Ninja Mutants: An Extended Review -- Part Three: A Cultural Phenomenon

Does it come as a surprise that the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles started out as a joke? I bet it doesn't to some of you. I think the joke was aimed mostly at Frank Miller, since much of the concept was based off of Daredevil, which Miller was doing at the time, and Ronin, which was Frank Miller's. There are other influences, but, really, those seem to be the biggest. The whole Foot Clan thing was a play on Miller's The Hand, which he created for Daredevil.

I thought it was a joke but not a particularly funny one. I had just started collecting comics seriously around the time TMNT first came out, not that anyone really heard about it at the time, since the first issue had a print run of only around 3200 copies. As Peter Laird said, "It was a goof." It was, they thought, a one-off. A gag. The evidence of that can be seen in that they, Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird, published it as an oversize issue, larger (much) than the standard comic book.

TMNT #1 is currently valued at around $4000.

But the first issue sold out, which lead to a second issue... and a third... Within a year, the Turtles, the gag, had become something so much bigger than Eastman and Laird could ever had imagined. It had taken over their lives. Three years after the debut in 1984, the Turtles were on TV, and Eastman and Laird were busy trying to run a multi-million dollar company, something neither of them had ever dreamed of. Or were exactly happy with. Laird quit drawing, the one thing that had always been a source of happiness for him. Eventually, Eastman sold his rights in the company because he wanted to do things not related to the Turtles.

That's an interesting irony, that Eastman sold his share, because he's the one that has ended up keeping his fingers in the Turtles pie, so to speak, although it's Laird that owns the company and all of that.

By the end of the 80s, the Turtles had become a thing. A rather big thing, in fact, spawning all sorts of copycat titles about things like Radioactive Hamsters and who knows what else. I was busy trying to avoid them. All of them. Rather unsuccessfully since I did a lot of working with kids during the summers. The Turtles were everywhere!

But I didn't have my first real encounter with them until my freshman year of college. I was doing a lot of painting miniatures for money at the time

and someone approached me with a request to paint a set of Turtles miniatures. [I wish I had pictures of those, but, alas, I do not.] They were pretty cool, actually, and it was $$$, so I took the job. Which required research. No, seriously! I had to know how to paint the various characters, not all of which were the Turtles. The miniatures were based off the original comics and had figures I was unfamiliar with. Even April was unfamiliar since, originally, she was a lab assistant (to an Evil Genius), not a reporter.

Which is kind of the point. Eastman and Laird didn't have any plans for the Turtles when they created that first issue of the comic series. When it took off, they made stuff up as the went, just trying to keep up with demand (and failing). What happened was that the Turtles underwent many, let's say, "creative re-boots." When they licensed them out in the mid-80s for the cartoon series, the origin was re-done and April became a reporter. When the work became (quickly) too much for Eastman and Laird to keep up with, they allowed other creators to put their own spin on the Turtles which resulted in many alternate stories and ideas (like one with the Turtles set in medieval Japan). They even had to bring in another creative team at one point to do a completely separate series just to fill in the gaps in the continuity of their own series.

The end result of all of this is that any time the Turtles have changed formats, they have been re-imagined. There is no definitive origin for them, not any more. Maybe not ever. Probably, though, the one most people are familiar with is what came out of the hugely popular cartoon, the one I thought was too dumb to sit through. [I'm just glad my kids have never wanted to watch it!]  In fact, most of the negative reaction to the current Bay movie is that the movie owes more to the comic books than it does to the 80s TV show. Perhaps that's why it didn't bother me. The movie, despite having 6' tall, talking turtles, is not cartoonish, and I liked that.

The important thing, though, is something that began as a joke 30 years ago is still here. And not just still here like it's over moldering in some corner somewhere; it's still a pop culture force. I have to say, that first issue, which I did finally read, was pretty brilliant. All of the early issues were. It was a great parody of comics, the same container of radioactive goo that created Daredevil also giving rise to Splinter and the Turtles. It wasn't quite as silly as I thought it was, after all. Okay, the cartoon was silly, but that comic series was... well, it was something new.

Obviously, people liked it, because the Turtles are still here.

How To Be... a Zen Master

I am not a user of the word "Zen." Ever. Seriously, I don't think I've ever once used it in everyday speech, and I tend to ignore people when they say something like, "That is so Zen." Why? Because I don't really know what it means, but not just that--no one seems to know what it means. It's always just been this kind of ambiguous term that people throw out every once  in a while... to sound cool, I guess. It's one of those terms that people will tell you, "If you don't get it, man, you just can't get it." But what they really mean is that they don't really know what it means, either; there are just special circumstances they feel warrant the use of the word.

Wikipedia seems to agree with me on that. They call the term "vague."

And, see, here I am, right now (as I write this, not as you read this, although I might be), drinking a cup of Tazo zen tea, which I just discovered a couple of weeks ago. Bet you didn't know your tea could be all Zen, did you?

The real issue with all of this is that there is no one Zen discipline. Zen Buddhism began something like 1500 years ago in China and has been continually changing since then, not to mention spreading. First to Vietnam, then to Korea, and, finally, to Japan, but it took it 700 years before it was its own discipline there, and Japan has been the biggest influence of Zen on the West. But the forms of Zen in Japan aren't the same as they are in China or Korea or Vietnam or, even, in Japan, since they have three different schools of Zen in Japan: Soto, Rinzai, and Obaku. All of these variations cause confusion about what it means to be "Zen." At least, it causes confusion over any definitive meaning of the word.

With over 1500 years of teaching, there aren't even any central or essential Zen teachings. No doctrines to point to. Each different form has its own ideas.

And none of this even deals with what we've done with the idea here in the West. Because, here, we've reduced it to someone (anyone) who demonstrates "detachment and control in stressful situations." If you have a cool head, you're "Zen," and, if you do it often enough, people might call you a "Zen master." And, hey, you never even have to try Buddhism. Which says nothing of the fact that sometimes it's just applied to "spiritual" people (often by themselves) to make them sound better.

No wonder I've never used it.

What it all comes down to, though, is that there are many, various, diverse, and sundry ways to become a Zen Master. 1500 years of many, various, diverse, and sundry ways. Just decide which Buddhist discipline you want to follow to get there. Or there's the American way which is to not bother with Buddhism at all and decide to just not get worked up over anything. Hmm... I'm beginning to see the relation, I guess, between being Zen and pot smoking (except for the part where I've never smoked pot).

Note:
Make sure to come back tomorrow to discover what all of this has been about in my final "How To Be..." installment. Yeah, all of these posts have a point. Or have been leading to a point. A point that, perhaps, this post more than any other exemplifies best.

Oh, also, "Part Twenty: The Sword of Fire" is still FREE! today.

How To Be... a Paleontologist

Okay, who didn't see this one coming?

My love of dinosaurs began around the age of 3 or 4 when I saw this:

Or something like that. I don't actually remember other than that it was a big dinosaur over a gas station. I was fascinated and spent, basically, the next 10 years of my life devoted to the study of dinosaurs. Just so you know, this is my favorite:

In case you don't know, that's a Triceratops. I think my love for them probably grew out of my early childhood perception that they were capable of taking on a T. Rex, which is true. There was actually a fossil found of a T. Rex and Triceratops locked in combat. As far as I know, they don't know if something killed them while they fighting (like a volcano) or if they just killed each other. It's still pretty cool.

The thing is, and I didn't know this when I was a kid, paleontology is more than just dinosaurs. It's the study of all prehistoric life. And, um, rocks. Okay, paleontologists don't study rocks, but you have to study rocks to get to paleontology. In fact, paleontology is most often within a university's geology department if it offers any kind of paleontological studies at all.

The real issue with paleontology is that it is just broad heading for many different specialties. So you have paleobiology, which is the specific branch that most often deals with dinosaurs. And you have icnology and paleobotany and invertebrate paleontology and vertebrate paleontology and micropaleontology and, even, paleogenetics. And that's not all of them, but I ran out of breath.

Paleogenetics is pretty interesting, especially if you remember this post. (They say) Paleogenetics is not for the re-creation of actual organisms, but it is theoretically possible, and they do work on recreating DNA sequences. AND there have already been attempts to clone a mammoth through recovered DNA in Japan. They still say they can do it. Suddenly, Jurassic Park doesn't seem so far-fetched.

Basically, it kind of doesn't matter so much what you're into, there's probably a paleo field for it. I mean, heck, there's even a paleo diet going around now.
Me? I'm still just into dinosaurs.

How To Be... a Ninja!

This post started out as my "A" post. No, really, it did, because I was going to do "assassin." However, everything I was looking up about assassins kept leading back to ninja, and who ever says, "I want to grow up to be an assassin"? No one I ever knew. No, everyone said either, "I want to be a ninja," or, "I want to be a ninja assassin." I think assassin is more of a subheading under a lot of other careers these days, anyway, meaning that you get trained to be something else, first, like, say, a sharpshooter in the military or a spy or, well, something and, then, end up using those skills to kill people.

Interesting fact: the term "assassin" actually has Middle Eastern origins. The Order of Assassins, founded by Hassan-i Sabbah, dates back to just before the First Crusade.

But what about the ninja?

I don't want to get into an actual history lesson, here, so, to put it simply, the ninja--or shinobi, as they were called back in the 1400's--were a reaction to the samurai during a period of great unrest in Japan. The samurai were bound by strict codes of honor and combat and weren't free to... take care of certain types of business. The ninja (shinobi) came about as a result. They had no such codes and developed as covert agents using more unorthodox means: espionage, sabotage, assassination. A samurai would never assassinate anyone. Contrary to popular opinion, the ninja were not strong in direct combat skills, generally speaking, and confrontation of that sort was only a last resort. In short, the ninja had no honor and were outcasts from the rest of Japanese society.

So the first thing you need in order to be a successful ninja is a questionable moral compass. You have to be willing to, well, kill people... behind their backs, so to speak. Sneak and break into places. Steal. Spy. Wait... this is sounding kind of familiar...

You need to learn the art of silence. One source I found said simply, "Practice walking quietly." In a broader sense, you can't go around telling people you're a ninja. I actually had a friend in high school who bought himself a "ninja suit" and told people he was a ninja. That's how you know when someone's not. But, as to being quiet, as a ninja, you may need to stayed concealed for days at a time, so silence is a must.

You have to learn how to think ahead. Plan your escapes in advance. The ninja have been referred to as ghosts, and this is why. A successful mission can rely on a planned escape route. And make sure you have more than one planned.

Be a master of your whole self. It's no picnic keeping concealed for days at a time, so you have to be a master of your body. Also, remember that no one should know you're a ninja, so you can't go showing off, which may mean walking away from a fight in disgrace rather than demonstrating your skills and kicking some ass. See, a samurai would never walk away.

As for the killing, you have to be able to kill people in secret. Knowing about poisons is a strong skill set for a ninja. What each poison does for whatever effect you're going for. Should it be painful? Should it look natural? Should it scare other people? Long distance ways of killing are also important, so things like the bow and arrow or the blow dart (or, in today's world, a sniper rifle). Sometimes, killing someone would mean hiding for days in a toilet, so, well, be prepared for anything.

You know, all of these things kind of sound like being a CIA agent, so, maybe, that's the best way to be a modern ninja.
Well, that or joining Alex's ninja army. Yeah, that one sounds a lot safer. And much less likely to have you hiding in sewage for three days. So that's my advice; drop by and see Alex and see if he has any spare pajamas for you.