Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-1255374-20160227224555/@comment-995426-20160330215750

Like I said, I mainly appreciate TMNT comedy series that make fun of a companion main series without actually affecting its canon. I'm not really all that much of a Batman fan&mdash;I just use it as an analogy when discussing TMNT. All the friends I have who do like Batman, have nothing but disdain for the Adam West version and all the fruits thereof, and believe Batman storylines must necessarily remain dark. What TMNT and Batman do have in common is that their common theme of darkness, in multiple senses&mdash;noir characters, grittiness of setting, and stealth in the shadows. If primary TMNT stories can't maintain a dark and/or bittersweet drama narrative, they're just not TMNT. It's because the 1987 series eschews this entirely that makes it an anti-TMNT.

Also, Chris Allan has been a good TMNT artist too. He illustrated for both Archie and Mirage. What's interesting about his style is that it adapted the 1987 series, and darkened and matured it for Archie Comics so that adult comics readers could take it seriously reworked as an alternate universe&mdash;the 1987 series itself having been such adult-repellent to practically everyone who wasn't a fan of it as a child.

See, one area that I'm willing to give the 1987 series credit, was that its very first art style in the first two episodes or so wasn't that terrible, even if the story and characters weren't that good. It was done by anime studio Toei Animation (the same studio that made Dragon Ball Z), and some of the character art had decent lines even though Murakami-Wolf-Swenson only ordered low frame counts, which made the animations themselves look limited, repetitive and choppy. MWS would eventually go through a revolving door of cheap lowest-bidder animation studios, but Toei was good at what they did.