from Chris Snelgrove
| Published
We now think of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles as a film and television franchise, but long before that they were born in comics. These comics became more popular with the rise of movies and cartoons, and kids who are TMNT fans seek them out and read any Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles-related content they can get their hands on. And not everything was as kid-friendly as the movies or TV shows.
As all ’80s kids remember, there were two different Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles comics back in the day: the original black and white Mirage comics and the full-color Adventures of Archie Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles comics. For young fans and their parents alike, this created the assumption that there was a clear divide that the Mirage comics were made for adults and the Archie comics (which were based on an 80s cartoon) were made to be suitable for children.
This assumption was very wrong. I recently re-read all 72 issues of the “kid-friendly” Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles comic and found some weird Technodrome nonsense that effectively warped an entire generation of young fans without their parents realizing what was going on.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles vs. Disembodied Brains and Genocide
Perhaps the most famous example of this is the revelation that the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles caused Hitler’s death. This was during a story where the future turtles and their current selves met and engaged in some timely mishaps with villains that included Hitler’s brain with a robot body. When they encounter the intact Hitler in the past, the future Raphael punches him, and the future Leonardo claims that they are demons here for the Führer’s brain, causing him to kill himself.
While this is the most famous example of Teenage The Adventures of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles The comic is extremely strange and definitely not suitable for children, but it is not the last. For example, the comic establishes early on that Krang (the franchise’s more famous brain in a robot body) isn’t just some ineffectual leader from Dimension X. He’s actually a genocidal warlord responsible for destroying entire planets.
Cannibal Walking Eyes and Devil’s Harem are not suitable for children
The revelation that the wacky comic villain was actually a mass murderer indeed threw me young for a loop, as did the later plot point where Krang started working with a cannibalistic walking eyeball and ended up fitting himself onto Shredder’s head so he could use the evil ninja as a puppet.
The comic features other strange bad guys, including Zero, a man who impersonates the devil and tries to create a biblical-themed apocalypse on Earth. Oh, and he’s threatening to forcibly make one of the Mighty Mutanimals’ mothers part of his “harem,” which means we can add “rapist Satan” to the list of baddies in this “kid-friendly” comic.
Both prostitution and Christianity are a big part of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles universe
Speaking of the Mighty Mutanimals, they got a short-lived spinoff series before being killed off…just brutally shot by some third-rate villains. Through the time-traveling future turtles, the comic makes it clear that these characters were killed due to the meddling of bad guys in the timeline. However, they are never brought back to life, but present us with Null’s vision of these deceased characters literally burn in hell.
Perhaps my favorite example of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Adventures Being Totally Crazy is a multi-problem back-up story in which April O’Neill discovers a literal angel who has been kidnapped and forced into showbiz by a literal pimp. She uses her newfound ninja training to free the angel, but not before a thug offers to get the reporter into an R-rated movie (an adult movie star named April O’Neill…who would have imagined that?) . The angel then flies back to heaven like Neo at the end of The matrixas the comic has apparently confirmed that Christian theology is completely real.
I’m kidding about that Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Adventures ruined my childhood, but even as a kid I appreciated these comics despite (and often because of) their inherent weirdness. They made big creative moves that didn’t always pan out, but any given issue of the comic was far better than the 1987 TMNT cartoon it was nominally based on. All of this delightful weirdness was my personal mutagen, transforming me from someone who expects simple stories to someone who can appreciate even the weirdest genre content.
In gratitude, I can only say these three little words first popularized by 20th century pop icon Vanilla Ice: “go ninja, go.”
