Quote:
Originally Posted by Venom
Say, as a comic fan first, how did feel when the Fred Wolf toon debuted? You were roughly 12-13, so in that transition phase of "cartoons are for kids" mentality...
Did any of your friends read the comics too? Perhaps abandoning them when E&L "sold out" (for lack of a better term)?
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I'll paraphrase bits that ended up in my intro threads here and on IDW and expand a little... someone at school in my year got hold of the first colour graphic novel that First Publishing released, I want to say 1988 here. It was before the cartoon aired on TV here in the UK that's for sure, or that I was aware of it being shown if anything. If anyone knows WHEN the cartoon started showing in the UK, please let me know.
He had heard that these "Turtles" were quite big in the US and had picked up a couple of the graphic novels when on holiday over there during the summer. I ended up being able to borrow them, and was hooked immediately.
I was able to acquire three of the four graphic novels myself on import (indeed my book IV says "first printing Nov 1988") not that long after, although I couldn't find book III and ended up getting it when Penguin in the UK released all four itself in 1990. By that point, I was 16.
In direct answer to the questions, I never really liked the original cartoon because it was... too cartoony I guess, and nothing like the serious, gritty nature of the original comics that I enjoyed. I'm not really sure how many others read the comics in the end, they may well have bought the Archie stuff because it was easier to acquire; I don't know if the Mirage series was officially distributed in the UK at the time, but the local comic store to my school quite often got issues in, so I was able to buy many of my first series comics there.
I somewhat drifted out of things during the mid 90s due to university, other interests and doing stuff that you do at university heh, but in the late 90s, once I graduated and had a job, and with the advent of eBay, I was able to fill in my gaps and get runs of the colour Mirage and Image comics. I restarted buying the comic afresh, when new issues came out, from the Dreamwave series and Volume 4.