It’s a good year for fans of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. They have a hit animated CGI TV series on Nickelodeon, with accompanying toy line, a hot new movie hitting theaters next month starring Megan Fox and Will Arnett and produced by Michael Bay, and Insight Editions has just published a brand new book, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Ultimate Visual History by Andrew Farago with a foreword by Peter Laird, one of the co-creators of the original concept.
Farago is the curator at the Cartoon Art Museum in San Francisco and has written for Marvel Comics in the past. In Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Ultimate Visual History, Farago takes readers from the very beginning, during that fateful night in 1984 when two budding comic creators brainstormed a concept of ninja amphibians who eat pizza, train under the tutelage of a rodent, and fight a powerful clan leader named Shredder.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Ultimate Visual History is broken down into 19 chapters over 130 pages chronicling the rise and fall and rise again of the popular characters. The book takes us through the entire saga, from the original sketches and concepts, to the start up of Mirage Studios and the in-house black-and-white comic book line, to the big break–the late ’80s-early ’90s cartoon series and later live-action films, to the market saturation that almost killed the property twenty years ago. Farago packs the book with interviews from creators Kevin Eastman and Laird, as well as animators like Fred Wolf and puppet maker Brian Henson, son of Muppets creator Jim Henson, who created the suits for New Line Cinema’s trilogy of TMNT films in the 1990s.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Ultimate Visual History is chock full of cool insights, as well as random inserts like fan club letters, press releases, even a reprint of the first issue of The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles from Mirage Studios. The stories and anecdotes on the pages tell the story in great detail and Farago leaves no stone unturned. Yes, there is even a section dedicated to the ‘Ninja Rap’ from 1991’s TMNT II: Secret of the Ooze, and it’s creator, Vanilla Ice.
The publisher, Insight Editions, has released some great genre-specific books this year, but Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Ultimate Visual History is by far one of the best. And not just for long-time fans of the turtles, but for everybody. The history of how two guys came up with a silly idea and turned it into an empire is always inspiring, and Andrew Farago tells that story magnificently.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Ultimate Visual History was released on June 24th and is available now.
