You read that title correctly, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles are coming back to the printed medium that first launched their world-wide fame. Comic publisher IDW have gotten the publishing rights for the turtles after actively pursuing them when the TMNT were sold to Nickelodeon last year. Viacom (Nick’s parent company) has been pretty open about their plans for the franchise. In addition to the live action/CG movie that is currently in the works, Nick is also putting together a new CG animated television (see video below for sneak peak).
The comic will explore new stories but be set in the universe of the original Mirage TMNT volumes. No details were given as to whether this would be a retelling of that universe or simply additions to it. IDW did however state that they would be publishing collections of old material. This includes a hardbound reprinting of the first 11 issues. I other words, a reprinting of this collection. The most important and surprising thing is that its coming THIS YEAR! IDW said the series would begin in the summer, thats only 2-3 months away!
Viacom spent 60 million dollars getting the turtles in their camp, and obviously the are looking to recoup that cash. A movie, TV series and comic book should do the trick. The great news about the comic, is that with Viacom owning the franchise, it doesn’t have to be profitable to continue to be published. When the book was published by Mirage (the original home of the Turtles franchise), many times the creators lost money on them due to poor sales. If Viacom feels that its necessary to maintain a comic series for the Turtles just for promotional sake, then it will remain in print.
As a life time TMNT fanatic, I am extremely excited about everything Nick is doing to further the stories of the turtles, but pardon me if I go off on a tangent for a moment.
Mirage left a lot of things unfinished with the Turtles, mainly the DVDs. There is not a single TMNT series that has a proper complete DVD release. The original show is short 2 seasons, the live action Saban show has only been released in PAL regions and the 2003 4Kids series had erratic, out of order releases with the final season being completely unavailable.
TMNT Vol. 4 of the comic series left an unbelievable number of loose ends and was never properly wrapped up due to creator, Peter Laird, not finding the time to write the stories. The Forever War TMNT Adventures comic mini-series, despite being resurrected a few years ago, during the 25 anniversary, was never published and the second wave of the award winning/beautiful NECA series of TMNT figures were canned at the last minute (hell, the figures were even shown at comic conventions and toy fares).
Its disgusting how unfinished the TMNT franchise is and from what I understand Nickelodeon/Viacom, own most of the pieces needed to finish up these projects. Nick, do us fans a solid and get us some DVDs, I know you can’t make Peter Laird write the conclusion to TMNT Vol. 4, please don’t ignore us.