Turtle Power

Originally published April 16, 1999, in Comics Buyer’s Guide #1326

“Look, mom! There’s a comic book of the Turtles, too!”

That, as it was related to me by the comic retailer who saw it, was how it went down in his store some years ago, when Turtle-mania was at its height. There was a young boy, maybe eight or nine, and he was apprising his mother of the big discovery. In addition to the Turtles movie, animated series, action figures, plush toys, sheets, bedspreads, pillow cases, towels, board games, mugs, and what-have-you… apparently, they’d also managed to put out a comic book that tied in with them as well.

I found this rather amusing, considering that the first real inkling of just how big a hit Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles I had was when Carol Kalish almost grabbed my copy out of my hands.

When the ads first appeared for it, it looked to be an entertaining little book. It certainly seemed as if the creators, Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird, had managed to identify every then-hot commodity in comic books. You had teenagers thanks to such then-hot titles as New Mutants and Teen Titans. You had mutants, thanks to the X-books in general. Ninjas owed much of their popularity to Frank Miller’s Daredevil. And turtles…

Cripes, y’know… I never did figure out where that came from. I mean, I can’t help but think that the choice of animal was truly pivotal. I happen to think that cows are intrinsically funnier, but I guess it was just the cadence of it. Four two-syllable words, accent on the first syllable. It just flowed trippingly off the tongue. Plus they’re among the only animals who carry their own armor with them, so from a story point of view, it made sense.

The ads appeared in CBG, full page shots rendered in a hilarious Miller-esque style. There was just something so incredibly surreal seeing Miller’s style adapted to something so relatively mundane as a turtle, that I made a mental note for myself to pick up a copy when it came out.

Which was exactly what I did. I was out and about on a road trip in my capacity as assistant direct sales manager for Marvel Comics. I was visiting a store (I regretfully don’t remember which one) when I saw a copy of it sitting on the shelf. “Oh, is that out?” I said, which of course is always one of the dumbest questions one can ask about a comic that’s sitting right in front of you on the shelves. Because all the retailer has to do is say, “No.” Then you get to stand there, looking like a doofus, and say, “But… I see it right there.” To which the obvious response is, “Well, then why did you ask?”

Mercifully, the retailer did not respond that way to the idiot from Marvel. Instead he said, “Yeah. Do you want it?”

I offered to buy it, and he said, “No, don’t worry about it,” picked it up and handed it to me. Free copy. “Thanks,” I said. And I stuck it in my briefcase and didn’t think any more about it.

So there I was, back at my office at Marvel, and I was going through my briefcase when I found the comic. I decided to kick back for a few minutes and read it. Not a bad job, huh. You can actually be sitting around in your office, reading a comic book, and nobody’s going to get on you for it.

So Carol was wandering past my office, glanced in, and immediately bolted over to my desk and made a grab for the comic. I reflexively pulled the comic away from her reach and said, a bit defensively, “What?”

“Where did you get that?” she demanded.

“When I was on the road,” I said. “I got it from (whichever the hëll store it was.) Just this past week.”

“It’s going for ten dollars,” she said.

I stared at the comic book. I had bent the cover back while reading it; quickly I smoothed it out so it didn’t become spine-rolled. “Are you sure?”

“Yeah. I was at a convention in Atlanta. They had it there for ten.”

I couldn’t believe it. I mean, it was funny. It was entertaining, certainly. But good heavens, I didn’t think it was going to spike that kind of popularity that quickly. I doubt the retailer did either; I don’t see him giving it away if he had.

It turned out that there were only a few thousand copies in existence, since that was all Eastman and Laird could afford to print. So not only did you have a comic with such a hilariously skewed concept that everyone who liked Frank Miller or X-Books (not to mention the massive turtle fan base) wanted to get their hands on a copy, but you couldn’t find the dámņ things. The laws of supply and demand don’t operate on a much purer basis than that.

The series’ popularity continued to escalate. And Eastman and Laird went from wide-eyed, excited fanboyishness to savvy businessmen almost overnight. I know, because I saw them at both ends of the spectrum in a relatively short time… and, as a side benefit, I wound up coming out looking like a total schmuck to a couple of Marvel editors because of it.

Now I don’t remember who suggested it first or how precisely it came about, cause it was a reeeeal long time ago. I don’t recall whether it was my bright idea, or whether Archie Goodwin floated it, or whether Kevin and Peter approached us, or what. But fairly early in the series’ history, there was a period of time, however brief, when Epic Comics was seriously thinking about picking up the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and publishing it.

As I said, I wish my recollection of how it came to be was a bit sharper. What I do remember was speaking to Eastman and Laird about the concept… and they couldn’t have been more excited about it. They were gleeful… they were, dare I say it, awestruck by the notion of Epic, a division of mighty Marvel, publishing their satirical title. They’d never dreamed that such a thing would be possible. Would they be interested, I asked, in my setting up a lunch meeting with Archie Goodwin. Yes, yes, absolutely, that would be great! Eastman and Laird told me.

So I did, and I gotta tell you, when Archie Goodwin, Jo Duffy, Eastman and Laird and I got together at a restaurant nearby the Marvel offices, I was so busy patting myself on the back I nearly tore my rotator cuff. Again, I don’t recall how I wound up in the middle of it, but the bottom line was that I was the one who had set up the face to face, and I was certain this was going to rebound to my benefit.

Except the Kevin and Peter who were seated across from Archie and Jo were not the same guys I had spoken with barely a month earlier. They were polite, but reserved. “So… what did you want to meet with us about?” they asked. Gone was the gosh-wow. Gone was the youthful enthusiasm. Archie and Jo cast a glance at me that basically said, Why are they asking why we’re meeting? Don’t they know? Well, if they knew, they kept it quite well to themselves. Rather than having lunch with two enthusiastic creators eager to work with Marvel (which was what they were when I spoke to them), Archie suddenly found himself doing a selling job. He talked about the series, about how much he liked it, about what he felt Marvel and Epic could bring to it. He also suggested that something else be done to distinguish the turtles from each other.

“They’ve got their weapons,” the guys said, “that’s all that’s needed.”

But we could give them different colored masks or belts. Make it that much easier to tell one from another.” said Archie. I believe Archie also suggested belt buckles with the first letters of their names on them.

Eastman and Laird smiled, nodded, but didn’t seem all that interested. It was as if they had bigger fish to fry. When lunch ended, they said they would think about it, which was a polite way of saying “No.” And Archie and Jo, equally politely, reamed me out because I was supposed to have done the leg work on the concept and I had thought, prior to the lunch, that we pretty much had a done deal.

Remember, this was back when Marvel was the king. Marvel didn’t come hat-in-hand to anybody, and yet we’d basically been blown off by two guys whose claim to fame was a black and white parody title that sold a fraction of the titles it was parodying. And it was my fault, and Archie and Jo were cheesed off with me, and I couldn’t blame em. It all became clear later, though, when some time after, it was announced that a high-powered packager had become associated with the Turtles and would be guiding them to fame, fortune, etc. No wonder they had suddenly been acting like they didn’t need Marvel. It was probably because they didn’t need Marvel. Which made me feel a little better, although not much. And of course, by that time they were sporting multicolored apparel and belt buckles with the first letters of their names on them.

So the Turtles when on to become a cottage industry for awhile, ensuring that an entire generation of kids would give art teachers grief by saying, “I thought Donatello was a turtle.” And kids would become familiar with Splinter and the Foot without any knowledge whatsoever that they were send-ups of Stick or the Hand. Maybe one Turtles fan in a thousand, probably, knew that the leaking radiation canister which had created the turtles had ricocheted first off the face of young Matt Murdock. The parody had outdone the original.

The characters moved so far away from their comic roots that, indeed, as I said in the beginning, there was the kid discovering that there was a comic book, too. And you know what else? It was in the fifty cent rack (obviously it was of more recent vintage than the black and white originals). And the mom looked at it and said, “Forget it, you have enough toys; you don’t need a comic book of it.” In other words, she would shell out (excuse the pun) money for the toys, but wouldn’t pay a fraction of that for a comic book which would encourage her kid to read. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: the comic you couldn’t give away. Considering how I got my first issue, I considered that somewhat ironic.

(Peter David, writer of stuff, can be written to at Second Age, Inc., PO Box 239, Bayport, NY 11705.)