Thread:Gilgameshkun/@comment-29720851-20170503182211/@comment-995426-20170503204807

I won't deny that the 1987 TV series started out with a few half-decent episodes. Maybe...as much as 5 of them, at first. But Peter Laird said, in practice, that they were shut out of creative control fairly quickly, and their ideas were stopped being taken seriously. Laird soon lost all interest in the series, and he and Fred Wolf even went to court against each other once, and Laird still is not liberty to discuss the details of that lawsuit.

But if you get a chance to read Mirage TMNT comics, you'll come to notice that it gets very, very, very different from any of the cartoons. Each of the comics labels and each of the cartoons follow their own separate continuities, and for the large part set their own tone as well. Mirage TMNT started out a dark parody of other comics, but eventually became more of a drama combining alternating action-adventure with more peaceful slice-of-life elements. There were still some comic relief or parody elements (especially in shorter backup mini-comics), but the primary narrative took a serious path and largely stuck to it. It also let its characters age normally, and by Volume 4, the four characters were in their 30s and the title was changed to simply the initials "TMNT".

To be honest, the 2012 TV series did initially have much for older audiences as well as younger ones. But there's always been a sort of split between adult TMNT fans who like TMNT for adult reasons and gravitate towards Mirage and IDW (and to a lesser extent to the 2003 series which Peter Laird was more directly involved in), and adult TMNT fans who mainly see TMNT as an outgrowth of their childhood because they grew up first and foremost with the 1987 TV series. Sometimes these kinds of fans get along well. And sometimes they...really don't, as sometimes it seems like they have too little in common, and can't agree on what TMNT fundamentally is or should be. (You may see that a lot in my discussions in other threads here at Turtlepedia.)

I generally don't like the 1987 TV series, but I do respect some of its byproducts, like the Archie TMNT comics, especially as they matured with the aging of their audience in a way the 1987 series itself resisted more strongly. And surely, there are fans who like both the adult and the kid-friendly approaches, our wiki's administrator The S being an example. But most of my own longtime TMNT fan friends, including my two older brothers in their 40s, are pretty much only fans of TMNT when appeals strongly to adults, and lose interest when it appeals mostly to children. And many of them did find potential in the 2012 series at first, but soon lost interest by the second or third seasons as it started shedding Mirage appeal elements in favor of the 1987 appeal elements and became more obviously merchandise-driven. I liked the first two seasons of the 2012 series, and my favorite episode is "Slash and Destroy," but I stopped enjoying the show during season 3, and was eventually completely turned off the show by season 4. Still, I was glued for a time, and I've produced over 1000 animated GIFs from the 2012 series for Turtlepedia.

Today, the primary franchise vehicle chiefly for Mirage-style adult TMNT fans is the IDW TMNT comics series, which combines appeal of both the Mirage comics and certain select elements of the 1987 and 2003 series to tell its story, though under a rather short leash from Viacom which limits certain freedom of character and plot development that Mirage never had. Whereas Mirage eventually gave the central characters some pretty drastic character development, it's been said that the most interesting IDW characters are actually the supporting characters like Old Hob, who can sometimes be seen as surrogates for how writers wished they could develop main characters (like Raphael) in ways Viacom ultimately wouldn't allow. The IDW comics also involve Kevin Eastman but not Peter Laird, whereas the later Mirage comics involve Peter Laird but not Kevin Eastman, and the differences between their respective visions becomes clearer. The Mirage comics series has been on indefinite hiatus since soon after Laird sold the property to Viacom in 2009 (the last regular issues of Tales of the TMNT published in 2010), though he still has certain freedom to continue the series if he still wants to&mdash;he just hasn't yet. The last new issue of Mirage TMNT was published for free online as JPEG image files on Laird's blog in 2014, but those pages were actually drawn a few years before and sat on a shelf gathering dust until then.

But whereas Mirage was the principle adult TMNT comic and IDW is another adult vision under Viacom's supervision, the one comic series that some of my fan friends respect the most, is Mutant Ninja Turtles Gaiden, which was never a licensed comic at all, but technically a fan webcomic. Still, it's been publishing continuously for over a decade now with hundreds of pages under its belt (longer than some licensed TMNT comics volumes), and now has a whole fandom of its own, and some of its memorable scenes even ended up mysteriously appearing recreated in licensed works. It's also much, much darker than even Mirage or IDW, with many deep psychological drama elements. My friends tend to prefer this because it's not just fascinating but in some ways more realistic, as it would have always been hard to live a life being raised as deadly assassins without lots of associated trauma and baggage, and MNT Gaiden is very good at showing what it might be like if the four turtles had grown up to become extremely dysfunctional 34-year-old adults, but in relation to a younger generation of 16-year-old humans and turtle who don't have nearly as much baggage but in some ways even more on their plate than the four brothers did when they were still teenagers. MNT Gaiden is certainly a more brutal deconstruction of this, but even Mirage TMNT has its turtles accumulating a certain amount of psychological baggage as they age, as all adults do but ninja adults almost certainly would. They tell a good story, though, and you can love turtles even when they are deeply-flawed people who don't always do the right thing.