SUPER MUTATION!

One of the first times i felt totally violated by the pain of the "sell out" was with Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. In 1986, the TMNT were a successful, but still very underground black & white comic that was half tongue in cheek, half totally serious. Eastman & Laird's drawing style combined all sorts of awesome comics references & essentially defined to me what a cool drawer was. As the comic series progressed, the title was interpreted by lots of different artists, introducing me to Mark Bode & Richard Corben, but also giving me headaches because of certain translations of the characters & drawing styles i didn't like. It seemed like as soon as i got into the turtles they began an immediate hurtling forwards into popularity which just kept going. At first i had the same feeling i would have years later when "Punk" became popular with bands like Green Day, Rancid & the Offspring: violated.

Years later as i am slowly creating my own media empire, i dream of having millions of cartoons & toys & cookies & slime pies & gelatin deserts & oven mits with my designs on them. I still think that Eastman & Laird screwed up on some levels with the recreation of the turtles as commercial products, on the other hand, some of the wrongness of having something as absurd as teenage mutant ninja turtles cereal & the Archie comics series end up being very right in a very right way.