Influential: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Adventures
I’ve talked more than once about the influence the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles had on my adolescence. The cartoon debuted in 1987 and I was right around ten when I discovered. I distinctly remember watching the first week’s worth of episodes over a summer syndication right after moving from my childhood home into a school district I hated. In sixth and seventh grade, the Ninja Turtles were one my greatest refuges from the shit that threatened to overwhelm my young life.
For the first few months, it was all about the cartoon. But I already gravitated to comics when I enjoyed something. My collection at the time mostly consisted of G.I. Joe and Transformers with issues of M.A.S.K. and Sectaurs intermixed. My forays into superhero comics were fairly new still, but I already knew that comics were often far better than cartoons. And I certainly knew about the Turtles’ comic origins as I read three of the four First Comics collections of the first twelve Mirage issues in color. I started to pick up Mirage issues when I could found them, but living in a town of a hundred in the middle of nowhere Iowa did not make access to comic specialty shops easy. Thankfully, Archie Comics rode in to the rescue.
The heroes and villains of the Adventures Universe illustrated by A.C. Farley. Characters copyright their respective owners.
After an initial three issue limited series in 1988 (probably my first exposure to the characters outside the toys) the series started bimonthly in 1989. I bought the book sporadically early on as it continued the original limited series’ adaptations of TV episodes. It was the debut of artist Chris Allan on the book that would hook me though right around the title’s 20 issue. The “Midnight Son” arc introduced the Warrior Dragon, Chien Khan and the Turtles’ nemesis-turned-ally Ninjara. These Turtles weren’t grounded like the Mirage ones nor were they goofy like the cartoon ones. The book mixed international culture, cool characters and crazed action. It proved to be everything I wanted in a comic. Allan’s clean line art in the era of a billion hatch lines drew my eye and I was irrevocably hooked as a fan of the book.
Mirage veteran Stephen Murphy wrote the series pretty much throughout using the pseudonym Dean Clarrain. He could sometimes get preachy with his pet topics (often with no depth given to those causes), he wasn’t particularly out of line with the usual messages of that era’s Archie Comics or entertainment for young people in general. Environmental messages popped up every few issues. But as part of that spread and just out of basic storytelling sense for a book revolving around mutant animals fighting mutant animals, the Turtles and company rarely spent any time in New York.
The book sometimes felt like a travelogue as the Turtles made their way across the country, the galaxy and eventually up and down the timeline. They met a plethora of allies that would eventually join forces for their own spinoff, the Mighty Mutanimals. They encountered a bunch of badass threats not seen on the cartoon: Null, Armaggon, Maligna and the like. Krang was barely an afterthought. Bebop and Rocksteady rarely appeared. Shredder resurfaced every year or so, but he was always a more dangerous threat with each appearance. It was a far cry from the comically inept villains from the cartoon.
When I first started to write novels and short stories set in the MHP Universe, I was a bit all over the place. A large number of my tales focused around the city of Federation, the so-called City of Champions, home of Lightweight. But as I introduced new locales across Epsilon, Smoke and Ash and the like, I realized that I would never be able to cover all the locales and individual stories I would like to write. I would consolidate a ton of heroes I created over the years into F.O.R.C.E. (more on that front soon), but that book could never travel to every corner of the MHP Universe.
I wanted a series that could travel far and wide and tell the stories I wanted to tell both about the heroes themselves and the world they lived in. KITH was already in development at the time, even as I looked back at Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Adventures as a resource for the kind of world-spanning tales I wanted to tell. I had already locked in the four heroes of KITH, but their brotherhood became absolute as I realized that familial times not unlike those of Donatello, Leonardo, Michelangelo and Raphael could explain their connection. The influence of those books would bridge a gap of an idea already built around ideas gleaned from other famous comic foursomes, from the Challengers of the Unknown to Fantastic Four to even KISS.
With KITH now up on Kickstarter, I’m now sharing the first world-spanning ideas. The brothers start in Federation, but their adventures take them to New York, a strange border-town between Mexico and the United States, the African veldt and deep into space.
If you’re interested in the series, almost the entire run (minus two poorly thought-out and culturally insensitive issues) are collected in trade by IDW.
