Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-995426-20151021204331

This is less of an actual question and more of a rhetorical question, in the hope of starting a discussion. :)

One thing TMNT comics were from day one, were adult comics. Now, I don't mean adult as in "adult entertainment industry" or anything like that&mdash;I mean adult as in an adult target audience. Sometimes it was rated PG-13, sometimes it was rated R, but always primarily for adult readers. The cartoons that aired on television were very different&mdash;merchandise-driven and marketed to 7 year olds to sell toys. It went on its merry way, but at least there were still the comics.

Since TMNT was sold to Viacom and given to Nickelodeon to control, it's been clear that their #1 priority has been another TV show primarily for kids...and that in itself is not necessarily a bad thing. And they also licensed IDW to start a reboot of the comics series, largely for more mature readers. But apparently, Nickelodeon maintains a certain creative control over the comic that Mirage never had to deal with: In particular, shooting down creative ideas from Kevin Eastman and the rest of the comic staff that Nickelodeon seems to fear may attract unwelcome attention and questions about equivalent characters and plotlines in the cartoon show.

For example, the original plan in IDW for the City Fall arc was for to turn out to be the son of  and not. This was vetoed by Nickelodeon for..."reasons". Instead, they went with an arc where Leo is merely brainwashed by Kitsune to become "Dark Leo", until the spirit of his mother helped unravel his reprogramming. Having Leo turn out to be Shredder's actual son would have made the story all the more intense and heart-wrenching and full of grey. But a brainwashed Leo kept the story relatively black and white with a plot-easy escape clause.

And where Kevin Eastman is famous for making very mature, gritty comics (Bodycount probably being the most extreme TMNT example), the IDW comic is very conspicuously more PG-13 and not at all R in rating, as if it keeps self-censoring or something.

I mean, it's certainly possible I may have something of a nostalgia filter and IDW isn't necessarily more censored or less daring than Mirage, Palladium or Image were. But in many ways it feels...less bold, less daring, that what Mirage used to be. TMNT comics are expected to be noir and serious and intellectual all at the same time. They have no shortage of humor, but dead seriousness and "adult fear" is never far away. And it's not at all for little kids. And now all of that somehow feels less the case, especially as the IDW comic keeps moving forward.

IDW has been reprinting Mirage issues, adapted to color, as "Color Classics". I guess we can take notice in which issues they print, and which issues they noticeably skip over. So far they skipped over the entire Guest Era, which in some ways was not surprising since (a) they were declared non-canon by Peter Laird and (b) a wider pool of copyright owners may have been involved. But if they skip over Image or Bodycount or Michelangelo's Volume 4 arc, it may indeed mean they are trying to keep TMNT comics less adult.

One part of youth&mdash;usually the inevitable part&mdash;is finally growing up and becoming an adult. I liked how classic TMNT never shied away from that reality, and how it started with teenage characters (hence the title) and not 7 year old characters. Characters aged, and characters even became middle-aged past even the MTV target audience, and dealt with scenarios that a 7 year old couldn't even begin fathom. The characters grew up along with us, and didn't stay young forever. I really wish for more of this in TMNT media. Even if we cannot always realistically expect it from cartoons and its perpetually 15 year old main characters, it should at least be in good adult comics. 