Adam Green: Subcultural Karate Turtles

Subcultural Karate Turtles is a satirical graphic novel by artist/musician Adam Green.  Parodying the popular Ninja Turtles cartoon, Green reimagines the turtles as subcultural artists who must battle the mainstream to determine the future of art. Set in an intergalactic Kabuki theater,  the book is a play inside of a comic book. Against the backdrop of childhood iconography, the psychedelic dialogue functions as a critique of cultural theory. 

 Adam Green is an artistic polymath—a songwriter, filmmaker, visual artist, and poet.  A co-founder of The Moldy Peaches and author of ten solo-albums, his songs have been performed by artists as diverse as The Libertines, Carla Bruni, Kelly Willis, Dean & Britta, and Will Oldham. Green’s paintings and sculptures have been the subject of exhibitions in America, Asia and Europe, including a 2016 show at the Fondation Beyeler Museum in Basel, Switzerland.  He wrote and directed the feature film The Wrong Ferarri (2010), the first feature film shot entirely on an iPhone, and Adam Green's Aladdin (2016) which Buzzfeed.com described as “the trippiest movie ever made." In 2019, Green released War and Paradise, a graphic novel combining his lyrical and visual vocabulary. The satirical war epic is about the clash of humans with machines, the meeting of spirituality with singularity, and the bidirectional relationship between life and the afterlife.   

Green’s 10th and latest solo album, Engine of Paradise, is a musical exploration of these same themes. Recorded in Brooklyn, New York, by Loren Humphrey, the album reimagines the baroque orchestral style of his early 2000s era records and features performances by James Richardson (MGMT), Florence Welch (Florence and the Machine) and Jonathan Rado (Foxygen). 

 In 2020, Green published an epic-poem MDVL: 1,000 Years of Dark Ages with Spheres Projects, a section of which was included in the Poetry London literary journal. This was followed by an animated movie version of the poem, narrated by Green, in the style of a medieval illuminated manuscript.