Eastman & Laird’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
Mirage Studios Volume 1, Issue 2
Story & Art by Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird
Read it at NinjaTurtles.com

There Is One God, and He Is Baxter Stockman

And it sold well, and they scrambled. “Oh crap, we gotta make another? We already did ninjas, so what’s the second-coolest thing for the heroes to fight?” That’s an easy enough answer. Robots. Which means issue three will be werewolves, issue four sharks, five terrorists, all the way down to giant caterpillars at thirty-one and the British at sixty.

“So we’re got robots, but it’s gotta be personal. How can we make it personal?” What if, and this is a crazy idea here, so bare with me, those robots were originally designed to hunt rats? “I don’t follow.” Because Master Splinter is a rat. “I follow!”

Book 2 brings us the Mousers, those lovable little robot ratcatchers designed by Baxter Stockman (quizzically presented here as a black man with non-compound eyes — although he wears glasses, so that’s kinda compound) that sent many a joystick waggling in our youths.

More significantly, it also brings us the Turtles’ jumpsuited human friend April O’Neil, who was responsible for more than a few waggled joysticks of her own. But unlike the cartoon show, this April isn’t a TV news reporter — no, that would lead to too many easy plotlines, and as established, these guys gotta make it difficult for themselves. In this original incarnation, April is a computer scientist and assistant to Stockman. What she isn’t, though, is observant — it takes her a while to clue in that her boss has built an army of Mousers, and is using them to rob banks around the city. But that’s only the first stage of his nefarious scheme:

He’s threatening to knock down the World Trade Center. Let me say that again. He is threatening to knock down the World Trade Center. You know, Eastman & Laird, if you’re going to toss off some random plot-interestening danger, you’re best not to pick something that might just actually happen and might just send even the burliest of a culture’s gladiator men weeping under their mommy’s beds.

Of course, it’s complete coincidence, and would be ridiculous to imply any causal connection between the two, and yet here I go: picture a 27-year-old Osama bin Laden sitting in his cave reading the new issue of this independent, hipster-imperialist comic magazine, coming to page 21, and thinking “Hmm, now there’s an idea…” I’m not saying Eastman & Laird should be held accountable for 9/11, I’m just saying that Laird should be held accountable for 9/11, since Eastman sold off his ownership of the company some years back. But most importantly, this should be seen as a lesson to all artists: watch yourselves.

Though now that I think about it, perhaps E&L aren’t the Taliban sympathizers I’ve made them out to be. After all, the army of Mousers are unquestionably the villains of the tale, the way they advance on our heroes in mobs, their robotic ululations calling out for an end to freedom and prosperity. And to top it all off with a miniature flag, their wise creator Baxter Stockman — or, as the Mousers call him, Allah — gets served up a three-fingered, American-style knuckle sandwich, courtesy of ultraXtremepatriot Raphael.

Now that our boys have taken out Mechanical Ali, it’s time to stop his army of jihadibots. Naturally, their first inclination is to whip up a quick computer virus, give those metal bastards a bad case of the sniffles. But they decide it’s too impractical, mostly because computer-nerd Turtle Donatello (character development alert!) can’t work the keyboard with his fat fingers.

Plan B is to cut the power. Now, I’m no robotistician, but I’m pretty sure turning off the electricity won’t make all that much difference to a bunch of clearly battery-operated killing machines. There’s some other mumbo-jumbo about transmitters and such, but it all reads like voodoo to me.

Personally, I think the approach the Turtles were already taking was the best one: smash shit up. Robots break real well when you smack ‘em with nunchucks. And if there were too many for them to fight off, well, then they don’t really deserve to survive, do they? I think Splinter would agree.