Before all the streaming platforms, there was a mainstream. Native American tribes Lenape and Iroquois peoples described the mantle of the earth as the back of a large turtle shell. They referred to modern day New York and much of the Atlantic coast of North America as Turtle Island. The terrain was mountainous, verdant, and varied, an animate world where light and seasons change on the back of the turtle as it shifts along the stream.

Beneath the skin, the subcutaneous—and beneath the culture, the subculture? In Stephen Hawking’s primer on the universe, A Brief History of Time (1988), he chirps, “A well-known scientist (some say it was Bertrand Russell) once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the center of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy. At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: 'What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise.' The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, 'What is the tortoise standing on?' 'You're very clever, young man, very clever,' said the old lady. 'But it's turtles all the way down!'" So under the underground we stand on an “infinite regress” of turtles.

Beneath the street, it's a sewer. In Freud’s schematic of human consciousness, things move from a dark sea of unknowable id into the well lighted cognitive space of the ego. Inside of the ego, we understand thought and can express it, communicate it. The commerce of ideas occurs from ego to ego and so does all commerce. As thoughts move from the unknowable id into the ego space to be articulated, are their energies somehow being appropriated? Maybe all consciousness is the act of selling out our more unknowable drives. The power of the unknowable goes “all the way down,” inherently a form of turtle power.

In that notorious annus synonymous with the dystopia of George Orwell’s eponymous novel 1984, Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird self-published 3,000 copies of a black and white comic book called Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. They sent them around the United States to a network of comic book shops, and to the surprise of all the Marvel and DC fans, there were 15,000 requests for a second issue by the following year. This was an underground hit that became mainstream. How could turtles be action heroes? How could they be ninjas? But despite the premise's absurdity, by 1987 the characters were licensed for action figures, then a cartoon series to give the toys context, followed by Hollywood movies, darker comics, a Michael Bay CGI treatment, and on and on, the ninjas passing through the hands of hundreds of artists and writers. Turtles all the way down.

You are about to enter the kabuki theater of Subcultural Karate Turtles where sensei Burroughs named these illustrated testudines. In Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, the tiny turtle hatchlings are famously named after four artists from the Italian Renaissance by the rat Splinter. This mutant sensei rat teaches the turtles ninjutsu, but naming them after master artists might be the first act of raising them into ninjas. Splinter instills discipline in training martial art, an analogue to the painting and sculptural art disciplines of the old Renaissance Masters Leonardo da Vinci, Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino, Donato di Niccolò di Betto Bardi aka “Donatello,” and Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni Donato. The discipline and teachings of these old masters hold a body of secret knowledge. Adam Green names his turtles after underground artists, sewer masters of deskilled modes of expression, his subcultural “heroes in a halfshell.”

What do you know about CRISPR? The splicing technology promises to allow us to take our genetic traits into our own scientific hands? Does it seem like our new 2021 version of mutant making ooze? Experiments gone awry, mutation has always been a part of superhero creation. From the radioactive spider that bit Peter Parker on down, there’s a reason why Adam Green makes his version of the villainous ninja Shredder into CRISPR, the bad side of the mutation. Rather than freaks, the promise of CRISPR would be a genetically modified mainstream, a doorway to a more precise eugenics, the beating heart breeding superficial fascism. That word fascism comes from fascia, the tissue just below the skin, yet another thing lurking beneath the cultural dermis; below is not just a subdermal culture but also this other tissue of latent fascist art production.

Superheroes of Gotham famously wear costumes to preserve their anonymity, and the turtles all wear Lone Ranger/Zorro style eye masks and belts. But in their case their clothing makes them a band of brothers almost like the Ramones, who were not actually brothers but used the same last name, dress code, sunglasses and haircut to demarcate the culture of their fourtet. Hot Topic might sanitize the Ramones now, though they were willingly cartoonified like Kiss. Their uniform helped delineate and spawn a type of subculture in the Dick Hebdige sense, but also was a visual shorthand that lent itself to becoming a mass-cultural cartoon. In Edo Japan, during the 17th and 18th centuries, the seedy theater neighborhood Ukiyo was the same place where you could buy woodblock prints of scenes from your favorite kabuki theater. Prints of actors in stylized white face paint were named Ukiyo-e after that neighborhood, a term often translated as “images of the floating world.”

In finishing up this writing, I played an old Adam Green song for Lucy, “Can You See Me” from his 2002 album Garfield. Apart from being from an album named after another cartoon character, the song seemed to be relevant to the struggle to be heard and seen as an artist and person. After some chaotic bit about the moon being a clock, it ends up with one of the words in question:

When it comes to artistic production though, don't be scared of being underground. One theory as to why cultures have been drawn to turtles as a representation of mother Earth has to do with their large shell looking like a pregnant belly. When the head peaks out from underneath the shell, it's as if a baby is crowning and being born. ♦