Martial Arts

As we all know from reading comic books and watching movies, the 1970s were a time when lethal ninjas and club-wielding goons lurked around every corner, kicking sand into the faces of honest, hard-working comics readers at every opportunity. The people cried out for something, anything, that could save them from these ruffians, and as they always have, comic books stepped up to help in the most efficient and effective way possible: Advertising! Comics had always provided their readers with the most exciting purchasing opportunities — nuclear submarines, X-Ray glasses, even the occasional piece of real Kryptonite — but between 1971 and 1974, they were full of opportunities to train yourself in the lethal arts of self-defense. That's why we here at ComicsAlliance are compiling a comprehensive list of the greatest promises for deadly hands and death touches in this, our Grand Compendium Of Comic Book Martial Arts Instructional Advertisements From The '70s.

If you were a child in 1990, then you wanted to be a ninja. I actually suspect that this is true for literally every child of every era who has known what a ninja was, but I can really only speak from my own experience, and that experience had a lot to do with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. There were other ninjas of course, but while Snake-Eyes never really did much on TV and Sho Kusugi required a trip to the video store, the TMNT were swinging katanas and nunchuks around everywhere you looked. They were everything my eight year-old self wanted to be, and since growing a shell proved difficult, ninja training was obviously the next step. Sadly, I never had a copy of 1986's Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Authorized Martial Arts Training Manual, or else I probably would've grown up into a life of silent assassination and smoke-bomb escapes, rather than just sitting in my office making jokes about comic books. But with a new theatrical movie and ninja interest returning to an all-time high, it's worth looking back now, to see if we can't find out a few ninja tricks to apply to our day-to-day lives. Spoiler warning: Unless your day-to-day life involves the proper handling of a sai, we will not.

It's been a while, but one of ComicsAlliance's primary goals has always been to chronicle the many ways in which our world is becoming more like the work visionary comic book creator/prophet Rob Liefeld. It's happening, folks, and the sooner we all accept that, the better off we're all going to be. I'm not sure if anything will ever top the bayonet attachment that lets you mount a gun on another g