The Many Faces of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

The Best (and Worst) Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Designs

Change is constant in the world of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, a franchise which has managed to stay at the forefront of popular culture for over three decades, undergoing numerous re-jigs, remakes and reinterpretations in the process. The main players - a lean, mean, green incredible team with elite ninja skills and sweet headbands- may always be the same, but the Turtle’s formula has undergone some pretty radical changes over time, mutating from a hard-edged, satirical superhero comic into a cosy, kid-centric Saturday morning cartoon, and back again. Since I’ve been alive - which, coincidentally, is the same number of years that the Turtles have been kicking shell - this awesome foursome have left no corner of the media untouched and undergone some great, and not so great, transformations in the process.

This feature takes a peek under the sewer lid and shines a light on some of the Half-Shell Heroes’ best and worst incarnations from across comics, film, TV and videogames.

The First Turtle

Back when TMNT creators Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird first started out, the pair would entertain themselves by trying to one-up each other's sketches. One such doodle, drawn by Eastman, depicted a rather dumpy turtle kitted out in ninja gear, nunchucks strapped to its stubby paws and a bandana wrapped around its head.

Laird got a kick out of this little guy, which Eastman had called a ‘Ninja Turtle’, and drew his own, more polished, version.

Determined not to be outdone, Eastman took up his pencil and drew another sketch. Featuring four grumpy looking amphibians in matching bandanas brandishing various lethal weapons, this sketch would become the blueprint for the version of the Turtles we all know and love today.

The Mirage Years

With no other projects in the pipeline, Laird and Eastman took their sketch of the Teenage Mutant Turtles and began building a story around them. Their initial plan was to release a one-off comic book describing the Turtle’s journey from tiny terrapins to mutant masters of the martial arts.

Told across forty action-packed pages, the origin introduced many familiar elements, including the mysterious mutagen that gave the Turtle’s their powers, their mentor and father figure, Splinter, and their arch-nemesis Shredder. Well, I say nemesis, but unlike his animated counterpart who was a constant thorn in the Turtle's shells, the original Shredder’s career as a supervillain was cut short by Leonardo’s sword in the comic's very first issue.

Yup, these Turtle’s weren’t afraid to get their three-fingered hands dirty, killing if necessary. That grittier tone is reflected in the artwork itself, which is rendered in stark black and white with smoggy grays added for depth and texture.

Initially, the Turtles looked extremely Turtle-like, sporting beaky noses, more rotund shells and skinnier limbs. By about 1986, though, their designs had lost some of that earlier gangliness, adopting squatter, more compact physiques; the beaks were also dumped, although the Turtle’s trademark grimaces remained.

Animation Domination

Recognising the Turtle’s merchandising potential, Playmates teamed up with Eastman and Laird to produce a series of action figures based on the fledgling comic book. In order to differentiate the Turtles from one another, Playmates, in conjunction with animation studio Murakami-Wolf-Swenson, decided to address the awesome foursome’s clashing wardrobes. They hit upon the idea of giving each Turtle their very own colour scheme - Leo was now blue, Donnie a flattering shade of purple, Michelangelo orange, and Raphael classic red - and shiny new belt buckles with their initials on.

Aside from these cosmetic changes, the Turtle’s overall appearance was also completely retooled. Gone were the scowling, white-eyed bruisers of the comics, replaced with a quartet of softer, slightly more appealing mutants. The Turtles also gained a love of Italian food, particularly pizza, and the difference in their personalities was more exaggerated.

Creature Feature

Although the Turtles were big business by the nineties, there was another comic book character waiting in the wings to steal their thunder. That character was DC’s Batman, undergoing a huge resurgence in popularity thanks to Tim Burton’s movie starring Michael Keaton and Jack Nicholson. Mark Freedman, the man responsible for much of the Turtle’s licensing success, quickly realised that the TMNT had to beat Batman at his own game if they wanted stay on top of the merchandising heap, and started shopping around the idea of a movie.

Surprisingly, given its massive popularity at the time, the main movers and shakers in Hollywood expressed little interest in bankrolling a TMNT movie. With none of the big studios willing to put their necks on the line, the movie was made independently with a budget of just $13 million (a little over a third of Batman’s). Despite their lack of resources, the filmmakers didn’t skimp when it came to realising the Turtles themselves, employing the services of Jim Henson and his legendary Creature Workshop to give the guys their bigscreen makeover

Henson’s crew brought the Turtles to life via a mix of full-body prostheses and cutting-edge (at the time) animatronics. The end result was pretty impressive, and although these Turtles may look a little outdated to our CGI-jaded eyes, they still hold up well today.

Tour-ture

Following the success of the live-action movie, it was decided that the Turtles should trade their weapons for musical instruments and hit the road as part of an all-singing, all-dancing musical tour. This questionable enterprise was dubbed the 'Coming Out of Their Shells Tour' and saw the Turtles, along with April, Shredder and Splinter, travel the length and breadth of the globe spreading music and merriment. That was the theory, anyway. In reality, this garish spectacle was more painful to sit through than a root canal.The music was bad enough, but the Turtles themselves looked positively nightmarish, sporting glassy-eyed stares, rictus grins and outfits that would have made Judas Priest blush.

Image Problem

In the mid-nineties the Turtle’s left their longtime home at Mirage and joined the Image Comics stable. Peter Laird gave control of the property to a whole new creative team, encouraging them to put their own spin on the material. What followed was one of the most tempestuous and polarising chapters in Turtles history.

While it only lasted 23 issues, the Turtles underwent some pretty extreme changes during their tenure at Image; Splinter was transformed into a giant bat, Leonardo got one of his hands bitten off, Raphael was horribly disfigured before going on to become the new leader of the Foot Clan, and Donatello was killed only to be reborn as a cyborg. Of all the Turtles, Mikey was the only one that managed to get through all 23 issues without being maimed, mutilated or mutated.

This obscure chapter in the Turtles' history has proved divisive among Turtles fans and, as a result, has never been reprinted. Tellingly, when it came time for Peter Laird to resurrect the TMNT comic book in 2001, he brought the brothers back to their roots and ignored the Image continuity completely. 

God Dammit, Jim!

Beautiful fanart of some awful designs by artist joshdancato

If you want to see how bad comic book character design was during the nineties - an era infamous for its bulging muscles, big guns and billions upon billions of pouches -look no further than these bizarre Turtles redesigns from superstar scribbler, Jim Lee. Designed during the mid-nineties as part of Savage Dragon/TMNT crossover toy line, these figures were so unsuccessful only three of the four Turtles were ever produced, leaving poor old Leo (who looks a bit like a dime-store Thor) out in the cold. In hindsight, this was probably for the best. 

The Next Generation

What's better than four Ninja Turtles? Five Ninja Turtles, of course! At least, that's what the producers behind the woeful live-action TV series The Next Mutation believed. Yup, this show not only gave the Turtles faintly embarrassing new costumes, but a whole new member of the family. Venus, as she was known, became separated from her brothers after their fateful encounter with a vat of mutagen, growing up in Chinatown. Suffice it to say, this new addition to the Turtle family didn't go over well with longtime fans, particularly co-creator Peter Laird who has gone on record saying he regrets the series was ever made. 

Reanimated

In 2003, the Turtles returned to the small screen with an animated series that was a lot edgier and more action-packed than its predecessor. As part of the update, the Turtles underwent a slight redesign, sporting a look that was heavily influenced by the angular, Noir-inspired style in vogue at the time. 

Virtual Reality

For their fourth movie outing, the Turtles stepped away from traditional 2-D animation to star in their own CGI adventure. To complement the move from 2D to 3D,  the brothers four were given a fresh lick of paint. This was also one of the first times the Turtles sported major physiological differences: Leo was lithe and athletic, Raphael was squat and muscular, and Michelangelo was given a more innocent appearance.

New Beginnings

IDW's Turtles reboot is the place to be if you're a Turtles fan; written by Tom Waltz and TMNT co-creator Kevin Eastman, it re-purposes a lot of the existing mythology and story lines from the Turtles' many film, TV, and comic book appearances, whilst also throwing a lot of its own ideas and inventions into the mix. It's the perfect combination of old and new; nostalgic without feeling derivative, and with enough twists and turns to keep even die-hard TMNT fans on their toes. It has also been home to some wonderful artwork courtesy of some extremely talented artists. 

For the most part, the look of the Turtles in the new series has been quite traditional, sticking closely to the designs first laid down by Eastman and Laird thirty years ago. There have been one or two artists willing to break with tradition, however, taking these classic characters and adding their own unique spin. My personal favourite would have to be Sophie Campbell, whose interpretation of the Turtles manages to somehow be cute and completely badass all at once. It may not be everyone's slice of pizza, but I love seeing the Turtles looking this vibrant and expressive.

Most people would agree that the the most influential penciller working on the current IDW series is Mateus Santolouco. Joining the team as part of the Secret History of the Foot Clan miniseries, the Brazilian artist decided to shake things up by giving the Turtles a complete overhaul. This involved giving each of the four brothers their own distinct physical features, a tastefully redesigned costume, and a new bandana, shaped to reflect their inner personality.