Erik Burnham is, in many ways, your average fan of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
“I found the Turtles, like many people found the Turtles, in 1987 with the cartoon as soon as it launched — because I have never lived anywhere near a comic shop,” he said in a recent Zoom call. “So the comics were not something that I would have found. But the cartoon? No, that was right there. That was syndicated. I’m like, ‘This looks super weird. It’s funny. It’s got action. I love it.’ And I rolled right into Turtle-Mania along with so many others in this generation.”
But unlike other TMNT fans, his appreciation has gone a deeper ever since those halcyon days. Burnham has written a slew of Turtles stories, including issues of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Saturday Morning Adventures, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles/Ghostbusters, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: New Animated Adventures. He’s emphasized that deep abiding fandom across every facet of his TMNT career, and he’s been a consistent voice for the IDW line in recent years. Burnham is a presence that proves doubly important as TMNT commemorates its 40th anniversary, and we inevitably look back at both past, present, and future of the team.
And, like many other Turtles faithful, his love affair continued in the late ’80s with the Mirage titles/stories.
“A few years later, I got the other side of it when I was in middle school,” said Burnham. “A friend says, ‘Hey, you like Ninja Turtles, right? Here’s a book that my dad gave me that I wasn’t into, but you might like.’ And it was book #1 of Return to New York from Mirage. I was like, ‘This is completely different than what I’m used to. I need to know more about this.’
He added, “Then I was finding other back issues from Mirage and some of the experiments that they did…It was just always fun. I love fun in my entertainment. And it sucked me in when IDW got the license and Tom Waltz and Kevin [Eastman] and the crew came up with a new way to do the Turtles. That was all the classic stuff. They cherry-picked all the stuff that they loved, but brought in some new elements, like the reincarnation and all the ninja lore, which I love. I’m one of those who leans a little bit more towards the ninja stuff than the sci-fi outer space stuff.”
It was, as you might have guessed, that rather robust devotion that got him all those great gigs. In turn, it only increased his fondness for all things TMNT.
“Anyway, Tom’s stuff on Ninja Turtles, it just drew me in right away,” said Burnham. “And they invited me to do some stuff early on in the process. I really connected to the characters more because I got to help build them a little bit. This is our incarnation of them. Part of it was my long-standing love. Part of it was just getting to help build the sandbox and it all just meshed together. I’ve been lucky to be able to do these stories that they’ve let me do, and each one has made me love the cast more.”
Courtesy of IDW.
That diversity and range is what continues to connect Burnham to the larger franchise. It’s that no matter how you came in, or what you might be looking for, there’s always something TMNT for almost everyone.
“There’s so many other flavors in and on top of that,” said Burnam. “What Sophie [Campbell] is doing with the…we’ll go with drama [on Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles]. Some of it wasn’t as action heavy and some of it was very action heavy. But I mean, there’s different flavors. There’s relationship drama and all that fun and comedy, straight action, and even horror. I can’t think of too many things that you can’t find, or too many types of stories that you can’t find room to tell in this universe, and I love that. It’s many things to many people — the ideal of any franchise you could try to come up with.”
He added, “[TMNT] just allows so much and that allows every type of fan, every type of reader, to find something as well a several types of creator to find something that they would like to do — and it all fits. And that is very rare; not every comics property, not every entertainment property, has something that can go from something very light and very silly to something very, very dark. The Saturday Morning Adventures that we do versus The Last Ronin; there’s a wide gulf between the two books, but they are both very much identifiable as Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.”
That distinct openness doesn’t come from the ether, though. Burnham explained that the creative teams have a lot of help and direction in crafting stories, and those boundaries allow them to be inventive in the kinds of Turtles stories they try to tell.
“When you take something like I was saying — Last Ronin — you would say, ‘Well, this does not fit within this corner of the universe.’ So, like, Cudley the Cowlick — that’s not happening here,” said Burnham. “When you have something like Saturday Morning Adventures — this is getting a little bit too violent, and that has no place here. Or, this joke is a little bit off-color; that has no place here. That kind of stuff does come up. So the tone of the specific project…everybody has been very clear about what fits and what doesn’t from Nickelodeon on down. So, no, they keep the flavors separate, but they allow so many different flavors. They are very cognizant of what works for each type of Turtles project. They keep the rules of each sandbox pretty set, pretty straight. So walking into any given project, we know exactly what we’re going to be able to get away with and exactly what doesn’t fit.”
In fact, having that editorial presence can actually be an even bigger help once they move into other parts of the storytelling process.
“I have to say one other big, incredible advantage that Turtles has — I’m not saying that other franchises don’t have this as well — but working with the folks up at Nickelodeon, they are huge fans,” said Burnham. “I mean, the guy who goes over all our books will routinely come back with notes like, how about we include this, this, this, this, and this? Just deep cuts — super deep cuts. I’m like, ‘I would love to and maybe I can. Let’s see what we can get in there!’ If we happen to miss something on purpose or accidentally, he’ll point it out and then ask, ‘Is there a reason? Convince me.'”
Courtesy of IDW.
And that entire process, Burnham noted, often runs counter to the efforts that he’s seen with other titles and franchises (without naming specifics, of course).
“I’m not going to speak out of school on my part, but I will say that other folks have talked to me about [other properties] where the folks in charge don’t care — they just want you to check the boxes and they don’t want you to offend anybody,” he said. “And that can make it harder to tell a story, but everything that I’ve worked on, I’ve been super fortunate. Really, 99% of the time, the notes have always made everything better and everybody’s been enthused. And the one goal is to make the best possible project that we can every single time with the toys that we’re playing with. And I really appreciate that with Nickelodeon.”
So, with that structure and support in place, just what makes a good TMNT story/series? If you can do almost anything, and take the team in almost any direction, how do you define a proper Turtles tale?
“Action is part of it, obviously — it’s an action book,” said Burnam. “Humor is part of it — even the Last Ronin has humor. You just can’t have dark without a little light for contrast. And family is the biggest key — found family. The Foot Clan and Karai; the Turtles, Splinter, and April — those are all families. If you do not have that element, if you’re missing out on that, it’s not going to feel right. It’s not going to work. Even with all the action and humor you could dump into them, all the mutant shenanigans, the Turtles don’t work. Family is at the heart of every single big, popular story, down to the quiet little things that Mirage was doing for years.”
He added, “They are strong personalities. They are archetypes. And one other thing that they are is they are very much siblings, and they act with each other like siblings act. I have four siblings myself. So when you get a whole group of like that, it’s funny to see the interactions and how it all comes out. It all rolls back into what I was saying about family.”
And that idea of family is a vital enough element in the Burnham-written stories. That even extends to the “bad guys” of TMNT, the Foot Clan. Burnham, alongside artist Mateus Santolouco, colorist Joa Vieira, and letter Shawn Lee, wrote the four-issue Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Secret History of the Foot Clan. It may not be Turtles-centric per se, but it’s still a massively important story to the larger canon. That’s because, as Burnam explained, you can’t have a shell-tastic team of heroes without villains with a proper backstory and real depth.
“We created something that really worked well. And it was looking at the Foot Clan as people, not as just the cardboard villains and stuff,” he said. “The best villains are the ones…you twist the angle of the story and suddenly they’re the heroes and they feel themselves as the heroes. They feel that they have destiny. That they have to go and do a certain thing and move the Foot Clan in that way. While they are definitely 100% still villains, they also can be funny. They can be heroic. They can do the right thing for the wrong reason. They can do the wrong thing for the right reason.”
Courtesy of IDW.
He added, “And that just makes for an interesting story and it fills out the world and it makes it feel a little bit more three-dimensional. If the villains are just cardboard cutouts — they’re twisting their mustaches and they’re like, ‘Muahaha, I want to take over the world’ — you don’t care as much if you can see their perspective, whether you agree or (hopefully) disagree with it. But you can invest yourselves in them as characters. You can feel good that the Turtles win, and bad things don’t happen to the world, but still feel some investment in the characters like, ‘Darn, it didn’t work out for them. I can’t wait to see how they try next.'”
It’s a concept Burnham’s seen elsewhere, and he likes the kinds of ideas it helps facilitate.
“That kind of thing, it just makes the whole world better. And it always has,” he said. “I’m looking at my bookshelf and I’m seeing the graphic novel Emperor Doom, and that’s just popping into my head as the kind of thing. What if the villain wins? What if the villain would do a good job, but it’s still the villain and it’s bad? And that kind of stuff is fun to explore. And also, through decades of the Turtles, the bad guys have never been quite explored in the same way as they were for IDW. As far as I remember. Now watch, somebody’s going to come out and say something. But, again, I’ve never lived near a comic shop.”
It’s not just the villains, either. Burnham’s other stories also try to extend the TMNT’s supporting cast while growing and developing real characters and not mere background players with utter disposability.
“We’ll start off with the Splinter micro-series that I got to do,” said Burnham of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Micro Series #5: Splinter. “Following hot on the heels of Turtles No. 5, where they reveal the reincarnation and showing Splinter maybe not as this kindly old man that many of the franchises have set him as [being]. He’s a little temperamental, a little bit more like Raphael than Leonardo. Showing how his wife’s death and all that played on him and then leading into the Secret History of the Foot Clan, which I wish I had written more of. I did tweaks and I added things, but the story is Mateus Santolouco. He was going to write that, but at that time the editor was like, ‘I don’t know that he’s ready yet, but the story’s really good. Can you jump in?”
Or, there’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Villains Micro-Series #5: Karai, which perhaps extended the Foot Clan in its most novel and intriguing way thus far.
“This was 2022 and we were having a meeting about the Turtles. Shredder is going to be going away. Karai is going to 100% take over the Foot Clan. It’s all hers. And we were plotting “Armageddon Game” at the time. I said, ‘You know, it’d be great to do just like a short or mini-series about a first job, her first big contract.’ They said great, and we just built it from there.”
Burnham added, “I really wound up liking Karai and being more invested in her story because she is somebody who is so attached to the past. I make a lot of my living on nostalgia properties and older characters. She’s wired to the past. She wants things to be like how she assumes they were from reading stories. And taking a character who is angry and violent and vain and giving her a little bit of humanity and a little bit of a sense of humor, that just feels so good to write. And it feels good when people can get something out of that and find entertainment from the villain’s perspective, I guess.”
Courtesy of IDW.
But Burnham’s not nearly done with adding to the lore and canon of all things TMNT. In April, he, alongside artist Sarah Myer, will be launching a brand-new arc starting in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Saturday Morning Adventures #12.
“The Ogglympics stuff is about as meta and fourth wall breaking as it is possible for us to do,” said Burnham. “He is one of those characters, like Q or Mister Mxyzptlk, that can do whatever he wants, and that allows us to have all kinds of fun in a comedy situation. In this case, what it looks like is that he has brought over several heroes. He’s got into a best of three with the Turtles, and if they lose, they’re wiped from eternity. The 1987 Turtles go away.”
He added, “So [Ogg] said, ‘I don’t know if you [Turtles] could beat the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles,’ and then he brings in Raphael and Donatello and Michelangelo and Leonardo ostensibly from different dimensions and that’s what that’s what it looks like is going to happen, and you don’t know whether there’s a twist or not if that’s where the story will go.”
The team — who Burnham said “had permission to do characters from the comics and TV shows” but not the movies — are once more trying to push the Turtles into some wild and wonderfully territory while delivering the best, most thoughtful story possible.
“It’s the first time the Turtles have seen other Turtles,” he said. “I’m not going to get into the Turtles Forever stuff, whether or not that falls into our story or not. But it’s just different, and it’s just fun visually to play with the different designs on the same page. I know Sarah Myer was having a blast drawing this design next to this design and looking as accurate as possible.”
Some fans were so excited by the teaser images of the “Ogglympics” storyline that they already started playing armchair editors. That tendency in the past, as Burnham noted, can be counterproductive. It should be all about awaiting for the actual adventure to unfold instead.
“The only thing that’s ever a problem with stuff like this is when fans see an image like this…they get excited and they start writing the story,” he said. “They theorize and they speculate. And if they’re right in what they have come up with, then the answer is, ‘Well, this wasn’t creative at all. They couldn’t have tried harder.’ And if they’re wrong, if they are nowhere near what we did, it becomes, ‘You lied to us. Why?’ So that’s the only danger we have with this, but hopefully it’ll be so much fun along the way that we won’t get into too much trouble.”
Not that that approach, or anything else really, makes Burnham some unspoken TMNT genius. (Although, the man does know his Turtles pretty darn well.) Instead, he’s a fan who got that rare chance to cross the threshold, and with that opportunity he’s grown the franchise in some interesting ways by telling heartfelt stories and making TMNT feel even bigger than it already is after some 40 years. Burnham is one of many solid voices on TMNT comics, and he’s someone who shows what happens when you commit to a story in the name of goodness and positivity, which feels as essential to the Turtles as pizza and karate itself.
Courtesy of IDW.
So, given that level of authority, I asked Burnham what makes TMNT so important in 2024. He made a comparison to the X-Men, and while that may be more obvious to some, his answer is nonetheless really interesting. Because it’s one of acceptance and community, and something we all hope is in the hearts and minds of true TMNT fans everywhere.
“There are many differences that you will encounter in other people, and the different is not always bad,” said Burnham. “That is something else that kind of sneaks into it. It’s not as directly thrown in, but I do feel that there’s a tiny seasoning of tolerance thrown into the stories. And you see these four very weird mutants. They look monstrous sometimes. Sometimes they look goofy. They have deadly weapons. They’re joking around. They don’t look like people. Yet they are very human characters. And it’s always in fiction, it sneaks into the back of your brain. You say, ‘OK, that scary thing is not that different from me.'”
He added, “It’s a story, but your brain doesn’t translate things that way. The brain takes everything literally. I love knowing that. And it’s a good thing to see it in the back of the head that differences are not necessarily something you need to attack or be afraid of. I like that being into the back of the head and filtering in for kids especially, but I mean, I wouldn’t be upset if adults took a little bit more notice as well.”
The “Ogglympics” story begins in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Saturday Morning Adventures #12, which is due out April 24. (The FOC is Monday, March 18.)
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