The Starlog Project: Starlog #165, April 1991: Attack of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

In the late `970s, the good folks (well, the folks) at National Lampoon licensed the rights to publish an American edition of the famed French adult fantasy comics magazine Metal Hurlant (which was the creation of Moebius and other great French creators). They launched Heavy Metal in the United States in 1977 and started a revolution in mature illustrated fantasy storytelling, influencing Warren Publishing’s 1984/1994 magazine, Epic Illustrated, even something called Gasm. (By the way, adult and mature here mean that they showed more violence and shirtless people – mostly women – than normal comics; they weren’t pornographic.)

But National Lampoon and Heavy Metal fell on hard times in the late 1980s, and eventually the company sold Heavy Metal to Kevin Eastman.

Ah, you say; you were wondering why I was talking about Heavy Metal in The Starlog Project. Kevin Eastman is the man who made zillions of dollars as co-creator of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. He parlayed that success into other creator-owned comics projects. (As opposed to what I would do if I earned millions of dollars, which is pay off my credit card bills.) One of the things he did was buy Heavy Metal magazine in 1991, and he continues to serve as editor and publisher of the magazine today (2010).

Not that you asked, but in 2000, I exchanged a series of e-mails with Eastman in an attempt to interview him for a weekly science-fiction column I wrote for my friend Aaron Barnhart’s TVBarn.com. Though it never worked out (Eastman was agreeable to the interview, but he was always putting it off until he came back from various travels), I had a largely favorable opinion of the man, as someone who is charging head-first into a bunch of exciting projects, always busy, enthusiastic, and desperately needs iCal on his computer.

So, to bring this all home: The heroes in a half-shell, aka the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, take center-stage this issue of Starlog, promoting the new film Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret of the Ooze, a movie you might well have considered skipping, even if you didn’t know that it featured a guest appearance by rapper Vanilla Ice.

Cowabunga, boys.

Starlog #165
76 pages (including covers)
Cover price: $4.50

This is the last issue of the magazine before its publisher finally starts adding pages, which is also the harbinger of – believe it or not – yet another hike in the cover price. So cherish each page of this issue while you can ...

Oh, and a classified ad from the Did-I-Send-This-to-the-Wrong-Magazine department: “BUTTERFLY HUNT! Learn how to find, capture, prepare, preserve and display butterflies & moths. Send $3 plus $2 for shipping to ...”

The rundown: The juiced-up juvenile Japanese ... I can’t think of a synonym for “turtles” that begins with “j”, so let’s just say the turtles and be done with it – anywho, they’re on the cover; The Neverending Story II is featured on the contents page photo; all five pages of the Communications section are taken up with letters about various aspects of Star Trek, with the exception of Mike Fisher’s Creature Profile feature Blob, from The Blob; and David McDonnell’s Medialog column announces Tim Burton’s intention to make a sequel to his successful Batman film, including this tidbit: “Sean Young – briefly part of the first film, replaced by Kim Basinger – will play the Catwoman. And the penguin will be – yes!!! really!!! we’re not kidding!!! – Danny DeVito.” Despite the initial skepticism or at least surprise, DeVito would nail the role and become the best villain of the Burton Batman cycle of films.

Richard Starr interviews fantasy author Phyllis Eisenstein (Sorcerer’s Son, Born to Exile, etc.), who talks about her books and her husband, Alex, which leads me to wonder: The Eisensteins lived in Chicago, and there was an Alex Eisenstein who wrote for another (long-defunct) science-fiction movie magazine, Fantastic Films – is that the same Alex Eisenstein?; the Fan Network pages include a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret of the Ooze contest, Lia Pelosi’s directory of Star Trek fan clubs, and the convention calendar; Teresa Murray and Karen Funk Blocher profile actor John Levene, who portrayed Sergeant Benton for seven years on Doctor Who; in his From the Bridge column, Kerry O’Quinn writes about meeting Dori and Lori, two conjoined twins who succeeded despite the odds; Edward Gross talks with Judy Burns, who wrote the “Tholian Web” episode of the original Star Trek (and who shares some interesting insight into the script for Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, which she critiqued for Harve Bennett and for which she urged the inclusion of more emphasis on the Kirk-Spock relationship); Adam Pirani explores the stage version of A Clockwork Orange, a theatrical version of the controversial Anthony Burgess story that managed to get performed in the United Kingdom, where director Stanley Kubrick had forbidden the release of the film since 1972.

Marc Shapiro goes behind the scenes of The Neverending Story II, with a sidebar on Neverending Story II’s co-star John Wesley Shipp, aka The Flash; T.L Johns writes the cover story, an exploration of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles’ sequel, The Secret of the Ooze (complete with that Vanilla Ice photo); Edward Gross checks in with director Richard Franklin, who talks about FX2; back in issue #150, Gwen Lee and Doris E. Sauter provided a portion of their interview with Philip K. Dick, possibly the last interview (certainly one of the last) before his death, and this issue, Lee and Sauter are back with more Dick, who talks more deeply about his thoughts and his writing; Tom Weaver interviews Don Taylor about The Final Countdown, The Omen, Escape from the Planet of the Apes, and more; T.A. Chafin explains what it takes to enter a masquerade contest at a science-fiction convention (which includes a series of photos from a very innovative “Skin of Evil” gag); Arachnophobia and other genre releases are given their due in David Hutchison’s Videolog column; and in his Liner Notes column, editor David McDonnell highlights The Boys in Autumn, a Huckleberry Finn/Tom Sawyer stage play by Walter Koenig and Mark Lenard.

“I had known Mr. [Alfred] Hitchcock because I had been up for a couple of his films. Rope [1948] was one of them; I had just finished Naked City and I went to see Hitchcock about Rope. We just talked. He had just seen Naked City and he wanted to know how they made this shot, that shot and the other shot. He marveled at the fact that we shot on Fifth Avenue in New York. Anyway, I didn’t get Rope, but I had been interviewed by him. And once I got to do that first Hitchcock [TV series] episode, then I used to sit and watch him direct. He was taking all the good scripts. My first year, he, Arthur Hiller and myself were among those directing. Arthur and I were way down at the bottom. If Hitch didn’t want to do it or couldn’t do it, then Robert Stevens got it, and if he had already had one, then it came down to Arthur or me. Once in a while, we’d get a good one; many times, we were struggling. But basically, those were good scripts. When I think of the stuff that goes by me today, those were excellent scripts. The only thing that was wrong with them was what was wrong with most of the shows at the time: There was absolutely no production. They would put up two walls and put a picture on the wall, a chair and a table and say, ‘Shoot.’ No books, no magazines, no papers, no frills. You couldn’t get any production worth a damn.”

–Don Taylor, director, interviewed by Tom Weaver: “Director of Men-Apes”

To see more issues, click on Starlog Internet Archive Project below or visit The Starlog Project’s permanent home.

Comics and Science Fiction: I Want My Space Opera Illustrated!

The short story is the perfect medium for science fiction. Of course, the novel is also the perfect medium for science fiction. Orson Welles proved that radio is the perfect medium for science fiction. In fact, movies, television, paintings, records/CDs and model kits are all perfect media for science fiction. All of those statements are true; science fiction has worked and mostly still works in each of those media.

But today I want to explore another true statement: Comics are the perfect medium for science fiction. So why has it been so difficult to find a solid, long-lasting SF comic publication for the last few decades?

In the 1970s and early 1980s, there was a lot of SF comics action, especially following the breakout success of Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind at the box office. At the highest end, there was Heavy Metal magazine, which National Lampoon licensed from the French original, Metal Hurlant. HM was joined in 1980 by Marvel's great Epic Illustrated magazine. Both magazine-sized anthology comics mixed science fiction and fantasy, and -- let's be frank -- well-endowed women who had somehow lost their shirts. Whether it was the creative ownership granted to the artists and writers, the exhilarating experimentation with new story and graphic types, or the women -- I'm not sure -- but both magazines represented a kind of golden era of SF and fantasy comics, certainly in the magazine format.

Meanwhile, in the early 1980s, the great Warren magazine empire collapsed. As a result, we not only lost Warren's horror-themed magazines Creepy and Eerie (which occasionally dabbled in SF), but its science fiction comics magazine 1994 (which had changed its original name from 1984). 1994 played in the same sexy SF area as Heavy Metal and Epic Illustrated, but it focused more on black-and-white stories.

By the mid-1980s, though, things were changing. Heavy Metal was reduced to a quarterly publication schedule, and Epic Illustrated ceased publication altogether. HM would continue with its lower profile until it was bought by Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles creator Kevin Eastman, who publishes it to this day. Epic continued as the brand name of a series of Marvel comics.

What else was there? When 1994 and Epic died and Heavy Metal refocused on longer stories, I don't believe there was any high-profile comics magazine featuring lots of quality short SF and fantasy. Long gone were past titles such as Unknown Worlds of Science Fiction or -- shudder -- Strange Adventures. Yes, you can still scour eBay for foreign classics such as Pilote or Metal Hurlant, but the pickings are slim. (Completists might also want to scrounge around for the three issues of Omni Comix from the mid-1990s. Or better yet, just buy anything by Moebius.)

Why is this? As editor Michael A. Burstein notes in the first (and so far only) edition of Outbound, comics and science fiction would seem to be natural partners, but they are rarely paired successfully. They should work well, because the ability to illustrate the imaginative settings of SF stories is the strength of comics; plus, of course, many SF stories have a healthy dose of action and adventure, which also make them great for comics. What might not seem to be a natural is the more intellectual, internal SF story, in which there are fewer explosions and more thinking. But anyone who's been a fan of the great Japanese manga series Planetes knows you can mix space ships, conflict, intelligent stories, and good art, and you can come up with a classic SF comic.

Outbound, by the way, is a comic-book-sized anthology published by the Boston Comics Roundtable. It features a nice variety of stories, some good original voices and art, naturally some weak spots, and, like Heavy Metal's early years, a couple stories that must only make sense if you're heavily into some sort of drug experience.

I do not know if there will be a second issue of Outbound, but I am encouraged to see someone trying to build something in this market space. It is clearly a tough niche in which to survive, but if enough people get in there and show what can be done, sooner or later some publisher will concoct the correct recipe. Then we'll get some great professional space opera, thought-provoking explorations of SF ideas, and mind-bending concepts.