of publicity, and was sold exclusively through the direct market (i.e. comics stores). Because it was so distinctive and stuck to a relatively small set of tropes and themesâJapanese/Okinawan martial arts, superheroes and supervillains with no or limited superpowers, a combination of manga and anime influences with a film noir sensibilityâDaredevil and Millerâs work in general was easy to parody, and in fact, before he himself went to work in American comics, Alan Moore wrote a Miller Daredevil parody, âDourdevil: The Man Without a Sense of Humour.â
So these two guys, Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird, decided to do their own Miller parody. Truth be told, they werenât very good, but it was fairly easy to signify Millerâs favorite tropes without having to be anywhere near as good as Miller was. Their original title, Eastman and Lairdâs Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, was a direct nod to Ronin, even in design, and the rest of it was almost pure Miller Daredevil; in fact, even though the âTeenage Mutantâ part of it was a nod to Marvelâs The New Mutants (an updating of the teen-superheroes-in-training theme of the original X-Men), their origin was more like Daredevilâsâin fact, IIRC, it was implied that the radioactive ooze that created the TMNTs was the same canister that took young Matt Murdockâs sight and gave him supersenses. It was a decent funny-animal parody, but nothing that great; mostly, it was a bit jarring to see funny animals killing people with alacrity. But it was popular enough to go through multiple printings, which was highly unusual in comics circles; most comics of the time were printed in the four-color process on cheap newsprint in numbers well in excess of sales with the extras being pulped or sold at a discount with their covers removed. The fact that this weird little parody actually went back to press started a speculation on copies of the first printing, which in turn fueled a boom in publication of black-and-white comics (up until then, a tiny fraction of the direct sales market, limited mostly to undergrounds and independent publishers such as Fantagraphics) and, in particular, direct TMNT ripoffs, starting with Adolescent Radioactive Black Belt Hamsters and ending, I think, with (I shit you not) Pre-Teen Dirty Gene Kung Fu Kangaroos.
And then someone got the idea to make it into a much-less-dark cartoon, and, well, you know the rest.
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Personally, I have never paid to see a Michael Bay film, but I guess heâs the director we deserve.
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Yeah, I donât know why youâd want to pirate this. I saw the first Transformers in the theater and havenât bothered seeing another one since.
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It was pretty good, for the most part. It was the first comic where I realized different artists could draw the same characters in different ways, and thatâs ok. I loved Dooneyâs turtles, and Veitchâs turtles, and Corbenâs turtles. When I was a kid, I hated Zulliâs turtles, and Hedden & McWeenyâs turtles, but I like them now. Ahh, memories. Anyway, it was a fantastic book.
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I recently picked up the color reprints of TMNT: Return to New York. #19, 20, and 21 of the Mirage published comics. Some gorgeous art by Jim Lawson. Lots of iconic two page spreads.
Mrrr. Iâm kind of torn on that. Iâm okay with artists bringing their personal style to the characters, but they still need to be recognizable. Those first three you linked are clearly different takes on the same characters. The last one clearly reads as âMad-style parody of the TMNT,â and I might roll my eyes because Iâm not really interested in that, but it gets the job done, and presumably fits the tone of that particular issue. But the fourth one, ZulliâŚthatâs perfectly good art, but those arenât the TMNT. Their anatomyâs all wrong. Your Corben example shows that itâs possible to make the basic shapes of the TMNT read accurately even in a more realistic/detailed style, but Zulliâs take is more like making a white character black with no explanation.
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