Talk:Rise of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles/@comment-26423071-20170502163032/@comment-995426-20170502192850

I've been reading (and sometimes watching, but mostly reading) TMNT for three decades&mdash;I already know that the concept was always initially a parody&mdash;but it was a mature one. And later, after it was already well-established as a comic, it could afford to start taking itself even more seriously. That's what makes the Mirage arcs "City at War" and "Blind Sight" so engaging&mdash;they're serious, and do what they do so well. I mean, yeah, TMNT periodically injects new parody elements as time goes on, but as a dark comedy or "sadcom" where you could still take characters and their development seriously because the pain they felt was realistic. It should never be just for kids, or it loses this critical dimension and is no longer really TMNT.

Even in the most recent Ask Peter Laird #16, he says he quickly lost all interest in the 1987 TV series because it was clearly going to be nothing but silliness (and also because his and Kevin Eastman's input was not taken seriously).

There's different kinds&mdash;different dimensions, atmospheres of parody. The Mirage approach was usually interesting, even as it occasionally did more humorous stories (usually as shorter backup comics). The Fred Wolf approach may have targeted a completely different audience and made a huge profit doing so, but in a way that became absolutely grating to many Mirage fans such that it was the anti-TMNT to them. It also excised most of the family and spiritual elements that could make the Mirage series so wonderfully heartfelt.

A more recent example of how I think this kind of mature drama/comedy balance is done well, is Mutant Ninja Turtles Gaiden (an unofficial comics scenes which is mainly serious while having many light-hearted moments) alongside Bakabakashii (which is purely a comedy-oriented side comic of MNT Gaiden done as a series of shorts but isn't the main story nor even canon to it). On the higher end of the comedy-to-drama ratio, another story this works well for this kind of balance is Bebop & Rockstead Destroy Everything, with a tongue-in-cheek premise and told as a comedy of errors, but at its heart a sadcom where Bebop and Rocksteady finally realize how much they mean to each other and search hard to reunite with each other. The formula works best for the Mirage audience when TMNT is a drama with some comedy elements&mdash;B&RDE really being near the highest comedy-to-drama ratio I'm okay with in a main plot TMNT story.

When TMNT's primary expression turns into a comedy with little or no drama elements, then I not only find it boring, but quite irritating. The premise of TMNT may have started out ridiculous, but has done well taking itself seriously enough times that these are usually the best TMNT stories.

After all, an adult person still appreciates humor and parody, but ultimately is a more complicated creature who still has to return to the adult frame of mind. Mirage's City at War in particular handled this well as a coming-of-age story where the main characters were really no longer teenagers, but now adults who had to make more serious decisions with a whole lot of responsibility attached and learn to live with whatever decisions they made. They didn't, and couldn't, remain young forever, nor should they have. From then on, some of the best TMNT stories were told from the social context of adults, remembering their own childhood but regularly reminded that they were no longer children&mdash;that part of their life was over and would never return. And it still had comedy and parody elements, but through an adult lens. So, while it seems appropriate for successive reboots of TMNT to start telling their story through the dimension of teenagers, it seems extremely inappropriate to permanently tell their story with unaging characters that appeals foremost to children while alienating adults who like TMNT for reasons unrelated to their inner child&mdash;I know that's done because it succeeds at selling toys to an extremely profitable demographic, but it hinders the (often tongue-in-cheek yet still serious) coming-of-age story of TMNT when it's at its most interesting.