Have there been times where you lost interest or just "forgot" about TMNT?

[AquaParade]

Originally Posted by Leo656

Oh, brother, all this.

Like, okay, some people deride the Archie TMNTA book because it's eco-preachy and kind of juvenile, but here's the thing - it was better-suited to my tastes at the time than FW, at least in some ways. When I was 7 going on 8, I still watched the cartoon every day but was already getting a bit bored with the formula. Once I'd seen every re-run for the tenth time, and especially after the movie came out, I didn't get the same "high" from the cartoons that I did before. I was getting older, but the material in the show was stagnant by its own design. I was still able to enjoy it, but I longed for something a bit more "mature", even if only a few drops more. The movie was great, but it was Just One Thing and I couldn't watch it all the time. Mirage may as well have been invisible, because at the time except for expensive copies of issue #1, no shops around here carried it. And having read it since and knowing my own tastes, especially at that age, I probably wouldn't have really been a fan of that, either. At the time it was TOO great of a shift away from what I was familiar with, objective quality aside.

Lo and behold, right around that time I started reading TMNTA, and finding prose storybooks like "Six Guns and Shurikens" and others in that series, which hit a nice "sweet spot" between the TMNT of the cartoon and the movie. The stakes were higher, the tension was greater, the humor was seriously downplayed... there were even instances of mild profanity, which isn't a big deal but reading Donatello saying "Damn it!" in a storybook was still a rather big step away from the G-rated stylings of the cartoon show, and gave an indication that this was at least a step closer to how I was seeing "TMNT" in my head, especially after seeing the movie.

On the cartoon show, Nothing Mattered; there were a few snippets of events that referenced earlier episodes but for the most part it was the same thing every week. The comics and storybooks were decidedly based on them originally, but immediately springboarded completely into their own, slightly-darker thing. In the Archie comics, people got hurt, characters got killed (often violently)... again, people have become rather dismissive of it nowadays, and the eco-preaching is pretty heavy-handed, but we were getting that stuff force-fed to us from every angle in 1990 so it didn't surprise me then and it doesn't bother me now. To a kid on the cusp of entering puberty, who was a big TMNT fan but already feeling weary with the one-dimensional formula of the cartoon, and with Mirage more or less not existing within that kid's sphere of influence, the Archie comics, the movie, and things like that gave a real indication that "Yes, these characters can grow and change with you." It was comforting to know that if I wanted to look back, the G-rated material that got me involved was still there, and if I wanted to look forward, the PG and PG-13 style material would be there for that as well. Something for every "mood", basically. When the 2003 cartoon debuted, it was definitely still for kids but it felt miles ahead of where the original cartoon was. It felt like it was aimed more at me, a then-20-something who had grown "and matured" with the franchise, not just at The New Kids who may or may not have been watching. I appreciated that.

We don't really have that anymore outside of IDW, which I admit not really getting into because comics aren't in the budget right now and haven't been for a long time. And comics on the whole aren't really selling big numbers, so I have to wonder how many kids even read them. So aside from those comics, it's ALL kiddy stuff. It feels like we're presently stuck in this place where, once you hit a certain age, you're not welcome at the TMNT party anymore "Because It Isn't For You", so you can choose to wear the silly paper hat and smear cake on your face like a jackass or you can just leave. No middle ground.

At one point, those books and the 1990 film were the only TMNT things I bothered with, until the 2003 cartoon, so without something a little more "grown up" I wouldn't even have been a fan past 1993. It's good that they're reprinting the older comics, but it feels like scraps, an appeasement at the simplest level so they can say "We do SOMEthing for older fans" while the only new content they generate is distinctly FW-flavored, if not outright kiddie stuff.

I don't know. It feels like there's no "bridge" anymore to allow a Young Fan to organically become a Tween Fan, then a Teen Fan, and then an Older Fan, the way it was back then. Again, I'm aware that IDW comics exist, but I doubt it's at all like it was when I was a kid; 10 year olds aren't buying these books at the 7-11 as an alternative, grown-ups are buying them at specialty stores as the only alternative they can get. They're not bridging the gap between fans of different ages, they're just giving older fans a tiny foothold so that they don't abandon the ship altogether.

I've said this before, and it's an unpopular opinion, but I'm convinced that the wrong company got their hooks into it. When you want content that appeals to people of all age groups and DOESN'T just try and hook older people with Nostalgia and 'Member Berries, you DON'T go to Nickelodeon. But it is what it is, now.

This was a good read. The birthday party analogy was the highlight

I was going to say you should give IDW more credit for being that “bridge” or transition point for TMNT fans, but you’ve pointed out that they really can’t be, given the current state of the comicbook market. That’s true.
Still, it’s a series that does attempt to cater to slightly older fans. And even though I didn’t love it enough to stick with it monthly, there is a lot to enjoy about their approach to the series.

Alas, it is not enough. Comicbook characters are the gods of mainstream entertainment right now. Adults and general audiences would eat up a quality TMNT movie the same way they’re willing to eat up Guardians of the Galaxy or Aquaman. People of all ages love these characters.

[CyberCubed]

The IDW series has some flaws (obviously everything does, nothing is perfect), but it's come a long way to becoming one of the definitive versions of the franchise. It's also been going on since 2011 with no signs of topping, it'll be celebrating it's 10 year anniversary in 2021 which isn't too long from now. It's also approaching it's 100th issue soon.

IDW's hardcover collections also gives you a quick way to catch up without tracking down all the single issues, so it's not like you have to track down 100-150+ main issues and specials/spin-offs. Or you can read them digitally, we're not in 1992 anymore.

[Toxin45]

Originally Posted by Andrew NDB

I really wanted to champion IDW TMNT. I did. But I can't. And it's not even their fault.

#sad

Ninjas that can't kill = not OK. That's dumb. Not to make that the cornerstone of anything... but that's sort of important. It's like saying, "We're making a new Ghostbusters series where they... can't bust ghosts."

Too be fair there are deaths you missed.

[sdp]

Yeah, I kinda forgot about TMNT when they stopped making toys pre TNM for a bit as a kid and after TNM stopped making toys I also forgot about the turtles in that whole N64 era and then I became a teenager which didn't help since I was now "grown up for kids stuff", then they started releasing the dvds and I started buying them while in High School and got back, but since only one season dvd released per year I would go into hiberbation for many months until my fandom would rekindle with the next dvd, etc. But yeah, I can get super hyped for the turtles and constantly talk about them and then go months or over a year without thinking of the turtles because I don't care.

I do this with all franchises not just TMNT, it keeps them fresh to me and when I come back I have energy to see all the stuff I missed etc, I think it's nice to take break from franchises, I know I've posted it plenty times here before.

[Original TMNT Cartoon Fan]

Didn't the Archie TMNT kill some Malignoids when they teamed up with Slash to save Earth?

[Whatswiththeheadbands?]

As with everything I get interested in, I lost interest in the TMNT. I think it was sometime after attempting to rewatch the 2014 movie shortly after the sequel came out, then 100% deciding it was garbage. It was only the beginning of this year that I've gotten back into it.

Now I've really realized that I'm only really interested in the gritty side of the TMNT. I get little to no entertainment from the wacky side of the franchise anymore

Originally Posted by Leo656

All I care about right now are the collector's toys. That's probably how it's going to stay until someone running the franchise remembers that some of the fans aren't 8.

This quote fits me SO much. I'm sitting here with Mirage Bootlegs on my desk, and every time I look at them I think "why can't someone over there cater towards the more adult size of the fanbase, even for just a moment?". The TMNT have spent most of the 35 years as goofy Pizza loving superheroes. Give us Noir, gritty, violent Turtles for once

Originally Posted by Andrew NDB

I really wanted to champion IDW TMNT. I did. But I can't. And it's not even their fault.

#sad

Ninjas that can't kill = not OK. That's dumb. Not to make that the cornerstone of anything... but that's sort of important. It's like saying, "We're making a new Ghostbusters series where they... can't bust ghosts."

This also. If you're not going to have the Turtles in a comic series kill their enemies, then just get rid of the Ninja from the title

[Xav]

Originally Posted by Leo656

Like, okay, some people deride the Archie TMNTA book because it's eco-preachy and kind of juvenile, but here's the thing - it was better-suited to my tastes at the time than FW, at least in some ways. When I was 7 going on 8, I still watched the cartoon every day but was already getting a bit bored with the formula. Once I'd seen every re-run for the tenth time, and especially after the movie came out, I didn't get the same "high" from the cartoons that I did before. I was getting older, but the material in the show was stagnant by its own design. I was still able to enjoy it, but I longed for something a bit more "mature", even if only a few drops more. The movie was great, but it was Just One Thing and I couldn't watch it all the time. Mirage may as well have been invisible, because at the time except for expensive copies of issue #1, no shops around here carried it. And having read it since and knowing my own tastes, especially at that age, I probably wouldn't have really been a fan of that, either. At the time it was TOO great of a shift away from what I was familiar with, objective quality aside.

Lo and behold, right around that time I started reading TMNTA, and finding prose storybooks like "Six Guns and Shurikens" and others in that series, which hit a nice "sweet spot" between the TMNT of the cartoon and the movie. The stakes were higher, the tension was greater, the humor was seriously downplayed... there were even instances of mild profanity, which isn't a big deal but reading Donatello saying "Damn it!" in a storybook was still a rather big step away from the G-rated stylings of the cartoon show, and gave an indication that this was at least a step closer to how I was seeing "TMNT" in my head, especially after seeing the movie.

On the cartoon show, Nothing Mattered; there were a few snippets of events that referenced earlier episodes but for the most part it was the same thing every week. The comics and storybooks were decidedly based on them originally, but immediately springboarded completely into their own, slightly-darker thing. In the Archie comics, people got hurt, characters got killed (often violently)... again, people have become rather dismissive of it nowadays, and the eco-preaching is pretty heavy-handed, but we were getting that stuff force-fed to us from every angle in 1990 so it didn't surprise me then and it doesn't bother me now. To a kid on the cusp of entering puberty, who was a big TMNT fan but already feeling weary with the one-dimensional formula of the cartoon, and with Mirage more or less not existing within that kid's sphere of influence, the Archie comics, the movie, and things like that gave a real indication that "Yes, these characters can grow and change with you." It was comforting to know that if I wanted to look back, the G-rated material that got me involved was still there, and if I wanted to look forward, the PG and PG-13 style material would be there for that as well. Something for every "mood", basically. When the 2003 cartoon debuted, it was definitely still for kids but it felt miles ahead of where the original cartoon was. It felt like it was aimed more at me, a then-20-something who had grown "and matured" with the franchise, not just at The New Kids who may or may not have been watching. I appreciated that.

We don't really have that anymore outside of IDW, which I admit not really getting into because comics aren't in the budget right now and haven't been for a long time. And comics on the whole aren't really selling big numbers, so I have to wonder how many kids even read them. So aside from those comics, it's ALL kiddy stuff. It feels like we're presently stuck in this place where, once you hit a certain age, you're not welcome at the TMNT party anymore "Because It Isn't For You", so you can choose to wear the silly paper hat and smear cake on your face like a jackass or you can just leave. No middle ground.

At one point, those books and the 1990 film were the only TMNT things I bothered with, until the 2003 cartoon, so without something a little more "grown up" I wouldn't even have been a fan past 1993. It's good that they're reprinting the older comics, but it feels like scraps, an appeasement at the simplest level so they can say "We do SOMEthing for older fans" while the only new content they generate is distinctly FW-flavored, if not outright kiddie stuff.

I don't know. It feels like there's no "bridge" anymore to allow a Young Fan to organically become a Tween Fan, then a Teen Fan, and then an Older Fan, the way it was back then. Again, I'm aware that IDW comics exist, but I doubt it's at all like it was when I was a kid; 10 year olds aren't buying these books at the 7-11 as an alternative, grown-ups are buying them at specialty stores as the only alternative they can get. They're not bridging the gap between fans of different ages, they're just giving older fans a tiny foothold so that they don't abandon the ship altogether.

I've said this before, and it's an unpopular opinion, but I'm convinced that the wrong company got their hooks into it. When you want content that appeals to people of all age groups and DOESN'T just try and hook older people with Nostalgia and 'Member Berries, you DON'T go to Nickelodeon. But it is what it is, now.

Hey we still got the PG-13 material with the Platinum Dunes films, right?

[The-Shredder]

I got into TMNT in 2003 with the Fred Wolf show and shortly after the 4Kids show. I used to visit ninjaturtles.com, foxbox.tv/4Kids.tv, and fan sites all the time, including The Technodrome. I lost interest midway through Fast Forward, and got heavy into Star Wars instead. I slowly got back in with Back to the Sewer, the 25th Anniversary, Turtles Forever, and started lurking the forums. I kept up with the 2012 Nick show, but I lost interest in keeping up with it around Season 3 because of the juvenile humor, plot holes, and constant hiatuses. I finally finished watching it last fall. It got better late in Season 3 in my opinion, but not by much. I haven't seen a single episode of Rise of the TMNT so far because I don't see it as a priority, but maybe I'll catch up to it before Season 2 starts. I'm definitely going to buy the Batman movie crossover though. So far, I'm not a fan of how Nick is portraying TMNT as a juvenile kiddy thing, but I appreciate that there are more high quality collectibles than there used to be that cater to the older crowd.

[Toxin45]

Originally Posted by Whatswiththeheadbands?

As with everything I get interested in, I lost interest in the TMNT. I think it was sometime after attempting to rewatch the 2014 movie shortly after the sequel came out, then 100% deciding it was garbage. It was only the beginning of this year that I've gotten back into it.

Now I've really realized that I'm only really interested in the gritty side of the TMNT. I get little to no entertainment from the wacky side of the franchise anymore



This quote fits me SO much. I'm sitting here with Mirage Bootlegs on my desk, and every time I look at them I think "why can't someone over there cater towards the more adult size of the fanbase, even for just a moment?". The TMNT have spent most of the 35 years as goofy Pizza loving superheroes. Give us Noir, gritty, violent Turtles for once



This also. If you're not going to have the Turtles in a comic series kill their enemies, then just get rid of the Ninja from the title

Those days are over dude there are some deaths in Archie and idw but gritty tmnt is tame to other gritter comics like punisher and many others.

[Original TMNT Cartoon Fan]

Never lost interest, just started to feel ashamed for liking cartoons and comics by the age of 11–12.

[Toxin45]

Mirage comics started off as a violet and gritty parody of mechindise driven series then got it's ongoing series focusing on the tmnt adventures and by vol 4 have grown apart but it went nowhere due to massive delays. At this point it will be a while for it to finishes.
Archie comics was basically loosely based on the 1987 series but has grown into it's own contitnuty
Idw is a more modern age version of the tmnt that is still ongoing to this day combine elements of the privious comics and the previous animated series together. I think I started in the 1990's but lost in interest in the 2000's but got into it again in the 2010's.

[Original TMNT Cartoon Fan]

Originally Posted by Toxin45

Mirage comics started off as a violet and gritty.

Not even Donatello's bandana was violet in the Mirage comics.

[Leo656]

Originally Posted by Xav

Hey we still got the PG-13 material with the Platinum Dunes films, right?

Dick and fart jokes may be "only suitable for an older audience" but that in no way makes them "grown-up".

[snake]

Leo is spot-on, as usual. I feel the issue a bit less because I follow the IDW comic and am genuinely enjoying Rise, but yeah, it's kind of barren if you don't want either of those things. But seriously, people, pick up IDW. It's pretty much an all-encompassing incarnation that pulls bits from all across TMNT history.

Weirdly enough, I've been following the IDW comic so long that it's basically the de-facto incarnation I think of anymore. The world is very well-defined, and what doesn't get covered in the main comic gets fleshed out in the wealth of spin-offs they've put out. All-in-all, it's a satisfying comic for fans who want something more mature, and probably the best we're going to get for the foreseeable future.

[Leo656]

I will say, I most likely would be picking it up if my closest comic book store wasn't almost a half hour out of the way.

Between 2002 and 2009, I had a job 5 minutes from home AND a comic shop that was about ten minutes away (where I had a permanent 10% discount because I helped them obtain and move in a bunch of glass display cases). In that time, I hit them up at least twice a week and gradually amassed a collection that currently fills over 25 long boxes.

In 2008, they went out of business (It broke my heart when the owner told me, "You more than anyone are how I was able to keep it running as long as I did."), so I had to start going to the next-closest place, which isn't very close (but they ARE a great place). In 2010, I got a new, higher-paying job, but it's a half hour to work and another half hour home every day, so we burn gas like a motherf*cker. So I mostly only go buy comics when they're having a huge sale.

Add to that, the average cost of a comic book since my "prime" has skyrocketed from $2.25-2.50 an issue to $3.50-4.00, and altogether I just can't justify the expense. I used to go in with $100 and walk out with a juicy stack; that doesn't stretch nearly as far as it used to.

It's just a lot of gas, traffic and hassle for me to go all the way there, buy one or two books, and come home. But if it was like it used to be, then yeah, I'd be getting it even if the price was the same. As it was, the owner of my old shop always told me that I was the only one buying Mirage Vol. 4 and Tales at the time, and I didn't even like Vol. 4, so it shows you that I'll take an occasional bullet to be a "booster". Under current conditions, though, I just can't fit it in.

I do own most of the first dozen issues or so of IDW. Pretty good. There's stuff I don't like but that's true for everything.

[Original TMNT Cartoon Fan]

Originally Posted by Leo656

I don't think it makes sense to have these sweeping editorial mandates about "No Killing"

One alternative to blood and gore is to have more fights atop rooftops and skyscrapers. Sometimes, someone is kicked and (call it "accidental" if you want it) falls off and dies.

[dragonside]

There are times when my interest has waned. Not so much that it was gone. But more like needing a break to have variety.

Currently I'm rotating through my hobbies/franchises. I am in a Gundam phase for now. Just came from DC/Marvel Superheroes.

[MsMarvelDuckie]

Originally Posted by Leo656

I will say, I most likely would be picking it up if my closest comic book store wasn't almost a half hour out of the way.

Between 2002 and 2009, I had a job 5 minutes from home AND a comic shop that was about ten minutes away (where I had a permanent 10% discount because I helped them obtain and move in a bunch of glass display cases). In that time, I hit them up at least twice a week and gradually amassed a collection that currently fills over 25 long boxes.

In 2008, they went out of business (It broke my heart when the owner told me, "You more than anyone are how I was able to keep it running as long as I did."), so I had to start going to the next-closest place, which isn't very close (but they ARE a great place). In 2010, I got a new, higher-paying job, but it's a half hour to work and another half hour home every day, so we burn gas like a motherf*cker. So I mostly only go buy comics when they're having a huge sale.

Add to that, the average cost of a comic book since my "prime" has skyrocketed from $2.25-2.50 an issue to $3.50-4.00, and altogether I just can't justify the expense. I used to go in with $100 and walk out with a juicy stack; that doesn't stretch nearly as far as it used to.

It's just a lot of gas, traffic and hassle for me to go all the way there, buy one or two books, and come home. But if it was like it used to be, then yeah, I'd be getting it even if the price was the same. As it was, the owner of my old shop always told me that I was the only one buying Mirage Vol. 4 and Tales at the time, and I didn't even like Vol. 4, so it shows you that I'll take an occasional bullet to be a "booster". Under current conditions, though, I just can't fit it in.

I do own most of the first dozen issues or so of IDW. Pretty good. There's stuff I don't like but that's true for everything.

This is why I LOVE buying in TPB format from Amazon! There are plenty of comic shop sellers there, so I am helping keep both the book and the sellers afloat!

[Leo656]

Buying comics online is cheating. Doubly so for TPBs. Philistine!!!

[snake]

Damn, Leo. You’d hate how my comic-reading habits operate. Let’s just sayI have a lot in common with Jack Sparrow.