On this day back in 1989 Marvel released Power Pachyderms #1 by Roger Stern and Maddie Blaustein. While the cover notes it's a parody of the X-Men, to truly understand its origins, you have to go back a few years to the debut of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
The black-and-white comic was an instant success for its creators, Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird, kicking off what would become a multimillion dollar franchise. At the time, it also lit the black-and-white comics boom, as many small press publishers scrambled to get the "next big thing" in B&W comics out the door. Others opted to parody the Ninja Turtles themselves with knockoffs like Adolescent Radioactive Black Belt Hamsters, Geriatric Gangrene Jujitsu Gerbils and Pre-Teen Dirty-Gene Kung-Fu Kangaroos. Marvel even got in on the act, teasing a title called Adult Thermonuclear Samurai Elephants:
If you're familiar with the origins of the Turtles, you know that their in-story origin directly lifts from the story of Daredevil -- the same nuclear-waste carrying truck that blinded a young kid lost a second canister of nuclear waste that bounced into a kid holding a fishbowl filled with four turtles, which broke the bowl, sent the turtles into a sewer and, well ... the rest is history. So Marvel parodying a comic that had originally parodied them was an interesting move.
But they never released Adult Thermonuclear Samurai Elephants -- instead, the title experienced several delays and by the time it came out they had retitled it Power Pachyderms. While the teaser shows four elephants wielding ninja weapons, the actual title only featured one sword-wielder, a parody of Elektra, who teamed with three other elephants based on members of the X-Men. I think it's safe to say that Marvel opted out of making it a TMNT parody because, well, a lot of time had passed, the black-and-white boom became the black-and-white bust, and maybe the joke wasn't funny anymore. Not that the jokes in Power Pachyderms were funny -- it's a pretty terrible comic. I don't think we've seen the Power Pachyderms since then, but hey, maybe their day will come again.
One interesting note: the comic's artist, Maddie Blaustein, worked as an editor at Marvel and wrote several comics for DC's Milestone, TSR and Impact lines. She would go on to become a voice actress and voiced Meowth on the Pokemon cartoons -- the first trans voice actress for many of the agencies she worked for.
