Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

I used to watch the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon show all the time as a kid. I think the first movie I ever saw in theaters was the Ninja Turtles movie. I loved Ninja Turtles. I think it's probably why I've been so enamored with superhero stories ever since. I was raised watching these formulaic, goofball cartoons:



Actually, come to think of it, that was pretty awesome. Here's another one:



I started writing superhero stories, scripts really, around freshman year of high school. I developed a team of six superheroes, each based off one of my close friends, and wrote about their many adventures. It was a great experience, because my friends were so gung-ho about being included in the characters. We always planned to film them and play all the parts, but in a cool turn of events the director at my high school let me adapt a few of the scripts into a stageplay for performance at the end of my junior year. It was definitely one of the defining moments of my high school career, and taking a final bow to riotous applause in my high school theater, hand in hand with all my closest friends--that is a moment I will never forget.
Without shows like Ninja Turtles, I probably would have never figured out the conventions of modern superhero storytelling. I was never big on superhero comics (most of the major franchises had taken desperate darkened turns in the '90s) and it wasn't until Batman: The Animated Series that I really got involved in the gritty side of cartoon heroes. The best part about superhero storytelling is that it relies on a series of strict conventions, making it akin to and derivative of many great national mythologies. From biblical type stories to Greek myth and chivalric epics, some of the best stories of any generation have been founded in deeply historical archetypes. Even Shakespearean plays assume and parody writing conventions of the Bard's contemporaries and predecessors. Whether you like to admit it or not, adhering to and understanding strict structure in narrative can provide any writer with the basis for captivating storytelling, whether you choose to follow the conventions or not.
I love learning old structures because it gives me so many new styles and methods to affect in my stories. Being able to reference the greats and understand what made them work is an essential part of a writer's craft, because it shows respect for the history that birthed the writer. Works like James Joyce's Ulysses and Faulkner's As I Lay Dying couldn't be classics without their nods to novelistic convention, and their subsequent clever bucking of trends.
I want to do something new that's never been done before. And like the secret of every innovation, the answer lies buried in the past.