Eastman & Laird’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
Mirage Studios Volume 1, Issue 7
Story & Art by Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird
Bonus story “You Had to Be There” by Kevin Eastman and Richard Corbin
Read it at NinjaTurtles.com

Life Begins at Ooze

Finally, all this space madness gets wrapped up, and wrapped up in a tidy little package of ass-kicking at that. Sweet, soothing action is pretty much all this issue is, with constant man-on-robot-on-dinosaur-on-turtle brawling and a couple of space-beam explosions tossed in for balance.

And … Hm. I was going to start up a plot summary here, but really, that last paragraph tells it all. They’re teleported back home, they fight, they win.

We’re treated to some flashback sequences, which were included, I have to assume, as counterpoint. The fighting seems all the more exciting when paired with this most dull of storytelling devices. First there’s a restatement of what happened to Splinter in issue #3, then we learn where the Krang aliens came from, which leads into a retelling of the TMNT origin story. If you’ll allow me to flash myself back to what I just said there: this issue has three flashbacks, two of which contained no new information. I’m not sure what to make of that.

But the one truly educational flashback does allow us a rare opportunity to compare origin tales. The fundamentals — four baby turtles, goo in sewer, rat with coffee can (I’m not sure why the coffee can is so fundamental, but it’s always included, so it must just be over my head) — have remained constant across all tellings, but peripheral details vary. Today, we shall analyze one of those details: the origin of the goo.

In E&L’s original, as we learn here in issue #7, the goo (more formally known as “ooze”) came to Earth with these Krang aliens when they, drunk on Space Beer, crashed their gigantic fucking spaceship completely undetected somewhere in New York state. The canister was lost about five years later, in transit from the crash site to the newly-established, alien-owned TCRI building. It bounced off the Krangs’ truck when a blind man crossed the street in front of them. Stupid irresponsible blind people.

In the old cartoon, the Shredder borrows what he believes to be a simple poisonous glowing ooze from his buddy, Dimension X’s own Krang, and pours it into the New York sewer home of his arch-rival, Hamato Yoshi. Personally, I think there are easier, and some might say more traditional, ways an evil ninja can kill a sewer hobo. And Shredder grabbed the wrong canister anyway, because the ooze turned Yoshi into a rat-man and turned his pets turtles in turtle-men. Whoopsie.

The second live-action film tantalizingly promises us “The Secret of the Ooze,” and boy does it deliver. I’m not sure how to make a sarcastic emoticon, so you’ll just have to imagine there’s one right here. It probably involves a tilde. So in the SotO version, it turns out that the mutagen isn’t alien at all, but rather an accidentally-produced nuclear waste. It wasn’t a brain creature’s fault at all, it was David Warner’s. It’s a fairly anticlimactic reveal, and as I recall, Donatello felt the same way. There’s a moment in TMNT 2 where he gets all distraught with Splinter, saying that he expected their roots to be something a bit more special that gross corporate negligence. As I recall, that important, existential conflict of his was never resolved. But to be fair, nobody gives a fuck about Donatello.

Nothing much else to say about this issue, but I’d like to address the full-colour bonus story included in my print copy. It’s called “You Had to Be There,” and E&L boast in the issue’s introduction that it’s the first full-colour TMNT story ever. A milestone, and what story do they choose to tell through the power of colour? It boils down to this: Michaelangelo gets drunk and hallucinates.

Seriously. A beer-soaked erotic (of both the hetero- and homo- varieties) dream. But oh, how they used the blues and greens!