Fugitoid
Mirage Studios Volume 1, Issue 1
Story & Art by Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird
Read it at NinjaTurtles.com

A Marketable New Friend Shows Up

So Mike was all hot for Coach Lubbock’s teenage daughters, and of course the girls were total flirts in return. But Lubbock was very protective of his girls and would fly off the handle whenever a boy even spoke to them.

Naturally, he and Mike had a strained — but hilarious — relationship. Which made it all the more surprising that Mike was Coach Lubbock’s number one defender after the coach was fired by the high school. You see, the coach had a large family — a wife and eight kids, including a newborn — and Mike knew that difficult times lay ahead for ol’ Lubbock. See, Mike Seaver ain’t such a bad kid.

And things worked out okay for the coach, too. He got a new job right away — at an all-boys Catholic school on the other side of the country, in hot, sunny California. The school was even good enough to make a special exception on that “all-boys” rule — Coach Lubbock’s teenage daughters were admitted as students. Four flirtatious teenage girls in a school with only boys, and their scary, overprotective father there to watch over them? Who knows what wacky antics will occur?

Personally, I see the spin-off as a sacred institution — only when you’ve built up a strong trust with an audience, through skilled and passionate storytelling, are you then free to invite them on a whole new adventure with a whole new gang of friends. You need to have the clout of a Happy Days to offer up a Mork & Mindy, the pedigree of a CSI to introduce a CSI: Miami and/or New York.

And I just don’t think that, after only four issues and a special, Eastman & Laird’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles could justify this “Fugitoid” business. Family Matters didn’t happen until the fifth season of Perfect Strangers.

He sure is a cute little guy, though. Kind of Urkel-ish, or perhaps more Urkelbot-ish. Yeah, so far I’ve been a bit hard on E&L in the plotting department, but I have to give them credit: they can sure design a great character. The Turtles themselves, Shredder, the mousers — all wicked, look-wise. And Baxter Stockman is clearly an evil Billy Dee Williams, which was definitely the right artistic choice.

So they can do the art part just fine. Which makes me wonder why, if they’re looking to jumpstart another franchise here, would they open with the ugliest picture ever drawn?

Nightmares it brings.

That grotesque creature up there is Professor Honeycut, some sort of genius scientist on a bizarre alien planet millions of light-years away from Earth where the dominant species are human-like but obviously not human but still speak English and sport buzzcuts. When a bolt of what I have to assume is wizard’s magical lightning swaps out his brain into a dopey worker robot’s body, he’s forced to go on the lam, accused of a crime he didn’t commit — his own murder!! Because they found his ugly human (-like) body all charred from the lightning, you see. Now, why they’re so convinced a worker ‘bot did this, I’m not sure. Unless they built their worker ‘bots with the ability to fire bolts of lighting. In which case, I have to say they were just waiting for this to happen.

Honeycut’s evil military boss soon figures out that a brain switch has taken place, and he formulates an evil plan: he’ll capture the fugitive android and force him to build all sorts of evil weaponry! He couldn’t do this before, when the human (-like) Honeycut was still his employee, because human (-likes) have rights. But not robots. Come on, whatever-planet-this-is-taking-place-on, these ain’t the 1950s no more, this is the whateverth-century-it-is-on-this-planet! You know, in some galaxies, not so far away, they even let robots gay marry.

The rest of the book is basically a chase through this crazy planet of mad insanity. Its evolutionary path is so entirely separate from our own that nothing is recognizable, from its flying cars and its robot marketplaces, to its seedy underbelly of space drugs and alien whores. And its forests full of giant poops.

How then is this a spinoff? There have been neither mutant turtle nor desperate spinster trying to hook up with said mutant turtle thus far in the story. Yeah, technically, I don’t know if this really counts as a spinoff. But the worlds do collide on the last page when, out of the blue, the Greens teleport into the middle of tense Fugitoid vs. spacecops situation. Recall: they teleported away at the end of TMNT #4. Apparently the teleporter was pointed at some random, dusty alley on this distant planet.

Is this the right marketing strategy? How were readers supposed to know that TMNT #4 played out in this book? It wasn’t mentioned on the cover — of course it wasn’t, that would spoil the surprise. But really, the surprise is the only reason anyone would ever read this book.

Anyway, the Fugitoid went on to be a famous character, beloved by America and the world over for his adorable beeps and blorps and the way he saved the President and … I don’t know. Fugitoid. Who the fuck is Fugitoid?