On 1991's Flaming Carrot Comics #25-27, guest-starring the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

The Flaming Carrot! Cartoonist Bob Burden's bizarre superhero parody character debuted in a 1979 magazine and, after the 1981 self-published one-shot Flaming Carrot Comics, would go on to carry a series of black-and-white comics from publishers Aardvark-Vanaheim, Renegade Press and Dark Horse Comics throughout the '80s and '90s (In the 21st century, he would reappear at Image Comics). 

The Carrot wore a white button-down shirt, red pants, green flippers on his feet (early on, one character intimates this is because he does not know how to tie his shoes, while later he will tell a character he wears them "In case I have to swim") but he is, of course, best known for seemingly having a giant carrot for a head (this is, of course, a mask), an ever-burning flame where the green, leafy part might be ("Strike fear into criminals! Confuse them..." he kinda sorta explains his costume at one point).

The earliest issues of his comics read a lot like a witty, self-aware take on Golden Age superhero comics: Primitive, child-like and weird unto randomness. His origin? "Having read 5,000 comics in a single sitting to win a bet, this poor man suffered brain damage." 

Apparently once a great hero, when Burden introduces readers to him in the Aardvark-Vanaheim series, he's all washed-up, living the life of a hobo (And talking in a sometimes hard-to-parse syntax apparently reflective of that brain damage). His comics adventures are therefore his "second act," as he returns to fighting crime and defending his home of Iron City. 

He still drinks a lot, spends a great deal of time out on the town carousing, and associates with various street people, colorful characters and lots and lots of beautiful women, Burden never passing up an opportunity to fill his panels of often strange, ugly men with lots of character in their faces with buxom, scantily clad women. 

Though the general public has mixed feelings about him, he's feared by criminals, worshiped by children (he's once saved by a Junior Carrot Patrol) and he's always a friend to any societal outsider. His early adventures featured a lot of communists, mad scientists and a communist mad scientist. The words "absurd" and "surreal" are most often used to describe his comics adventures.

The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles! Begun as a visual gag, artists friends Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird drawing images of a masked turtle with nunchucks to amuse one another. That masked, nunchuck-wielding ninja turtle and three more like him eventually appeared in a 1984 self-published comic, a deadpan funny animal parody of Frank Miller's Daredevil comics whose title referenced popular trends in mainstream super-comics of the time (The teenage heroes of New Teen Titans, for example, the mutants of Uncanny X-Men). 

It was an incredible hit, and so Eastman and Laird's one-off became an ongoing series, deadpan parody becoming something semi-serious, and the unusual juxtaposition of the four words in the title becoming something of a magic spell, one that can conjure any sort of strangeness they or their later collaborators could imagine. I mean, when your protagonists are Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, there's really no genre, no plot and no tone they can't be made to fit into.

By the time they became the stars of a cartoon show in 1987 and a toy-line in 1998, they were well on their way to being a pop cultural phenomenon, with multiple cartoons, TV shows, movies and video games to follow. Forty-one years later, they're among the most successful comic book creations of all time, beloved by multiple generations of fans. They're also still regularly starring in comics books.

It had to happen! The Flaming Carrot and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles naturally crossed paths. Eastman and Laird were very generous with their creations, and their characters often teamed-up or guest-starred in other 1980s black-and-white comics. 

Most famously, Leonardo first crossed swords with Stan Sakai's Usagi Yojimbo in a Sakai-drawn short called "Turtle Soup and Rabbit Stew" which appeared in the 1987 anthology Turtle Soup #1. It was the first of many meetings between Eastman, Laird and Sakai's characters in the comics (all of which are collected in IDW's 2018 Usagi Yojimbo/Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Complete Collection, save for 2023's Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles/Usagi Yojimbo: WhereWhen) and, more occasionally, in other media.

And then, of course, there was the crossover with Dave Sim's Cerebus the Aardvark in 1986's Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles #8, an over-sized issue by Eastman, Laird, Sim and Gerhard that introduced time-travelling Renet and horn-headed sorcerer Savanti Romero into the mythos.

But the TMNT also appeared in the 1990 and 1991 Last of The Viking Heroes Summer Special #2 and #3, appeared in a back-up tale in 1986's Grimjack #26 and appeared in 1987 Fantagraphics anthology title Anything Goes #5. 

The TMNT are up there with Archie Andrews and Batman as the comics characters most likely to crossover with another publisher's characters, and over the decades they have gone on to meet Mark Martin's GnatRat, Matt Howarth's Those Annoying Post Brothers, Jim Davis' Garfield, Erik Larsen's The Savage Dragon (repeatedly), some kid named Creed, and the characters from Ghostbusters, The X-Files, Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers, Street Fighter, Stranger Things and the Masters of the Universe toy-line/cartoon. And, of course, they had also crossed over with Archie Andrews and Batman (Four separate times, in the case of Batman!) 

(But, somewhat frustratingly, never Marvel's Daredevil, the star whose book they owe so much).

So, yeah, meeting with The Flaming Carrot, the star of another popular underground black-and-white comic of the 1980s with which Eastman and Laird's TMNT shares a bit of DNA and, according to Eastman in his introduction to Dark Horse's 2019 Flaming Carrot Omnibus Vol. 1, even influenced him a bit? 

As the old Marvel Comics used to say, it had to happen. 

And so it did, in three issues of Burden's Flaming Carrot Comics in 1991, by which point the series was being published by Dark Horse Comics. 

For context, by 1991 the Turtles had become mass media stars. While their Mirage title was still ongoing, it was at a particularly weird point of its great fill-in era, that year publishing the first two issues of a three-part story by the great Michael Zulli, a done-in-one by the great creative team of Rick McCollum and Bill Anderson and the comedic "Spaced Out" three-parter by Rich Hedden and Tom McWeeney. Meanwhile, the first TMNT film had played in theaters the year previous, and the cartoon had been on TV for about four years. 

Despite being completely representative of the contents, the cover of Flaming Carrot Comics, the first installment of the three-part TMNT crossover (that's it at the top of the post), isn't too terribly dramatic. Far better is the opening splash page, featuring the Carrot and Raphael racing across a rooftop together, the Carrot's intentionally ironic narration discussing his intention to make something of one of the much more popular, much more successful Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

This may be the Carrot's comic book, but after the splash, Burden starts his tale with the Turtles, who are here in their New York City sewer lair (Which would seem to place this story somewhere within the first ten issues of the TMNT volume one continuity, but, of course, TMNT continuity is a sucker's game, especially when it comes to volume one). 

Raphael is quietly studying a stack of books in the corner, while his brothers sit on the couch, watching TV and bickering. What is he studying? The spines of the books have titles like Human Psychology and Love and Will (and though the first half of the title is cut off, one seems to be Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead). When April scolds the other Turtles with "Let's see some adult behavior around here!", we see what's going on inside Raph's head.

Apparently, Raphael is curious about the world of adulthood—here Burden actually seems to remember the "Teenage" part of "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles", something that's never really emphasized in a majority of their stories—and so he decides to go topside to observe adults in their natural habitat. To do so, he dons the costume he wore when visiting the city streets in that first movie, a trench coat and wide-brimmed hat.

After encountering a series of strange people, he leaves the streets for a rooftop and spots The Flaming Carrot below. As he looks so interesting, Raph decides to follow him around for a while. 

And what is Iron City's hometown hero The Flaming Carrot doing in New York City, anyway? Well, as will eventually be revealed, he and his fellow Mysterymen have heard rumors of a big crime of some sort being planned there by their enemies The Vile Brotherhood, and so they have come to investigate (The Mysterymen, by the way, are a misfit team of oddball superheroes like Mister Furious, The Shoveler, Screwball, The Spleen and Bondoman and more; you may have seen some of them in the weird, Flaming Carrot-less 1999 film, Mystery Men. Sometimes the team's name is one word, sometimes two. I'm going to stick with one word, which seems to be used most often in these comics, and was the way it was spelled in the title of Burden's book about the team).

The Carrot eventually gives Raphael the slip, and then begins following him. Then Raph sees someone who might be even stranger than the Carrot. A man in a bowtie and suspenders sitting on a chair atop a nearby rooftop. When the man stands up, his hand falls off, and he reattaches it. Investigating the man's apartment, full of strange Bob Burden-y details, Raph has to suddenly hide when a second man, identical to the fist, appears.

They don't seem to be human, talking in a strange alien language, getting drunk on Sprite, dancing with dolls and, upon finding one of Raph's sai, their Little Orphan Annie-like blank eyes extend from their sockets on wires to closely look the weapon up and down. 

When they discover Raph, they blast him with a ray gun, lay him on a table and subject him to some kind of device that apparently gives him amnesia. 

The Carrot is able to recuse Raph and takes him to a secret hideout. Eventually, he decides to train the amnesiac Turtle to be a superhero. He gives him a pair of purple pajamas, a black cape with the word "Bread" on it, a sack for a mask, as well as a utility belt and pair of plungers for weapons. He dubs him "The Dark Avenger."

They set about fighting street crime and, in the last three panels of the issue, the other Turtles finally realize that Raphael is missing. 

Note the cover of the second issue of this Flaming Carrot/Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles crossover, #26. While Raph appeared on the cover of the previous issue, this one features the other three Turtles, and they are all wearing their color-coded masks, thus appearing as they would in the cartoon and movie (and the Archie Comics series), rather than how they would appear in the Mirage comics. The interiors being black-and-white, though, the only time we see their masks in color are on this cover and the next. 

The first chunk of this issue is devoted to the Mysterymen, who are busy tackling zombies in New York City. When they are interviewed on the TV news, the Turtles catch the broadcast in their lair. And then there's some footage of "some other Mysterymen in action on the Lower East Side...Flaming Carrot Man and someone called Bread Boy!"

Though in his Carrot-designed Dark Avenger get-up, the Turtles immediately recognize Raphael's moves...and his feet and hands, and so they grab their weapons and are soon racing across rooftops in search of Raph. 

Meanwhile, F.C. and Raph encounter Leaf-Blower, a Canadian superhero in town hunting The Evil Umpires, a criminal team of performance artists, whose bizarre crimes the Carrot rattles off to Raph after he consults his "crime computer", which is really just a Rolodex (A card from which lists a half-dozen other crimes of theirs). 

And where might a team of evil umpires be planning to strike in New York City? Raph guesses "The Umpire State Building", and the Carrot likes the way he thinks. They head to the Empire State Building and, indeed, it has been taken over by the Umpires, who have allied themselves with the severed but still living head of Frankenstein (the monster, not the doctor). 

Raph goes to the Mysterymen for help while the Carrot distracts the umpires, and then Raph's brother turtles jump him, helping jog his memory.

The concluding chapter of the crossover features the Flaming Carrot and all four Turtles and guess who drew it? Did you guess Bob Burden? If so, you guessed wrong. 

Look closely in the lower lefthand corner, and you may see a familiar signature on a little scroll...That's right, it's Todd McFarlane! Granted, it's not very Todd McFarlane-y looking, but then, this was 1991, and perhaps McFarlane wasn't quite at his McFarlane-iest just yet...? (For a more McFarlane-y looking Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle, see below). 

Former Dark Avenger Raphael returns to the Empire State Building with his brothers, and the four of them team up with the Carrot to stop the Umpires' plan to steal the building by means of attaching powerful rockets to each of its corners. 

There's a lot of combat in this action-packed finale. There is the usual punching and kicking, of course, and a game of keep-away with Frankenstein's head. And, as one might expect at this point, some of the combat is just really, really weird: Raphael curls up in a little ball and the Flaming Carrot bowls him into an on-rushing v-formation of umpires, the Carrot traps a group of Umpires in a room and tosses in his nuclear pogo stick to bludgeon them, the umpires' leader holds off our heroes with a ray that, he says, will make them smell like barbecue sauce for the rest of their life, and so on.

Oh, and the police have surrounded the building, but the umpires are holding them off by dropping pennies at them. 

But isn't that just an urban legend...?

The unsung hero of the day? Mysteryman Screwball's pet shoelace. 

Our heroes make their escape from the Empire State Building by commandeering the hot air balloon the umpires had planned to use (hence the scene from the cover), and, in the very last panel, we see Frankenstein's head, now bearing a red nose, attached to the body of a reindeer.

There are some loose ends. Like, whatever happened to those weird aliens (?) that zapped Raphel? Well, a later scene shows them leading a sentient skeleton into the apartment, finding the bed Raph was on empty and then they all laugh hysterically and...that's the last we see of them.

What of Leaf-Blower, who said his partner was kidnapped by the umpires? Shruggy emotion. Raph's quest to learn more about adulthood? Completely dropped. And the Vile Brotherhood? Well, they never ended up making the scene.

Still, compared to some of the earlier Flaming Carrot comics—those collected in Dark Horse's 2019 Flaming Carrot Omnibus, which is where I read these issues via Hoopla through my public library's website—this is a rather remarkably tightly-written comic, and the artwork and storytelling are a stronger and more refined. 

Perhaps unsurprisingly given the similarities of their real-world origins, the Flaming Carrot and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles characters and milieus fit together rather seamlessly. This might also be because the first decade or so of TMNT comics weren't just Eastman and Laird's, but also included all of those many weird fill-ins, and contributions from various artists in anthology books, so that a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle comic could really be any comic in which the Turtles were featured, no matter how out there, how silly or how comedic it might be. 

Visually, the characters are perfectly at home in the black-and-white world of Flaming Carrot Comics and, in fact, look and feel more natural and, well, like themselves here than they would in many other of the comics that followed, like the second and third volumes of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, their various Image Comics guest-appearances and the IDW years. 

Speaking of color Turtles comics, the next time the TMNT would cross paths with The Flaming Carrot and Mysterymen, it would be in color, in the pages of the 1993-1994 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles/Flaming Carrot Crossover miniseries, written by Burden and drawn by Jim Lawson and Neil Vokes and published by Mirage Comics.

Those comics have never been collected, but, luckily, I have the single issues, which we'll take a look at in the next post. 

In the meantime, here's that more Todd McFarlane-y Ninja Turtle I promised, a pin-up from the back of 1992's Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles #50: