Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Jason Aaron on Returning TMNT To Its Roots for 40th Anniversary

Aaron hopes to take the Turtles to places fans haven't seen before.

By Russ Burlingame

Fan-favorite writer Jason Aaron recently stepped into the role of writer for IDW Publishing's Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, with the publisher promising a whole new era from arguably the biggest name to write the characters in recent memory. The approach so far has been a unique one, splitting the quartet up and sending them in their own directions, while promising that sinister forces are coming together to reunite the boys sooner than later. Speaking with ComicBook recently, Aaron broke down his approach, which he hopes will pay homage to the original Mirage Studios comics from the 1980s. 

Those books, by Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird, were darker and more adult-oriented than most people usually think of the Turtles, who became a global sensation after being translated into a children's TV series. More important than that, they sketched out a really clear vision for the Turtles, which would make each of the four well-defined enough to make the jump to other media.

"Really, everything I feel like I'm doing on this book is about harkening back to the original Mirage Studios series, the Eastman and Laird series, where the Turtles first came from, which is a book that I picked up off the shelf when I was a kid and it resonated with me," Aaron explained. "This is the 40th anniversary of that original series, so it seemed like, if you want to do something that's a new #1 and a jumping-on point in an anniversary year, let's do something that harkens back to the feel and tone, and grit of that original series. So this book very much focuses in on just these four brothers. You see them at a very pivotal time in their life, where they're still the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, but they're a little bit older, they've lived a lot of life in their teenage years. They are still teenagers, but there's a lot of difference between 19 and 15. I'm not telling you that they're one age or another, but in my mind, character wise, they're at that late teen point where they know who they are, they've been through a lot. They're very established personalities, btu they're also pulling in four different directions at this point, growing apart, and how do they deal with that? How do they come back to center to be the force for good that they need to be?"

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With the four brothers now spread out around the world, Aaron told us that he hopes to strike a balance of making the characters totally familiar, but putting them in unfamiliar situations where the audience hasn't seen them before, and doesn't expect them.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles arrives in comic shops monthly from IDW.

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