When last we left our hero, he'd succumbed to the siren's call of Madison Avenue, finding himself obsessed with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Rather than wait for the Michael Bay movie, though, he decided to plunge into the past and look at where this franchise started...
The Palladium role playing game was good. Despite the fact I had no intention of playing it, the book was fun to read and had neat illustrations (no surprise, since Laird and Eastman did most of them).
But I wanted more. This was an early version of the Turtles, a version that wasn't sanitized for young eyes. But it still wasn't the original vision.
While I was probing the internet for a copy of the RPG (out of print, so I had to get it used), I stumbled on Volume I of the comic. Apparently, they'd put all the original run into a hardcover. Rather than hunt down individual out of print comics, I could just grab this.
I hesitated. It was thirty bucks. I hadn't purchased a comic in twelve years, not since my brief fling with Moon Knight. (Well, except for Serenity. As a dedicated browncoat, I bought those comics to try and assuage the pain of its untimely demise.)
Suffice to say I'm not a hardcore comic book guy. It's not that I have anything against them--I think they're a perfectly legitimate form of expression. But the problem is that their cost-to-entertainment is a bit high. I'd buy a Serenity comic for over ten bucks and then burn through it in twenty minutes. Novels, by contrast, cost slightly less and entertain me for days.
I realize I should've stopped with each page and taken in the beauty, read those comics with Zen-like attention. But I'm impatient, like an old time photographer, I stand breathless over the chemical bath, waiting for the plot to develop before my eyes. I want to know what the character is going to say next. I want it now, now now. I am the guy who spent an entire Christmas with my nose stuck in a book. Because I just had to read Eyes of the Dragon in a single day.
Enough about my hang-ups. Long story short: I bought it.
It came promptly, though I didn't even order express delivery (it's unpopular to say so, but the United States Postal Service kicks ass, doesn't it?). When I opened the parcel something magical happened. The past wafted out of the package and blew me back through the corridors of time, to the game stores where I frittered away my youth.
The hardcover edition positively reeked of glue and ink and wood pulp. It smelled like more than just a comic book--it smelled like those luxurious RPG books I'd devoured as a child. It smelled like afternoons spent ambling through strange stores with even stranger books on their shelves.
After that little introduction, I could not help but love this book.
And it didn't let me down. The straight forward black and white art is perfect. It's gritty and imaginative and makes me feel less guilty about reading quickly. I was told there were some major differences between the cartoon and the comics but they weren't as big as I expected. The comic is definitely more violent. But the comic book Turtles aren't psychopaths--they still capture muggers alive. The hacking and dismembering is reserved for life-and-death struggles with their assassin-enemies, the Foot.
The most interesting difference, I thought, was in April O'Neil. In the cartoon I saw she's a journalist. In the comic she's a computer technician, which explains a lot. Really, why would a television reporter wear coveralls?
Overall, the main characters are actually pretty similar. I may get pilloried for saying that, but I can see what I liked about the show paralleled in the comics. That said, I haven't seen any of the later TV shows and, for that matter, have only a spotty memory of the 1987 series.
Splinter, by the way, is absolutely awesome in the comics. He's got a good sense of humor and is drawn in an almost creepy way, which I appreciate, since he's an enormous rat that skulks in a sewer. I've always had a fondness for Splinter. I remember his toy quite vividly: he was bent over and had a cane-sword. That little surprise was magical--I honestly thought the TMNT creators had invented it.
I have a favorite Turtle but truthfully, Splinter is my favorite character in the series. That insight was interesting when combined with my reaction to Star Wars: Yoda was my favorite character in that franchise. I've even been known to argue about who Yoda could beat in a fight, which was a lot easier before those new movies came out and settled the question (without my input, I might add).
If I'm allowed a bit of groundless psychoanalytic narcissism, I'd say that even as a child I was drawn to the mentor archetypes, that I've been interested in teaching and learning from the get-go. One time when I was at a college campus with my mother she told me that out of all her children, she knew I'd end up there.
So the next time I teach Freshman World Civ, I'll know I'm channeling my inner Splinter.
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