Eastman & Laird’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
Mirage Studios Volume 1, Issue 15
Story & Art by Peter Laird
Read it at NinjaTurtles.com
Sigh
And here we are again, back to normal. That brief experiment with quality storytelling scared me just a little bit. But here we’ve got a Classic Laird outing that features all the standards:
Casey and a couple of the boys are browsing the comic book shelves (Pointless Personal Taste Insertion) when the shop is suddenly attacked (Lazy Coincidence) by weird little robots (Plot Following Character Design). But they’re not there for the Turtles, no — seems the comic shop owner and his employees are all retired superheroes (Pointless Personal Taste Insertion + Lazy Coincidence + Plot Following Character Design + Fundamentally Retarded Story Idea).
Then there’s a big hero vs. robot fight scene at a farmhouse and a fucking crazy ending where the former-superhero-now-supervillain orchestrating it all is defeated by the daughter of the superheroine whom he once loved from afar, and then the supervillain, who set this robot attack up in the first place just to get another shot with the it-turns-out-dead-three-years superheroine he loved, decides with a shrug to change his spots back to superhero. It’s ridiculous and lame, and I say this as a 30-year-old writing a Ninja Turtles blog.
It all makes me wonder: is this a mistake? Re-reading the collection, is it going to taint the sweet nostalgia and destroy my love for this property? Am I at risk of actually facing up to the possible reality that the things I loved when I was a child aren’t really at the highest echelon of human artistic achievement?
Could He-Man < Shakespeare? It seems unlikely, I know. But still, what if?
Worse still, I’m forcing myself to think critically about these books by writing this accursed blog. I suspect that, were I merely breezing through, I could dismiss the crimes of E&L’s work while zeroing in solely on the triumphs. But instead I’ll be dedicating precious Internet space to reviewing each issue — to its very minutiae — requiring absolute and total commitment to reading every stanza from each of Hall’s three interpretive positions: dominant (Turtles is good); oppositional (Turtles is bad); and negotiated (Turtles is I don’t know).
Cumulative over time, my findings are bound to be filled with enough damning evidence to dull the shine. And for some stupid reason I’ve elected to go with a “snarky” tone for these reviews, and snark and praise don’t tend to fit together.
I’ve doomed myself. By the date of project completion (estimate: August 1, 2092), I will be utterly and absolutely disgusted by these characters. I will find no charm in their absurdity, no thrill in their violence, no pleasure in their weird inter-species sexual undertones. This is seriously depressing.
So do I stop? Do I refuse to go on any further, and despite the time and money spent on assembling this collection, not actually read any more of my TMNT books? (Before you offer your obvious protestations, this wouldn’t necessarily mean stopping the project. I can gather enough ideas from memory and cover shots to spin some blogged gold.)
It would mean only that I would never complete my life journey. Never reading the complete collection of TMNT books — from E&L’s Mirage to Archie’s Adventures to that Japanese shit that’s gonna be impossible to track down — would only mean remaining incomplete as a man through my dying days. Is that the price I’m willing to pay to avoid the chance of not really digging the franchise when I finally reach that end?
But wait, that’s not right at all. The fear is not, and never was, the fear of admitting to myself that the TMNT ain’t so great; it’s the fear of admitting that to others. I can keep reading and go right on, carefree in a land of put-on positivity.
Or better yet, I can keep writing these things with their typical sarcasm, outright mocking every detail I can, yet always assuring the reader that I MEAN ABSOLUTELY NONE OF IT AND LOVE IT ALL COMPLETELY. Then when I do get to a genuine bit of hate, you can’t tell. It’s like how I hide my genuine self-loathing in a veil of self-deprecating humour. Nobody’s the wiser!
(P.S. Yes, you’re wondering why this #15 came out after #16. It wasn’t my doing. E&L put them out in this order back in ‘88, because the awesome Mark Martin awesomely beat the … beat Peter Laird to the printers, so they decided to just put it out rather than have the kids all waity for the next issue. Doesn’t matter to me; I got them both in the late ’90s.)
I’d be curious to know how many of the tags that you create for each issue end up being one-offs in the WordPress-verse.
By: James17930 on November 6, 2009
at 7:34 am
Per review, I’d say an average of most.
By: Beal on November 9, 2009
at 11:19 pm
How much traffic you get off those?
By: James17930 on December 3, 2009
at 2:02 am
I’m not sure, because I can’t figure out where they tell us which tags brought people here.
By: Beal on December 5, 2009
at 10:44 am
You can see in the stats (in Referrers) which tags brought visits to your blog, but I don’t think they break it down by page for you.
By: drewbious on December 5, 2009
at 12:17 pm
And now we have an answer. The only tags of mine approaching wacky that have brought anyone in are: body swap (40 views), fuckstick (8 views), hilarious picture captions (5 views), and, though it’s not really that “wacky”, 5 basic conflicts (4 views).
By: Beal on December 5, 2009
at 2:47 pm
I like how these are supposed to be funny – I guess – and they never are.
Well, okay – almost never. Your spiel about Donatello being gay from forever and a half ago was pretty funny.
Hmm.
By: henryjbaugh on December 26, 2009
at 2:09 am
You like that aspect? That’s some weird masochistic taste you’ve got there.
By: Beal on December 27, 2009
at 1:50 pm
Well, you’re a peanut.
I did like your review of George Miller’s “Happy Feet,” though. You may have been one of the only people I’ve read that got what the director seemed to be going for. Outside of the French.
By: henryjbaugh on December 27, 2009
at 3:29 pm
I’ll take any comparison with the French you’ve got. And I still love that movie. If I were doing the decade-list thing (and I’m very much not), good odds it would be on there.
There is a sequel in the works, and I’m not normally a sequel-phobe — my default is to trust filmmakers who can do it great once as being able to do it great again; plus, George Miller has a damn good track record with sequels — but here, I just don’t know what’s left to do (also: do we see re-casting of Brittany Murphy’s charcter now?).
By: Beal on December 28, 2009
at 9:59 am
Oh, I know exactly how you feel – but, what I think they’ll do is resurrect some of the stuff they’d cut out of the first film in some measure, that subplot involving penguin-aliens that got chopped out at the last minute. Or, I hope so, at least – because, that stuff all sounds really interesting.
I have to wonder what they’ll do now that Brittany Murphy has died – I think they might recast her, because there’s nothing else to do, at this point. Production’s already going full-bent, and even though there’s time to rewrite, you can’t rapidly change anything.
Hmmm.
By: henryjbaugh on December 28, 2009
at 1:45 pm
But with animated films, both 2- and 3-D, the voice recording is often done really early, isn’t it? It’s slated for an end of 2011 release, pretty far off, but maybe they already got what they needed?
And whoa, penguin-aliens? First I’m hearing of this. How the hell would that have fit into the first movie? I mean, everything human-made (including the humans) had a very alien feel to it (pretty nice feat too, considering it was all depicted completely realistically), but there still wasn’t anything actually alien.
By: Beal on December 28, 2009
at 5:41 pm
Elijah Wood and Robin Williams just headed off a week or two ago to start their voicing sessions, so it hasn’t been too far gone, just yet. Still, in her last interview, she was talking about how excited she was to be heading to Australia in a week to start her voicing. So -
Yes, the penguin-aliens took up a huge chunk of the film, originally. It hasn’t really ‘gotten out’ yet, but I’ve talked to several animators who’ve all said that they were a pretty big part of the film as it stood – they resembled that penguin god we saw at the beginning of the film, and were threatening to fuck some shit up for the world outside, until the plight of the film’s protagonist stays their hand. So, in the whole allegorical sense the film had, with the penguins being the humans and the humans being the aliens, the aliens would’ve been ‘god,’ collectively. The only thing left of their presence in the finished film are the shots of space. Funnily enough, this ending remains in several of the film’s tie-in games, and that kind of thing, so it’s weird that nobody like a writer or even the director has mentioned it yet. I do suspect that if they’re not part of the sequel, then we’ll probably see a Director’s Cut sometime in the future.
Still, as far as the Ninja Turtles go, I’d probably agree that the first three or four issues – that is, from the second issue onward, as I really do think that first issue is almost scarily-well put together – are Laird and Eastman feeling their way around and trying to see what works and what doesn’t, something which is probably due to, like you said and like they’ve said countless times, they didn’t really have any plans past the first issue. Still, I think they really find their feet around issue six, and seem to hit their stride with the whole “Return of Shredder” arc – and, there’s a gleeful sort of experimental insouciance about those earlier issues, I think, even when something doesn’t quite work.
I’m kind of hoping you keep going, although I don’t know how well any type of humor is going to hold up against Michael Zulli’s “Soul’s Winter” arc.
By: henryjbaugh on December 28, 2009
at 8:37 pm
Believe me, I can take any grim, violent, mythic tone and make it not-as-funny-as-I’d-wanted-it-to-be.
As for E&L’s writing, I harp on them a lot here, but they do pull off a handful of good things over the years. There’s something about that first issue that works, something in structure or simplicity. City at War does some good and interesting stuff (but feels pretty empty for a 13-issue story). So they aren’t devoid of quality. But maybe I’m spoiled by your Alan Moores and your Brian Michael Bendiseses, because I dream of more.
And no, I will not play one of the Happy Feet games. I will fight the urge.
By: Beal on January 6, 2010
at 11:20 pm
I think there’s about maybe thirteen or fourteen issues up until after the “Return to New York” arc that are just as solid as anything Bendis has done – making exceptions for your space-hopping adventures and your Cerebus crossovers and whatnot that occur early on, and things like that. During and after “Return to New York,” the series kind of eschewed continuity, and became a string of interesting, anthology-esque stories from all sorts of writers, from all over. The best of these, like Zulli’s arc, are – well, some of the best stuff done under the title. The worst will be forgotten and never mentioned again. “City At War” is probably as good as the series has gotten, and it hasn’t yet reclaimed that kind of quality, which is a shame – they are, or were, trying to do interesting things with the character, but it just kind of fizzles out without much impact. I mean, April is a pencil and I feel nothing. “Tales” is good, though – what I’ve read of it, anyway.
Oh, I haven’t played any of those tie-in games, either – I have people for that, you know. Still, it’s interesting stuff, and I’d like to see some cut of the film with all this stuff back in, at some point.
By: henryjbaugh on January 7, 2010
at 1:05 am