Even people who market products to consumers for a living can be surprised by what connects with an audience and what doesn’t. Eastman and Laird struck paydirt with the Turtles in 1984, but that doesn’t mean the green foursome were necessarily their favorite characters.
Laird, in particular, was enamored with dinosaurs and robots. This might explain why, for better or worse, Mirage “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” Volume 1 Issues 5-7 (1985-86) heavily feature Fugitoid and the Triceratons in supporting roles.
In fact, Mirage felt the success of “TMNT” opened the door for a “Fugitoid” one-shot comic (1985) in advance of his debut in “TMNT.” In the comment thread of the review of “Fugitoid” over at TMNT Entity, Laird explained the existence of the one-shot, which was written before the invention of the TMNT but published afterward:
“Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” Issues 5-7 (1985-86)
Titles: “Teaming Up with Fugitoid” (No. 5), “The Triceraton Homeworld” (No. 6), “All is Revealed” (No. 7)
Writers: Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird
Pencils: Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird
Inks: Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird
“… the ‘Toid story ended up dovetailing nicely with the TMNT/Utroms/TCRI tale we were telling in the TMNT comics, so (we published “Fugitoid” so) all the work we did on the Fugitoid idea didn’t go to waste.”
Likewise, Laird had sketched Triceratons before the invention of the TMNT. When “TMNT” became a hit, Laird perhaps saw it as an opportunity to launch characters that were closer to his heart.
A new adventure
As such, Issues 5-7 completely depart from the good guys’ epic feud with the Foot Clan (something that – broadly speaking, based on analyses of their work by TMNT Entity – was Eastman’s realm, whereas the sci-fi adventures were Laird’s). The Turtles get transported via a transmat platform from the Techno-Cosmic Research Institute building to the city of Peblak on the planet D’Hoonib.
Eastman and Laird continue their awesome visual storytelling – more than once, you’ll turn the page and be treated to a stunning splash page of the new locale, be it Peblak or a battlefield or the Triceraton asteroid cluster.
And when I first read these stories, I thrilled to the introduction of Fugitoid and the Triceratons — because I had the action figures!
(Weirdly, although they are among earliest supporting characters in the Mirage continuity, neither Fugitoid nor the Triceratons appeared during the heyday of the original cartoon or Archie comics. However, one of the first Archie arcs did find the Turtles in an outer-space adventure; there, they ended up in a wrestling match, whereas in Mirage it’s a battle to the death with Triceraton warriors.)
Today, I don’t like these issues quite as much as I did back then. The half-fun, half-silly nature of the story persists: Dr. Honeycutt (a human trapped in a robot body, and known as “the Fugitoid”) just happens to be on the scene in Peblak to ally with the Turtles and provide exposition to the reader.
Our five good guys are caught in the midst of a war between the Triceraton Republic and an army of Federation humans led by General Blanque. Both sides want Honeycutt for his knowledge of how to build a transmat, which could swing the tide of the war. As we find out when the Turtles, Fugitoid and a few Triceratons are beamed back to Earth in Issue 7, the TCRI aliens have crossed paths with the Triceratons, too.
Unanswered questions
Substantial mythology questions are left hanging: Are the humans on D’Hoonib related to Earth humans? A reader would assume so, if only because English is the primary language on D’Hoonib. (This isn’t a case where an alien language is translated for the reader, as the Turtles converse with their new acquaintances without trouble.)
However, no one is familiar with the Turtles’ home planet of Earth, so if the Federation humans came from Earth, it wasn’t all that recently. But it couldn’t be in the too-distant past, because they speak the same English we do. Maybe these questions will be answered in future issues, or maybe they will remain plot holes.
Back in NYC during the Turtles’ off-planet adventure, April mopes around, worrying about the Turtles and Splinter and watching the Channel 6 news report on the mysterious beam of light above the TCRI building. As a reader, I understand why she missed them. “TMNT” had developed a nice relationship between this lonely human and her strange new friends, then set that arc aside for a random outer-space adventure.
Even the TCRI aliens’ explanation about the mutagen (the secret of the ooze, if you will) isn’t exactly packed with revelations; we simply learn that the ooze belonged to the TCRI aliens (and actually, we already knew that). We don’t learn if they had any defined plans for the mutagen, or if it was a purposeful creation or just something they were tinkering with for the sake of science. (Indeed, the ooze is decidedly lacking in intrigue in the second movie too, now that I think about it.)
At the end of Issue 7, I was glad to see the gang return home so we can get back to the more down-to-Earth, character-driven stories I prefer. (Back in the day, E&L had readers like me in mind, too. Concurrent with these issues in the main series, they released the character-driven one-shots “Raphael,” “Michaelangelo” and “Donatello.” More on those in a future post.)