Dimension III - "Elfquest and Cerebus"

Thus far, we've looked at mainstream comics and how Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles acted as a response to them, but how do those early comics fit in with their contemporary neighbors in independent publishing? As previously mentioned, as with all eras, the era of fringe independent comics is not something that is easy to map, but if you had to put a starting point for it, it would be between late 1977 and early 1978 with the successes of Wendy Pini, Richard Pini and Dave Sim.

Again, it's not that cut and dry, independent publishing technically existed in some form or another since the underground comix of the 1960s, or actually as far back as the 1920s with pornographic comics/Tijuana bibles. For our purposes, the fringe independents was an era that began with a desire to release non-mainstream content with a level of mainstream quality. Content alternative to superheroes, but with the same quality of paper, ink, printing and overall quality control as that from DC Comics and Marvel. The best underground comix had to offer was Bud Plant Inc, which was largely a mail-order distribution service, and Star*Reach, which focused mostly on more adult versions of typical comic book genre stories, and and even they were not adventurous enough to give a Quest for Fire meets Chariot of the Gods meets Star Wars manga-influenced alternative fantasy yarn a chance.

Which is kind of a surprise, because the actual story within Wendy and Richard Pini's Elfquest is not all that out there. The establishing story is that of a tribe being forced out of their home by a disaster, they have a perilous journey and then join with another tribe, and concluding with a fairly standard love triangle. It's fairly easy to digest in that "three-act structure"/"Joseph Campbell"/"plug and play story" kind of way. What actually made it stand out in 1978 was its Eastern-influenced storybook visuals and complicated lore involving a lot of fantasy and sci-fi genre mashing.

At best, Wendy and Richard could be called casual readers of American comics, and with no serious experience in the field, they largely drew from alternative sources for inspiration, in this case mostly the anime works of Osamu Tezuka (creator of Astro Boy and Kimba the White Lion) and various manga like Sanpei Shirato's Kamui series and Kyoko Mizuki's Candy Candy, which had been imported to the western United States almost entirely untranslated. Wendy, who did all the art and co-wrote the story, was (and still is) a huge geek (in the good way) and spent a lot of time pouring over these works and trying to understand the visual language of these Japanese productions, even if she couldn't actually follow the story.

Once again, it's Western reappropriation of Eastern imagery, but unlike Frank Miller just seeing things like ninjas and samurais and thinking they looked cool, Wendy made an honest effort to try and work out why things were drawn this way, and what advantages adopting these styles might give to a story. She recognized manga's general feminine sensibility and the stretches of time created with silent panels and lingering moments. Elfquest flows more like animation than a typical comic book, and the large-eyed androgynous look of characters in manga lent themselves well the sensual other-worldly quality of the titular elves, who appear to be the exact midpoint between Tolkien's elves and Keebler's. All in all, Elfquest is pretty damn gorgeous.

Unfortunately, all the style and visual language in the world doesn't mean anything if you have a crappy printing on newsprint, as was the case with Elfquest's first issue, printing under Fantasy Quarterly by Independent Publishers Syndicate, and if you needed any evidence as to the poor state of independent publishing at this time, IPS folded after just printing one single comic book issue. By all accounts the physical quality of the issue was pretty much crap, the entire thing was printed on newsprint, including the cover, meaning heavy discoloration over time and the chance for disintegration if caught out in a light drizzle for a few seconds. It was about the most horrible first experience any comic creator could have, and many might be disheartened to the point of quitting and getting a job as a file clerk. Wendy and Richard Pini didn't do that. They started their own publishing company.

WaRP Graphics, like all small companies, was a huge gamble. Elfquest had yet to prove itself a success, but the Pinis poured as much money as they could into quality publications, with magazine-sized issues and glossy covers that wouldn't look out place next to a DC or Marvel book. It paid off though, and Elfquest was a runaway hit that still has a significant fanbase through seemingly continues rediscovery (from what I've read, it seems Elfquest is a common fixture in public libraries). Over time, WaRP Graphics expanded to other alternative fantasy titles, including Martin Greim's superhero parody Thunderbunny, comic book adaptations of Robert Asprin's fantasy farce novels MythAdventures, and most notably Colleen Doran's New Age pro-gay space opera A Distant Soil (That didn't turn out well for either party, but that's a story for another entry).

WaRP Graphics was not the only model for independent publishing being created at the time. In almost parallel step with the Pinis, Dave Sim and his partner Deni Loubert founded Aardvark-Vanaheim in 1977 to publish Sim's sword-and-sorcery pastiche Cerebus. The main difference between WaRP and Aardvark-Vanaheim is largely that of attitude. Both were created for a singular creator-driven fantasy title when said creators became disillusioned with publication practices, and both strove for the quality of major publications, but while WaRP at least attempted to look the part of a legit publication house (and eventually became one, warts and all), self-publication was a significant part of Cerebus's and Sim's identity.

We presently have a rather odd inconsistency in our attitudes towards self-publication. There's little respect for self-published novels and albums, while Internet video production has become a viable alternative to televisions for many, independent films are popular if rarely seen in the mainstream, and performance art is often a source of mockery. Self-published comics in the late 1970s all the way through to the 1990s fit a bit uneasily on the positive side of the spectrum, largely due to the majority of comic book consumers and creators being part of the same fandom community. Self-publication in comic fandom was often an extension of the resources already present in fandom, with printing experience from producing fanzines and the connections made at conventions. It was a largely self-fed self-congratulatory market.

But even as that scene changed, and even after getting offers from major publishers, and later Hollywood types like George Lucas, Dave Sim insisted on keeping Cerebus self-published and self-distributed, sometimes to the point of alienation (more on that in another article. Believe me, we're going to talk a lot about Sim as this project progresses, and this isn't the time to cover his more... esoteric behaviors). Even during a brief period in which Aardvark-Vanaheim extended itself to publish other titles, the focus remained creator-driven content and control over publication. For Sim, control over your own product was a badge of honor, one that Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird would quickly learn and lose.

As for Cerebus itself, which is the fourth and final comic credited as inspiration by Eastman, we have an even simpler and tried form of genre collision, that of "funny animal" cartoon character in a realistic and serious human-based setting. Howard the Duck had defined that genre collision five years prior. The main difference between those two properties, outside of Howard the Duck's modern Marvel superheroes setting vs. Cerebus' swords-and-sorcery setting, was how little Cerebus actually drew attention to the contrast. The titular character, a cartoon aardvark, maintained the attitude and swagger of a Robert E. Howard anti-hero, and while other characters may comment on his unusual appearance upon first meeting him, they none the less recognize Cerebus' abilities as a killer, thief and strategist.

The actual humor of the series does not come from Cerebus himself, but from the various parodies and celebrity caricatures that fill out each issue, with Cerebus always playing the straight man. Micheal Moorcock's Elric of Melniboné is given the personality and dialog of Foghorn Leghorn. Prince Valiant becomes a whiny man-child whose dad is Groucho Marx. Red Sonja became hyper-sexualized eye-candy whose only... actually, wait, no, she pretty much just stayed Red Sonja. Not to mention medieval parodies of Batman and the X-Men running around.

And yet Cerebus shouldn't be mistaken as a gag comic, as all the jokes and parodies hang on a frame of real conflict and forward momentum. Cerebus is constantly gaining and losing, there is never a "status quo" for longer than a couple of issues, and there's a new complication around every corner. In a span of thirty issues, Cerebus could be a wandering barbarian, looking for the next job, only to wind up worshiped by a cult, than made leader of an entire army, which is then defeated, so then he saves a prince and becomes a noble's chief of security, only then to get roped in with a bunch of savages who want to overthrow the noble, but is chemically put under a coma by a secret order only to wake up months later halfway across the globe fending off assassins. Not to mention all the one-off stories with Cerebus encountering wizards, monsters, would-be adventurers and various drunken antics.

There is a lot to say about Cerebus (A LOT), and we'll cover more of it in time, but it's this progression, this outright refusal to get comfortable with itself, that was the most important lesson learned for those early years of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Not the first issue, mind you. Eastman and Laird also used the cartoon animal in realistic human setting, and WaRP and Aardvark-Vanaheim certainty laid out the groundwork on which Mirage and all the other 1980s independent publishers would build up from, but the first issue is completely lacking that forward momentum. It wasn't until they adopted Cerebus' fervor for never sticking to one idea for too long that Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles was allowed to be immortal.

Out of the four main influences, Cerebus is the most important. The New Mutants was representative of then-current comic book trends to which the Ninja Turtles was a response to. Frank Miller's Daredevil was the comic the Ninja Turtles was a less-than-direct parody of. Ronin gave the Ninja Turtles an art style to aspire to and a how-to guide for cultural reappropriation. All just aesthetics. Cerebus gave the Ninja Turtles the structure, the modifications and attitude it would need to continue. It offered the first significant change to the franchise.

Cerebus was the first mutagen.

Dimension II - "Frank Miller's Daredevil, Ronin"

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles initially began as a stand alone comic that was, at least in part, a satire of then-current trends in comic books. It accomplished this by pumping up these trends with steroids and playing them out using Hanna Barbera-esque cartoon characters that have no business in stories like this. The parody involved is pretty broad, but if we were to settle on one thing that the Ninja Turtles were directly making fun of, it would almost certainty be Frank Miller's run on Daredevil.

Frank Miller came from the same generation as Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird, and much like them began his career with little interest in doing superhero comics in a time when comic books were refocusing almost exclusively on superheroes. One story of his early career has coming into a publisher's office with a portfolio of "guys in trench coats and old cars" and being asked "where are the guys in tights?" His earliest credits as an artist including Gold Key Comics' Twilight Zone series and DC's Weird War Tales, before joining Marvel on their John Carter, Warlord of Mars series. Eventually, being a comic book artist meant drawing the guys in tights, and so Miller found himself doing a few issues of Spectacular Spider-Man and eventually becoming the main artist for Daredevil in 1979.

At this point, Daredevil was doing very poorly in sales largely due to the terribly uninspired writing of Roger McKenzie. His writing wasn't exactly bad, but he kept things pretty straight-laced and uneventful, and with a character as limited in ability and personality as Matt Murdock, you can't afford to play it safe. The worst you could say about McKenzie's run was that all the secondary characters revolve around Murdock despite the character being too boring to justify it. This included a large cast of attractive white women all madly in love with Murdock, rather shockingly resembling a harem anime.

This extended to the villains as well, resulting in repetitive plots. When Frank Miller came on board as artist, the first two story lines he worked on involved older villains, Death-Stalker and Bullseye, hiring minor criminals to stage a trap for Daredevil for revenge for a past defeat. Alright, but if you want to want to keep readers interested, you probably don't want to run the same story twice in a row. Speaking of reruns, this was also a period in which McKenzie was retelling Daredevil's origins through the character of reporter Ben Urich, who spends half a dozen issues uncovering what led Matt Murdock to become Daredevil, with no changes to the original origin story all the way back in 1964. McKenzie brought nothing new to the table.

Frank Miller, on the other hand, infused the pages he was given with darkness and detail. It's often been refereed to as a film noir style, with characters obscured in deep shadow and sharp contrasts. He also added a level of detail to the New York City that set it apart from the New York City seen in other Marvel titles, giving the oft-traveled rooftops water towers, piping and cracked stonework that ground the setting with its real-life counterpart. He also had a tendency towards long vertical panels, emphasizing the dizzying heights of buildings rather than flat cityscapes. Visually, Daredevil was about rising and falling, fitting for one of Marvel's more acrobatic characters.

Miller disliked McKenzie's scripts and asked to be taken off the title, but after a change in editor, McKenzie was canned and Miller took over as writer. One of the first things he did was take advantage of McKenzie's "origin story rerun" by following it up with Daredevil's "secret history," new details about Murdock's life between being blinded and actually becoming Daredevil. The first of these was the introduction of Elektra, an old college flame who, after her father was killed after a hostage situation gone bad, became a ninja assassin. In many ways, this was a redo of McKenzie's Black Widow arch, who just before Miller took over was part of Daredevil's "harem." Both were independent heroines struggling to reconcile their chosen career paths with their feelings towards Murdock. Where Elektra differed was that she wasn't defined by her longing for Murdock, but rather that her feelings for him were getting in the way of her being a professional killer. She was a career woman first, a love interest second.

The other secret history was the introduction of Stick, Daredevil's old mentor who trained him in using his other senses. Not the first elderly blind Asian mentor/martial arts teacher in comics, that would go to I Ching in Wonder Woman, though Stick is far less of a stereotype. Elektra and Stick were just two of several Japanese elements Frank Miller brought into the comic, ranging from small details like Bullseye using shurikens to new enemies like the Hand, a ninja clan moving into the city. There is a concern about how much Miller actually understood these elements (Elektra murders a lot of people with sais, even though they are traditionally a blunt weapon or a tool for disarming), but never goes so far as to turn things into a nasty 1980s "yellow peril."

These are the elements that Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles #1 is often cited to be parodying. The Hand wound up becoming the Foot Clan, and Stick became Splinter. That's pretty much it, the names are the extent of the jokes. Stick and Splinter have very little in common, and the Foot Clan actually has more detail and character than the Hand ever had. In reality, Daredevil's influence on Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles runs a lot deeper than the initial parody. Frank Miller's focus on street-level crime set the stage for much of the conflicts in the Mirage-era of the Turtles, include his "Gangwar" arc which would serve as one of the building blocks for Eastman and Laird's "City at War" arc. Meanwhile, on the Archie Comics side of things, a lot of Elektra would wind up going into the secondary character Ninjara.

But Frank Miller's influence on Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and the 1980s independent comic book scene run even deeper. Miller is often associated as one of the leading mouth pieces for creator rights in comic books, though importantly not on of the leading movers and shakers. By the time Miller made his keynote speech for the 1994 Diamond Comic Distributors Retailers Seminar (in which he ripped up a copy of Comics Code publication Americana in Four Colors), we already had Jack Kirby and Neal Adams starting the practice of reclaiming original artwork from publishers, the Comic Creators Guild, the rise of independent publishers, the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, Dave Sims bypassing Diamond Comics' distribution model, the Northampton Summit and the signing of the Creator's Bill of Rights, the creation of Image Comics and the publication of Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics, events that Miller at best gave some comment on but mostly had little to nothing to do with.

(In fairness, most of the people involved with all that have largely tapped out, and with the exception of McCloud, Miller remains the most vocal of them today.)

Miller's actual impact for comic book creators and creator rights was through a heightened lionization of comic celebrity. There had been popular comic creators before, but no one that had gotten this big this fast. The reason for this was two-fold. First, Miller saving Daredevil was seen as nothing short of a Christmas miracle by Marvel, making him the first must-have of his generation. Second, Miller came in when major publishers began to sell shorter-form comics. The rise of the limited series and graphic novel started in 1979, when the major publishers began to realize that running dozens of titles non-stop forever might not be the easiest thing to manage. At one point, DC Comics was juggling sixty monthly ongoing titles, which became too financially unsound and resulted in what has become known as the DC Implosion, which saw over half of those titles suddenly taken off the market over a six-month period.

With a lot of freed resources, DC Comics began to experiment with shorter four-to-six issues series. These proved to be both profitable and pretty low-risk, since there was no obligation to expand any characters or ideas into a years long soap opera. This opened the door for more experimental, artist-driven works in DC, and one of the first people to be swept up in it was Frank Miller and his 1983 six-issue series, Ronin. What was most important about Ronin was that it was made by Frank Miller. His name was in big letters above the title on the cover, it was always the first thing you read on every issue, much like Eastman and Laird would wind up doing. The back cover included quotes from other big names in comics, like Will Eisner and Harlan Ellison, praising the work and Miller as something new and revolutionary.

It was a scale of creator promotion that had only been seen in Hollywood. It was a level of self-branding that many young creators might strive for, and here's one of their own doing just that. For Frank Miller, that led to The Dark Knight Returns, which led to the "grimdark" period for comic books, which led the Image Comics stable of creators, which led to the rise and fall of the early 1990s comic book bubble. It's funny what a strong declaration of "HEY EVERYBODY, PAY ATTENTION TO ME" can do.

Ronin also happens to be of the four comics credited as influence on the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and out of the four, it's certainly the one the series most visually resembles. Both share an over-abundance of line shading to give a sense of heavy grit and constant shadow. There isn't a single human face that isn't subtly grotesque, and both series are in love with their sewers and large establishing shots of New York City.

Ronin also cranked up Miller's interest in reappropriation of Eastern imagery that started with Daredevil. The story involved a ronin, a masterless samurai, whose ancient battle with a demon spills into a half post-apocalyptic/half cyberpunk future New York City. Miller spent a lot of time looking into martial arts movies, samurai stories and untranslated volumes of Lone Wolf and Cub, and from that drew what how he assumed a stoic samurai character would act in a mess of American genre excess. There's a lot of surface coolness to it, but reading Ronin over something like Lone Wolf and Cub is like listening to Carl Douglas' "Kung-Fu Fighting" over watching an actual kung-fu action film, you only end up with a very surface understanding of things.

Frank Miller played a major role in changing the comic book landscape in the early 1980s, but he, along with everything else we've covered to the point, is part of the mainstream, and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles most certainly did not start that way. To better understand it, we'll have to look at some of its neighbors...

[Yes, I know, I said January 6th, but things in my life keep getting out of hand. For the time being, the blog will be updated whenever I can get it, and hopefully will settle into the original Monday-Wednesday-Friday schedule when my personal schedule settles down]

Tonight, we dine.

R.I.P. James Avery

1948-2014

Dimension I - "Kamandi, Weird War Tales and The New Mutants"

It is often a fool's game to map out the exact boundaries of a certain era. All eras bleed into each other and all eras either comment on or are commented on by every other era. For our purposes, the "era" of comic books that the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles were born in is seen as one of cheap independent production, fringe comics in black and white. Unlike mainstream comics, this fringe scene didn't often bother with superheroes, instead opting for more violent and pulpy genres.

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.

That stories like Kamandi were once a viable option for comic books and then were not resulted in this vacuum of alternative genre comics for creators like Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird to fill. This "era" of fringe comics have much more in common with these titles than, say, the underground comix of R. Crumb, Kim Deitch and Spain Rodriguez. A clearer example of filling a vacuum from around the same time as Kamandi was the DC's publication of Weird War Tales after revisions of the Comics Code Authority in the early 1970s.

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.)

Kevin Eastman stated for Heavy Metal that Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles was a parody of four different comic books, one of which was Marvel Comic's The New Mutants. Of the four comics he named, this one is perhaps the most "normal," the most reflective of trends in mainstream comics in 1984. Around this period, superhero comics began to eat their own tail in terms of continuity and shared universes. Crisis on Infinite Earths and Marvel Super Heroes Secret Wars were right around the corner.

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.]

"I started a joke..."

It started as a joke between two friends.

Then it became a parody of the trends of early 1980s comic books, both mainstream and independent. The return of young superheroes after the originals had grown up. An increase in street-level crime to match the colorful supervillains of the Silver Age. The "dark and gritty" stories being introduced by new generations of comic creators, like Frank Miller.

Then it became a legit action title and a cornerstone of the independent comic book scene, its creators leading a movement of legitimizing creator rights and re-inventing the entire industry.

Then it became an animated television show, offering a transitional point between the commercial-drive bloat of 1980s action cartoons and the more serious artist-driven productions of 1990s superhero cartoons.

Then it became a series of films that herald the last hurrah of practical special effects and animatronics.

Then it became a brand, a commercial product spread across dozens of different mediums, an image to be sold in thousands of different ways.

Then it became a husk with no core, no central idea to keep it interesting, to keep it maintained.

Then it entered into the 21st century reinvigorated, with a new television show and comic book line that harkened back to its roots while reinventing itself for a new age, reaching a final conclusion that was part tribute, part exorcism, part eulogy, part viking funeral.

Then it was reborn once again, and its future remains as uncertain as it was thirty years ago.

If there is one defining trait of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, it's how mutable it is. It's a franchise that refuses to be held down to one image, one core idea or one definitive version. There are probably more than a dozen separate continuities. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles has been comic books, television shows (both animated and live action), movies (both live action and animated), video games, toys, a comic strip, a stage show, a Japanese anime, a role-playing game, an amusement park ride and a brand name that could be slapped on just about anything, and they all can make claims in being the legit Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

Mutagen is the catalyst of change, and we'll be following it as it changes and warps and rewrites the DNA of this franchise. We'll be mapping it along all its streets and crossroads and dead ends, as well as its surrounding dimensions. By the end, we will have a map we can trace our fingers over and, perhaps, how to expand it ourselves.