Turtles Back On Top

20 years later and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles are still kicking mainstream comics properties' shells:

TMNT toppled 300 this weekend at the box office, cruising into the #1 spot with about $23 million. The family-friendly CGI-rendered movie of the turtles has gotten mixed, but generally favorable, reviews from critics and fans.

For those who don't know, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is a spoof of the popular comics themes of the 1980s - namely teenagers (X-Men, Teen Titans), mutants (X-Men, many popular Marvel titles and Marvel in general), and ninjas (X-Men, Elektra, Lone Wolf & Cub, more) - when The Uncanny X-Men were uber-popular. Invented by the creative team of Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird, it was independently published and eventually moved to Archie Comics (if I remember correctly). It became so popular that it began outselling the titles it parodied and soon became a powerful commodity in its own right. This is the turtles' second movie; the first was a live-action piece which was surprisingly good.

The more things change...

In more 300 news, sources say Frank Miller is working on a sequel. Um? A sequel to the battle at Thermopylae? That's like a sequel to Titanic, isn't it? Which, by the way, I have never watched all the way through, so please don't tell me how it ends!