Comic Book Review – Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Ultimate Black & White Collection Volumes One & Two

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Ultimate Collection Volumes One & Two (2014)
Reprints (V1) Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles #1-7 and Raphael One-Issue Micro-Series 
(V2) Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 8-11, Michelangelo One-Issue Micro-Series, Donatello One-Issue Micro-Series, and Leonardo One-Issue Micro-Series
Writing and Art by Kevin Eastman & Peter Laird

I won’t go over the backstory of how Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles came to be. That is a well-trod path you can find in various forms online. Instead, I want to share my first encounters with these characters in animation and comic books. Like almost every child in 1987, I watched television, unaware of what would be coming next. It was around Christmas, and our local Fox affiliate was showing a new episode of the opening mini-series each day of the week. I couldn’t remember the full name of the show, so I just called them “The Turtles” until I had it down. I was six years old at the time. 

My first encounter with the comic book would come a couple years later when I picked up one of my beloved comic book grab bags, a collection of three comic book back issues packaged together for $1 or so. Inside was a TMNT comic, not Eastman & Laird, but another artist/writer who did one-off issues here and there later in the run, as trying to keep the book monthly became harder. It felt so different from the cartoon I knew, and I was confused. Decades later, I sat down and read through the first two collections of the original series to get a better sense of this popular franchise’s origins.

I knew some things about the story of the Turtles, but it was fascinating to see the pace that the narrative plays out. Issue #1 is a complete standalone story: The Turtles debut, face off with Shredder and The Foot Clan, and their enemy dies. The end. This intro proved popular enough that Eastman & Laird developed a second issue. This time, scientist Baxter Stockman claims his newly developed mouser drones will help rid New York City of the rats that plague it. His assistant, April O’Neil, discovers Stockman’s real plan is to use the mousers to burrow into bank vaults around the city and steal everything inside. She ends up in the sewers running for her life as the mousers pursue and cross paths with the Turtles, beginning one of the comic’s most enduring friendships.

While the Turtles living in the sewer was a staple of the cartoon, our heroes leave it behind by issue three to stay in April’s apartment. The mousers’ trail of destruction has them worried it will lead authorities to their base, so the four turtles go with April. They have to elude some cops but get to her home. Splinter was separated from them during the fight and floated through the sewers until a pair of corporate security guards discovered it. 

These guards work for TCRI, a tech company with a nasty secret. The company is actually run by aliens from Utrom. They resemble human brains with faces and tentacles and use robotic humanlike husks to disguise themselves. Of course, this is the inspiration for Krang the Brain in the animated series, though it’s handled much differently here. No Technodrome. No suit like we see Krang use. If you saw the recent Mutant Mayhem animated film, TCRI is prominently featured as the antagonists, with a hint of the Utrom to come if a sequel is made. 

There’s a brief aside as we get our first four one-shots labeled as micro-series. This was a partial joke based on the increasing popularity of the comic book mini-series in the 1980s. Those mini-series were an experiment in decompressed storytelling, allowing a writer to take what might have been a one or two-issue story and give it more space to breathe. For Eastman & Laird, these one-shots spotlight an individual Turtle, giving the readers time to get to know them apart from their brothers while setting up future plot points. Raphael was one of the more popular of the brothers, as his uncompromising attitude appealed to many comic fans. In the pages of his special, we get introduced to the hockey mask-wearing, sports equipment-wielding Casey Jones. This whole story got hyper-compressed for the 1990 TMNT movie where Raphael meets Jones under similar circumstances.

From here, Eastman & Laird have many ideas they want to put into the series, and not everything meshes cleanly. The Foot Clan returns, but the Turtles get sidetracked by the mystery of TCRI. They get zapped by some fantastical device teleports them far across space until they end up near the galaxy’s center in the middle of the Triceraton Republic. The Triceratons resemble anthropomorphic triceratops and behave like Star Trek’s Romulans with a dash of the Klingon’s warlike mindset. 

These stories also have the Turtles meeting Fugitoid, a previous creation of Eastman & Laird. The man trapped inside a robot first appeared in the one-off Gobbledygook and then got a one-shot self-titled comic. With the Turtles popularity, the creators decided to bring this character back. He’s Professor Zayton Honeycutt and an experiment gone awry transferred his consciousness into the body of a nearby android. When authorities show up and see Honeycutt’s dead body and the android standing there, they assume he killed the human and pursue him. Hence, the robot has the nickname Fugitoid. 

The Triceraton/Fugitoid arc is far more complex than the stories before this point, spanning multiple issues. You can clearly see the influences of Star Wars and Star Trek in the work. Interestingly, this part of the Turtles lore is almost wholly absent from the animated series. Some of these characters would appear in that initial cartoon but were less emphasized than the ones that would sell more toys. Eastman & Laird are getting more indulgent, riding high off the book’s success. I want to note that this comic (#5) was published in November 1985. Issue one was published in April 1984, so these comics came out on a different schedule. That’s an even bigger testament to their popularity: they could sustain interest in the title while being so irregular. Issue six wouldn’t hit stands until February 1986. 

By the end of the first collection, the Turtles & Splinter return to Earth, popping into April’s bathtub after they find a working teleporter. This is followed by the Michaelangelo micro-series, a light-hearted Christmas-themed one-shot. Next, in issue 8, we have a crossover between the Turtles and another indie comics darling of the period, Cerebus. Once upon a time, I thought about diving deep into Dave Sim’s Conan the Barbarian parody that blossomed into an apparently sprawling, epic, philosophical comic. However, if you are to look at Sim’s current unhinged reactionary bent, it immediately became highly distasteful to me to spend that much time reading his work. He now spends most of his days penning & illustrating comic book-styled screeds against LGBTQ people and is anti-vax. It seems to have really kicked off when his wife divorced him, which seems to lead a lot of already slightly unhinged men down a path of complete insanity. Enough about that.

Then there’s the Donatello micro-series, which serves as a one-off tribute to Jack Kirby. While Frank Miller’s Daredevil often gets cited as the initial inspiration for the Turtles, Eastman & Laird were fans of Kirby’s fantastical cosmic worlds. Many of Kirby’s works directly inspired the Turtles’ odyssey through alien worlds. Donatello is investigating a hot water shortage in April’s apartment and stumbles upon Kirby, who leases a space in the basement for an office. Don learns Kirby has found a mysterious crystal that makes his drawings leap off the page when bound to his pencil. This leads to a fun adventure in another dimension and a tribute to someone the creators greatly admired.

Subsequent issues go deeper into Splinter’s backstory and the death of his owner at the hands of Shredder. This leads to the dramatic return of Shredder. Reading some backstory, it becomes clear why they decided to bring back the villain who hadn’t been seen in three years. The animated series was nearing its debut, and part of that was having regular villains featured in every episode. The Utrom were condensed down to just Krang the Brain, and he was teamed up with Shredder, leader of the Foot Clan. It made sense to bring back Shredder, hoping that curious cartoon watchers might see the covers on the comics rack and pick it up. I don’t know if any media property has ever led to a sustained increased readership in comics but damn if the industry doesn’t continue to do stuff like this still.

There’s a fantastic issue where the Foot swarm April’s apartment, and the Turtles must fight their way out. I found the staging of this one pitch-perfect, tension-building; the readers can see the Foot when the Turtles are unaware, making things even more exciting. Casey Jones also shows up in the nick of time as Shredder corners our heroes. They barely make it out alive and head out of the city to Casey’s grandma’s house in the country. The final issue in the collection is told from April’s perspective; she journals about what everyone has been up to since they arrived here to hideout and voices her own worries about what happens when they inevitably have to return to NYC.

Reading these comics was highly informative, seeing what Eastman & Laird thought was important versus what the cartoon would emphasize to us younger viewers. The comic is such a different animal, not nearly as mature as I was led to believe as a kid, but definitely featuring more explicit violence & darker themes. It still definitely has the air of a middle schooler just drawing shit they like, which does have its charm. I think these original Turtle comics serve a great purpose in illustrating the absurdity of people claiming a new interpretation of a media property is “not the right one.” Stories are always being retold and refashioned. If you don’t like the current version of a thing, they will undoubtedly roll out a different one in a few years.