"Have You Heard of The Teenage Mutant Challengers?"
That review, by Win Wiacek of "Now Read This," explains that the Challengers of the Unknown (aka “Challengers,” or “Challs”) were four unrelated men who almost died in a plane crash en route to a TV appearance. They decided that since they were living on borrowed time, they may as well act like it - devoting their lives to exploring the world's most dangerous mysteries. In doing so, they became heroes. Pilot "Ace" Morgan, diver "Prof" Haley, acrobat "Red" Ryan, and wrestler "Rocky" Davis became the proto-Scooby Gang… funny, brave, and always in trouble.
And like true heroes, the Challengers came just in time. Wiacek argues that with this series Kirby provided a blueprint for the entire Silver Age of Comics, after the introduction of the Comics Code Authority. When the Code took effect, publishers that wished to adhere to code standards had to forgo stories of romance and horror. The industry was floundering, looking for a new model. The Challengers' breakout success in this new environment came from the fact that “Kirby developed a brilliantly feasible concept with which to work, and heroically archetypal characters. He then tapped into an astounding blend of genres to display their talents and courage in unforgettable exploits that informed and affected every team comic that followed – and certainly influenced his successive landmark triumphs with Stan Lee." The stories were flexible and adaptable - “classic adventures, told in a classical manner.”
Sounds familiar, right? This is exactly what the Ninja Turtles have always done. Four archetypal guys (the leader, the brain, the hot-head, and the heart) playing havoc with genre, going on a variety of adventures that display their talents, their courage, their limitations, and their brotherhood. And with the addition of Frank Miller's influence (among others), and the Ninja Turtles’ more ludicrous premise, TMNT was better adapted to the audiences of the eighties and onward.
I don't think Kirby gets due credit from many of us fans, at least not for the extent of his possible storytelling influence on the Ninja Turtles. We tend to focus more on Kirby’s visual legacy, and on Miller's story elements, noticing right away how "Splinter" is a cute callback to Daredevil's mentor "Stick," but not realizing (for instance) that Jack Kirby had an "honorary girl Challenger" - a fifth unofficial member of the team - a computer genius who was introduced during a rogue killer robot storyline - and her name was "June."
Challengers of The Unknown seems to run pretty deep in the DNA of the Ninja Turtles, and 1991 saw the release of a new mini-series by Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale called "The Challengers of The Unknown Must Die!" It follows the Challengers at an older age, living separate lives, before they reunite to take on a world-destroying foe. Does the 1991 Challengers series furnish any insight into Peter Laird's unfinished TMNT Volume 4 (begun in 2001), in which the Turtles are older and living separate lives, while a universe-destroying threat becomes ever more urgent in the background?
The '91 Challengers has a dark and moody tone, much more like Miller or Moore than Kirby. The Challengers are more or less retired from active service. Living in a fortress under a mountain which acts as a tourist-trap, a merchandising/branding center, and a home, they prosper in various states of boredom until one day the mountain explodes - apparently as the result of Prof and June's experiments with renewable energy. Prof and June are seemingly killed (along with hundreds of townspeople) and the team is disgraced, facing a criminal trial, and ultimately deciding to disband as a group.
When they go their separate ways, the leader Ace Morgan delves into mystical knowledge and eventually learns to open portals, or "doors," between different places on Earth… and between Earth and places altogether stranger. Red Ryan becomes a mercenary soldier, is captured, and suffers through a brutal captivity. Rocky Davis, lost without his adoptive family, wanders aimlessly through life, drinking hard - until a former friend talks him into wandering aimlessly and drinking hard at a fancy beach town, spending all his money in the process. He hits rock bottom, enters rehab therapy, and starts to heal.
At this point, new information surrounding the explosion of Challenger Mountain comes to light. Evidence of a worldwide epidemic - of ordinary people carrying out acts of mass violence - has landed on the desk of out-of-work tabloid reporter, Harold Moffet, and he learns that a seemingly harmless grocery bagger has claimed responsibility for the destruction of Challenger Mountain. Moffet meets with the remaining Challengers and they head back to the mountain, where they encounter a host of frantic people, an interdimensional evil being named N'zrath, and a sort-of-dead Prof and June, now married, existing in what appears to be a pocket dimension at N'zrath's mercy.
N'zrath is destroyed by Prof's tech and a stroke of good luck, and the people of Earth are released from his influence… but Prof and June are still trapped or partly dead, and remain to be saved in some later series.
I'm not 100% sure Laird ever read Challengers Must Die, but there are some wild parallels. From hearsay, I gather that he planned to have TMNT Volume 4 culminate in a meeting of the multiverses, bridging the Archie TMNT comics with the Mirage world - and that a prominent event in this storyline involved Kirby King opening a portal from Ebrik (the dimension where he was lost after an adventure in "Donatello #1: Kirby and the Warp Crystal", some twenty years previously.) Without going into details **, here are the basic elements of TMNT Volume 4 thus far:
- Leo is learning to open mystical doors to strange places.
- Don and April, each with their individual ties to the Warp Crystal, are effectively at ground zero of an impending interdimensional fracture.
- Mikey has escaped from brutal captivity as a prisoner of war, and is deeply traumatized and angry.
- Raph (and Casey, for that matter) is somewhat rudderless and at loose ends.
The parallels are more than just interesting - they could be a key to the Swelfield incident, and the nature of what the Turtles might be up against. Late in Volume 4 (#28), the residents of the town of Swelfield mysteriously vanish for a period of twenty minutes only to reappear on the ground, unconscious. In the Challengers Must Die, people all over the world mysteriously begin acting out their worst and bloodiest impulses under the influence of an extradimensional being. Maybe in Volume 4, Swelfield is the precursor to a similar kind of behavioral influence.
I say "maybe" because it's a fair guess, but guessing at all based on outside influences seems risky. There’s no way to know how the story was ultimately meant to go. Eastman and Laird, together or separately, have always made influences and source material their own, often in wild and unexpected ways… hence, the “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.” But whether Laird knew of the '91 Challengers or not, if you are one of those people a little bummed that Vol 4 remains incomplete... or if you just love trying to trace a mystery back to its source... this Loeb/Sales tale isn't quite the same, but it's tantalizingly close.
** (Volume 4 details can be found in profusion at TMNT Entity, and in the free digital issues on Peter Laird's blog)
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