Subcultural Karate Turtles

Book excerpt: A satirical graphic novel by artist, musician, creative polymath and Moldy Peaches founder Adam Green (born 1981), Subcultural Karate Turtles is a parody of the popular Teenage Mutant 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.0In 2019, Green published War and Paradise, a graphic novel about the clash of humans with machines, the meeting of spirituality with singularity and the bidirectional relationship between life and the afterlife. Subcultural Karate Turtles continues Green?s brilliant elaborations of the psychedelic and the satirical, the political and the spiritual.