But it would be remiss to suggest that this "era" is an isolated entity. Rather, it might be more accurate to describe it as "filling the vacuum." The 1980s marked when superheroes became the only significantly selling genre in comics, thanks in part to the rise of the "comic book geek" culture, but even today, that was not true of the majority of the history of comic books. They were as much comic westerns, science fiction adventures, romance stories, kiddy kartoons, war stories, mysteries and anything else that might grab the eye of a casual reader. The publication of superhero comics rose and dipped fairly regularly in this period. Really popular during World War II, all but vanished through the 1950s, back in the spotlight in the 1960s. All that time, alternative genre comics were being published like clockwork.
One example is Kamandi: The Last Boy on Earth, which ran between 1972 and 1978. The titular character, Kamandi, finds he is one of the last intellectual humans in a post-apocalyptic wasteland, the rest of the human race having been devolved into dumb animals while tigers, cheetahs, dogs, gorillas and several other species have evolved into intelligent, imperialistic cultures. This was one of many contributions Jack Kirby made to DC, a period in which Kirby was mostly interested in taking comic books into more cosmic places with titles like New Gods and Forever People.
Kirby always seemed more at home with Star Trek-esque science fiction than with superheroes. In more ways than one, Kamandi is Kirby's take on Planet of the Apes. DC failed to the comic book rights to the series, and so asked Kirby to take some of the popular images from the films and weave his own story from it. We've got anthropomorphic intelligent apes (though not exclusively apes), wild humans being treated as cattle, the last intelligent man, the sympathetic animal scientist, a culture worshiping an active nuclear weapon and the iconic image of a ruined Statue of Liberty (the letters page in the third issue is packed with people pointing out the obvious). This was not the last time Kirby would reinterpret famous science fiction films, he eventually did a ten-issue series adapting 2001: A Space Odyssey that took the original premise and led it into a whole new, very Jack Kirby direction. Somewhere, there's an alternate universe where Jack Kirby made an entire career out of remaking major science fiction films.
Kevin Eastman named Kamandi as one of his favorite titles as a child, and while there's no obvious direct connection between it and the first issues of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles as there is with Daredevil (which I'll get to next time), there is a lot to be said for for its tone and structure. For one, both are shockingly fatalistic. While at one point Kirby stated that Kamandi was supposed to leave a feeling of hope, I can't but feel that's either a lie or a misunderstanding of his work. Kirby seemed to love to get poetic about the rise and fall of civilizations throughout history, the second issue concluding with an entire page of text about anticipating the next fall. Kamandi thrives on imaginative horrors of the apocalypse and the titular character's stubborn inability to adapt to them. Kamandi as symbol of modern man shows us as stubborn, xenophobic and prone to reactionary violence.
That more or less fits the description of the human beings in virtually all incarnations of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, only now the ratio of modern man to anthropomorphic beings are reversed. The Mirage series shows a New York City polluted with violent criminals and petty capitalists, where even the acts of "cleaning up the streets" are just covers for more violent crime. The Turtles' lair is almost an oasis of culture, and even then it's an equally-violent, appropriated culture, much in the same way the animals in Kamandi repurpose the trappings of the Roman empire.
The Comics Code Authority was created in 1954 in response to gory, horror-themed comics being published at the time, especially those made by EC Comics, the leader in "comic books that aren't about superheroes" with titles like Tales From the Crypt, The Vault of Horror and Crime SuspenStories. The code banned vampires, werewolves, ghouls, zombies, negative portrayals of police officers and authority figures, seduction, rape, sadism, masochism, kidnapping, concealed weapons, the bad guys winning every once and a while and even just the word "crime." As Scott McCloud put it, "the list of requirements a film needs to receive a G rating was doubled, and there were no other acceptable ratings!"
It was natural to push against these imposed boundaries, and as time went on the Code kept revising itself for the sake of sales or common sense, and by 1971 things had lifted enough to allow full-on horror comics again. Weird War Tales filled the vacuum, leading a massive rebound towards horror comics. It started innocuous enough, the first issue consisting mostly of sad, but hardly horrifying, World War II stories, the worst that could be said was that is was portrayed a slightly sympathetic Nazi officer in one story. Each story ended with a little button reading "MAKE WAR NO MORE," which is frankly a bit patronizing after presenting some rather romantic images, like an abandoned bomber plain flying off out to the ocean as if ascending to an afterlife.
This kept on for a while, but the eighth issue saw a dramatic change. The buttons disappeared. Supernatural elements began to take center stage. Two of the three stories in this issue have Nazis being attacked by supernatural threats, first by an army of zombie French soldiers from World War I, and then a golem protecting a Jewish village. We've gone from "sympathetic Nazi officer" to "supernatural revenge fantasy" overnight. Most importantly, each story is introduced by a skeletal Death roaming different battlefields, much in the same vain as the EC Comics horror hosts like the Crypt Keeper. After this, the focus turned towards shocking imagery. Corpses in various states of decay became common place. The stories spread out to other wars, from Viking and Egyptian conflicts to space battles in the far future.
And the floodgate for horror comics opened again. After Weird War Tales, DC gave us Ghosts, Secrets of Sinister House, Weird Mystery Tales, Forbidden Tales of Dark Mansion, Secrets of Haunted House, Weird Western Tales, Tales of Ghost Castle and Doorway to Nightmare, not to mention darker versions of existing titles such as House of Mystery, House of Secrets, The Unexpected and The Witching Hour. It presents a second narrative for "filling the vacuum." While independent fringe comics came about through a natural, gradual change in trends, the 1970s horror comic explosion came from withholding something from people for a certain amount of time and suddenly returning it. One depressing example of this is how excited people got when the McRib returned to the McDonald's menu. The first narrative fills the vacuum like sand in an hour glass, the second narrative fills the vacuum with a landslide.
(Around the time Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles was first being published, Saturday morning cartoons were going through their own little second narrative, but that's an issue for a later post.)
The New Mutants was something of a soft reboot of the X-Men franchise. After a conflict with the Skrull, the majority of the X-Men found themselves trapped in space. While their adventures continued out there, Charles Xavier treats the situation as if they were dead and decides to start his mutant academy afresh with a whole new class of students. This brings back a lot of the old images and ideas of the original comics twenty years prior. The inexperienced teenage heroes, the yellow and black costumes, actual lesson plans, the hormone-driven in-fighting, it's all a throwback to the 1960s. It's certainty a more sound idea than Earth-2, but no less driven by nostalgia.
It didn't stick. Only a handful of issues came out before the original X-Men made their way back to Earth and returned to the mansion, meaning both groups of mutants had to acknowledge but somehow keep their stories separate from each other. Keeping both series in sync became an issue when it really shouldn't have been. The idea of setting a story within a school seems to naturally suggest a constantly rotating cast of students, letting characters like Cyclops and Angel and whoever graduate and go off on their own adventures, but the same nostalgia that brought back classic X-Men tropes also made it difficult to actually change the status quo.It was a curse of appealing to to comic book geek culture.
But it was this obsessive culture that allowed for independent fringe comics to find a home in the first place. Up until the late 1970s, comic books were typically bought in small shops, grocery stores or gas stations. The rise of comic culture necessitated the invention of comic book specialty shops, which is a lot of shelf space to fill. Yes, you guessed it, there was a vacuum to fill, mainstream superhero comics couldn't take up all the room in a shop, so cheap alternative titles were needed. It was a narrative of supply and demand, a lot less poetic than the first two narratives presented here, but a functional tool in getting things done.
Every incarnation of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles can be seen as filling a different vacuum, even if sometimes that vacuum is "there's a shocking lack of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles." In that sense, its mutable characteristics make it ideal for this, like a liquid able to fit the shape of any container. For now, though, it'll settle for "not a superhero comic."
[Mutagen will begin properly on January 6th, to be updated every Monday, Wednesday and Friday.]
