I need to make two things clear before I continue. The first is that I have been an almost-lifetime fan of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (I say almost because I was released before they were). I watched the original cartoon show, have collections of the first comics, littered my room with toys and little brown swords, etc. From the time I first discovered them until way past the point I should have let them go, they were a major part of my life.

The second point I’d like to make is that I’m neither defending nor condemning Michael Bay. In fact, I’m not even taking a stand on the movie itself. Unlike some people on the internet, I don’t have the magic power to know how a movie that is still in pre-production will eventually turn out and am likewise unqualified to review a film that is literally just words and sketches on paper at this time.

Let’s get into the big concerns, shall we?

THE INTEGRITY OF THE FRANCHISE

A concern I’ve heard expressed is that the changing of the origin will somehow impact the integrity of the franchise because aliens are less plausible than pet turtles who can barely move around turning into ninjitsu-wielding man-turtles after a dousing with intergalactic ooze. For the sake of this piece, we’ll pretend that point of view makes enough sense to even justify discussing it.

TMNT started out as a joke when Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird combined Marvel’s New Mutants with the ninjas of Frank Miller’s Daredevil and Ronin works. This is evident in the original comics. It was a gag. But, like Dave Sim’s Cerebus started out as a parody of sword-and-sorcery comics like Conan, TMNT became something much greater. The comics took the Turtles from ancient times teaming up with other small-press characters to far-off intergalactic arenas fighting the Triceratons.

The first television cartoon series started in 1987. More than likely, this is the version of the Turtles with which you are most familiar. While the original comic book adventures were darker, more violent and all of our heroes had red headbands, this new spin simplified things for children. The vengeful, dangerous Shredder of the comics gave way to the James Avery-voiced minion of Krang. Their initials were added to their belts and each turtle was color-coded to make things easier for smaller attention spans. In short, nearly everything from the original comic series changed to make the cartoon possible and attractive to a wider audience. “The origin was never changed!” you scream. I shush you.

I’m going to assume this is about where you left things. Your last memories and, possibly, only memories of the franchise itself came from that original cartoon series (possibly also the original movies) and you’ll be darned if anything comes along to change that!

Here are some things you might have missed:

• A live-action TV series that introduced female turtle Venus De Milo
• A 2007 CGI film that struck a nice balance between the comics and original cartoon
• A movie in which they traveled in time back to Feudal Japan
• Another animated series in which the participated in a Mortal Kombat-style tournament and also traveled 100 years into the future
• An Image Comics series that saw half of Raphael’s face disfigured, Leonardo losing a hand and Donatello grafting with a robotic body after becoming paralyzed due to a shattered shell
• Action figures that cast them as everything from Transformers to superheroes (designed by Jim Lee, even!)
• A concert tour sponsored by Pizza Hut in which they performed songs like “Coming Out of Our Shells” and “Pizza Power”

Obviously the fandom that’s currently concerned about the future of the franchise was okay with all of these follow-up projects, right? Maybe I wasn’t paying attention, but I don’t recall seeing the petitions.

TRANSFORMERS

Interestingly enough, the loudest and whiniest opinions about Michael Bay don’t seem to match the success of his career. That seems a bit odd, doesn’t it?

Let’s assume that when Michael Bay started working on Transformers, you were hesitant but maybe a little excited. Then you started seeing the character designs and saying things like “Why does Optimus Prime have a mouth?” or “Why is Megatron so spiky?” I know I did. But I looked forward to it. And when I saw it, I had a great time. As an avid watcher of the original Transformers cartoon and collector of its toys, I didn’t find my love of the fandom affected at all. In fact, it brought back a long-dormant interest in action figures that transform (I bought over $150 worth of toys after seeing the movie) and I had a good time with it. Did I wince when Optimus Prime said “My bad” or when Bumblebee urinated oil on John Turturro? Sure. But a lot of people hated the whole movie and the entire experience. In fact, it only pulled in $710 million dollars.

Wait, that doesn’t seem right. Of course, the crowds all went in blindly and didn’t know how much they would dislike it. Clearly this would be a cautionary tale for whatever future sequels might come along. And, in fact, the second Transformers movie, Revenge of the Fallen, only brought in $836 millon. Hold on, that’s more.

It’s widely acknowledged that RotF was an inferior entry in the series. Even Michael Bay said so. With their faith shaken, savvy, angry audiences had said “Enough is enough, Michael Bay! These movies are terrible!” I think you know where I’m going with this. The third film made over a billion dollars.

You may complain about Michael Bay’s movies and methods and call him Lord Destructor of Childhoods (more on that nonsense shortly), but you watch his movies. And I know this because I see so many rabid complaints about so many specific moments in the flicks that there’s no way you haven’t. Some I have to take your word on because I didn’t see the second one. It looked silly and I’m an American human that can make his own choices about what films he sees. But you might’ve. And every ticket sold says “Please, sir, may I have some more? You’re doing it just right.”

YOUR CHILDHOOD

Michael Bay is not a time traveler. Unless you’re still a child (in which case you’ve certainly abandoned interest in this and moved on to something else), your childhood is over. It’s time-locked. It cannot change. The only impact your present life can have on your past life is if you stir up some repressed memories of wonderful or horrible things. And even then, there’s just the potential to change your perceptions of growing up. Everything that happened still happened and nothing short of an evil time-traveling director can change that.

If someone tears down your childhood home, your childhood still happened. Should your accountant parents suddenly become roving carnies wandering from town to town in search of thrills and funnel cake batter ingredients, they were still accountants the whole time you grew up. And if someone changes something about some characters you liked as a kid, YOUR CHILDHOOD IS FULLY INTACT. If a lack of change is so very important to you, know that the ways in which these fictional characters were initially presented to you still exist on DVD, in reprint comics and on eBay where all the action figures live that we don’t play with any more.

If you really, truly, incorrectly believe that the very fiber of your childhood is at risk when this movie exists, pretend it does not. Don’t see it. Don’t feed the machine. That is your right as a consumer. Skip it. I dare you to ignore it. There will be a three or four month burst where the commercials are on TV and the toys are in the Kids meals and the buzz is all a-buzzy. Ignore it and find something else to do. You’re stronger than marketing, right?

By the way…a moment about Robbie Rist, the actor who said Michael Bay was “sodomizing” the franchise by making the Turtles aliens and referred to Bay “raping our childhood memories.” (Robbie Rist, by the way, did the voice of Michelangelo in the three live-action movies and is also notable for playing Cousin Oliver, final nail in The Brady Bunch’s coffin.) As I stated, Robbie, if something in the present affects your memories from childhood, you need to reassess how seriously you take things. And if you’re willing to equate someone making a movie with a violent sexual crime, you immediately lose the right to be taken seriously yourself.

THE ORIGIN DOES NOT MATTER

There are several things about TMNT that are very important, but mostly it’s the feel. It’s the setup and the dynamic. It is not the origin. In fact, the origin itself is inconsistent depending on which media you follow. In the comics, it was a cannister of ooze created by a race of outer space brain creatures that bounced out of a truck. In the cartoon and movies, it was altered to be more terrestrial. Both of these ooze origins were incredibly important to the storylines that followed, but had no bearing on the characters (the characters themselves also vary from medium to medium, but whatever).

Look, you want green guys with shells who have ninja equipment. You want Raphael grumpy, Donatello nerdy, Michelangelo partying and Leonardo vanilla. These are things that may or may not happen in Michael Bay’s movie. In fact, the characters may wind up being regular turtles from Mars that land on Earth and get splashed with a mutagenic ooze. We don’t know any of these things. The most important part of this whole entertainment experience is the entertainment part. Will it be good and be handled respectfully?

I don’t know. And neither do you.

So shut up about it. Don’t fight it because it’s going to happen no matter how hurt your feelings are. If you’re still dissatisfied when it comes out, don’t see it. Read reviews. Ask a friend who saw it for his or her opinion. You can’t do anything about how it’s made, but you can make decisions about how you handle it once it is. If you’re not interested, don’t see it.

I dare you.

The Dark Knight is currently poised to destroy every major box office record in the history of cinema. Having already smashed opening day and weekend records, the trends indicate it may overtake 1997′s Titanic as the high-grossing film of all time. This is an impressive feat for any movie, but my interest is held by the fact that it’s a Batman movie.

The concept of Batman has always had a place in pop culture, constantly reinventing and adapting itself. In the early comics, it was the darker approach of a regular guy righting wrongs from the shadows that caught the attention of a country already growing weary of the boy scout image portrayed by Superman and the characters he inspired. In the 1960s, there was the camp TV series that brought Batman and Robin to the public forefront with a take on the characters that would forever stain any serious discussion with “POW”s and “WHAM”s and “Holy this and that, Batman!” Counter to how the Dark Knight was portrayed in the original comics, this version provided a new lexicon for reporters to use when talking about anything related to comics (even now, as the public gets used to the darker, grimier version brought to us by Christopher Nolan). Tim Burton blended the dark and the camp in 1989′s Batman and 1992′s Batman Returns. The other pre-Nolan Batfilms don’t warrant mention (aside from their resaturation of the stains on the character’s image). The various Batman cartoons have all had their whack at the legend, most notably Batman: The Animated Series, a show that was kid- and fanboy-approved.

Batman, it seems, has always been around, forever adapting and changing. So why is it that The Dark Knight has risen to such mind-boggling heights? While ever-present, Batman has never been as popular or admired as the superheroes in brighter tights like Superman and Spider-Man. More than likely, The Dark Knight has set the world on fire based simply on the fact that it never lets itself act like a superhero movie. Unlike its predecessor Batman Begins, which only started acting like a comic book film when the big microwave bomb was headed into the heart of Gotham, The Dark Knight is a thriller, an action film, and a sociopolitical allegory wrapped into a tightly-weaved (yet needlessly long) film.

Batman Begins wasn’t without its own allegorical moments. A terrorist group (one that literally caused terror with a fear gas) using a public transportation method to crash down everything in mid-town Gotham? That story has been lived through, although admittedly with less Gary Oldman. But The Dark Knight sets itself up from the get-go. Batman is America (vascillating between its citizens and its government), the Joker is terror, the Underworld is the rest of the world. The Joker is wild, unpredictable, and impossible to reason with. Batman goes to extreme lengths (such as essentially wire-tapping the entirety of Gotham City) as way to restore order. At the same time, the ultimate symbol of hopeful justice, Harvey Dent, is corrupted along the way. Even the Joker’s creation, which we assume is a direct result of Batman’s presence in Gotham, rings of the true reasons behind the terror attacks we’ve faced in this country. In the end, we’re watching our world on screen for two and a half hours, played out with puppets in armor and purple suits.

The resolution, however, is ideal. And it’s the build to that resolution is what keeps people in their seats. Batman (America) catches the terrorist leader (The Joker) using his own means. He becomes reviled in the name of How It Should Be Done, but it’s for a good reason. As the credits roll, we see Batman in the perfect position. Safer yet still living by his own terms. He lost some things that were important to him, like his girl and the shining, scarred version of Justice represented by Harvey Dent. Are these losses acceptable? That’s to be determined in the final film of Nolan’s planned trilogy. One that will, no doubt, make another outlandish payday for those involved and hopefully frighten, entertain, and empathize with the American public. As long as it doesn’t suffocate itself in convoluted plots like Pirates 3 or Spider-Man 3, I think we’re in for another treat.

It’s still amazing to think that Batman will likely sit perched atop the list of film records, cape billowing in the wind. To a point it helps legitamize the industry of comic books, but it transcends that “genre” with such facility that it’s hard to even apply its success to its source. It would be great to see a reversal, in fact, and see some comics coming out that match The Dark Knight in its twisting plot-lines and solid, real-world characterization of unreal characters but using those elements unique to graphic storytelling to take it even farther. There are a few out there, but they are few and far between. The immediate thought is Watchmen, but even that is so grounded in the fantastic that it’s hard to compare.

What The Dark Knight teaches us is that source material and flash are irrelevant when you have a solid interpretation, a masterful storyteller, and the right amount of social resonance. I’m not saying I want to see a Superman movie fitting the same template, but The Dark Knight makes me crave more intensity in my moviegoing, not just in the action sense, but in the emotional and psychological. Tell me a story I already know, but do it in a format and a way I never knew could work so well. Teach me about myself and the world around me. Make me think and cringe and cheer all at once. The Dark Knight did it. And it’s going to be as much of a legend as Batman himself ever was.

Hi there. I’m Brandon J. Carr, artist and writer for Weird Adventures in Unemployment. The strip hasn’t updated in a couple of months and I should have been more communicative about exactly why.

As regular readers know, I was sick and then my computer went kablooie. Then a couple trips out of town without the ability to update pushed things even further behind. However, this whole situation has painted me as more of a slacker than I really am.

For most of this break, I’ve been waiting for some things to be sorted out behind the scenes. Business stuff, not personal stuff this time. Without getting into details, what I’ve been waiting for hasn’t been sorted. And until things are taken care of, I’m making the business decision to suspend my work here.

It sucks because I love Weird Adventures and all the readers. I’ll keep you guys updated via my blog as to if or when Weird Adventures will be coming back. Miss you guys already.

And there you have it. I’ve got other stuff I’m working on while I wait to see what course everything will take. I have two projects in particular with awesome collaborators, one with me as co-writer and the other with me as artist. Both are really exciting and the writing gig is a little similar in tone to Weird Adventures. The artwork lets me get back to some fun fantasy sci-fi stuff in the vein of what I used to do on Quantum.

I spent a few minutes trimming my ear hair earlier. Again. Getting old is getting old.

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No, it’s not Weird Adventures. But it’s something, right? Right?

Thanks to everyone who hooked me up with birthday happiness. I had a really nice weekend and getting e-mails and Facebook posts and text messages was certainly a big part of that. Thanks!

Today is Mike Rouse-Deane‘s birthday, so do him a solid and check out his ambitious Guest Strip Project. The concept is really neat and it seems to be going very well. Happy birthday, Mike!

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As far as MacBeth (my computer) is concerned, he’s currently still at the hospital having a hard drive transplant. I actually sort of miss him as his cousin Old PowerBook tries desperately to do the things MacBeth used to do. The Cintiq just doesn’t seem as magical without the MacBook Pro’s processing power. But just a little less magical. The awesome keeps the magic alive.

I’m going to be at Wizard World LA in a couple of weeks. That’s such an odd sentence. I’ve never been to LA, nor have I really been inclined to go there (unless it involves a lucrative writing contract), so looking at my itinerary is bizarre and kind of daunting. The good news is that I’ll get to see my Platinum bros and my DrunkDuck hos while I’m there, so I’ll be in good company. I intend to take lots of pictures since I don’t have official table space of my own. I won’t post any until I get back because MacBeth will still likely be in recovery.

My son turns five tomorrow. How did that happen?

Anyway, go enjoy the Weird Adventures return and tell me if you think I still have brush skillz.

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It’s been a huge week for Weird Adventures in Unemployment with the start of Chapter Two: Green Beans and a substantial upswing in traffic. The rating above means that out of all of the comics on DrunkDuck, where Weird Adventures is hosted, my comic is ranked number 10. I know it’s not like celebrating a first-place victory or anything, but there are something like five billion comics on DrunkDuck, so breaking into the top ten is a feat.

This means that, as you can see on the left there, Weird Adventures can be found on the DrunkDuck home page under “Most Read” stories. Now, because I’m an employee of Platinum, who owns DrunkDuck, Weird Adventures is at the top of EVERY page in a pull-down menu, but that never really seems to affect things.

True, you do need to click “see more” before it gets down to my strip, but it’s still there, hiding…waiting for adventurous and/or click-happy users to discover it. It’s a coy ranking, to be sure, but it still sits there on top of my Stats page, waving and blowing me kisses. “People seem to like what you’re doing,” it says, “so keep doing that.”

I didn’t announce the beginning of Chapter Two here, but it started. And it’s awesome.

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Also, a drawing of the squirrel inside that big hole in the zombies head would look really cool.

I thought it a grand idea and ran with it in my own way. Here it is:

I hope you liked that. Now back to your regularly-scheduled Internet.

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WARNING: Some of the songs have naughty language in them!

In the video I’m using Microsoft Word, Adobe Photoshop CS2, and Macromedia Flash 8.

Here’s the music list:

• Satan Is My Master – Ben Folds Five – Naked Baby Photos
• The Big Jump – The Chemical Brothers – Push The Button
• Mein Teil – Rammstein – Reise Reise
• Bounce – System of a Down – Toxicity
• New York City – They Might Be Giants – Factory Showroom
• King Murdock – King Missile – Happy Hour
• Fit But You Know It – The Streets – A Grand Don’t Come for Free
• Suck My Kiss – Richard Cheese – Lounge Against The Machine
• Remedy – Hot Water Music – Caution
• Dallas – They Might Be Giants – Venue Songs

That’s about all the info I can think to add. If you have any questions, leave a comment. I’m considering doing a version of this with commentary to explain the process, but that would depend on if people can even sit still through this version.

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http://www.weirdadventures.com
At long last, the new comic has arrived! Don’t be too hard on me…this is the first page in a long-overdue return to regular comic strip creation and I have some ground to cover before I feel comfortable. Especially now that I’m doing everything on the Cintiq.

Head on over to the comic, sign up to be a DrunkDuck member, and post some comments about how awesome I am/am not! Enjoy!

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Secondly, this is the unofficial announcement of the NEW COMIC I’m working on that starts Monday (10/1/07)! I’ll post the URL for it on Monday when it launches. It’s a Platinum Studios Comic that will run through the DrunkDuck collective and will update three times a week. Running along with great comics like DJ Coffman’s Hero By Night and Adam Black’s Kiss 4K is a treat for me.

I’m very excited about it and will post some items throughout the weekend as I get ready for the big launch. Working with Platinum has been a great experience from easy-to-read contracts to easy-to-work-with people. I hope everyone else digs it as much as I have been.

The comic is called “Weird Adventures In Unemployment” and was created by Mike Strang. Once Strang was no longer on the project, I was recommended to the top dogs at Platinum and the rest is history. A quick Google search of the property will show that the project has had a bit of a rocky past, but for me it’s all about the future. And the future looks great.

Hooray!

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