Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles #23 – Review

By: Too many to list—check out the review.

The Story: For those who’ve ever wondered what turtles dream about.

The Review: A while back, a friend of mine and I had a long discussion about predictability in fiction.  He insisted that predictability is toxic to the quality of any kind of story; if something is predictable, then it reveals not only a lack of originality, but also weakness in execution.  I saw his point, but ultimately disagreed with the basic premise.  After all, predictability is a very relative thing, dependent on every individual’s fictional experience.

As a reviewer, I’ve seen more than my share of narrative formulas, but who’s to say anyone else has had that luxury?  From last issue’s final scenes, I already knew that this month would be all about Shredder pressing Leonardo into his service.  And because Leo, as the most devoted of Splinter’s sons, could never be legitimately persuaded to follow Shredder, I knew that the only avenue to obtaining his loyalty would be some serious Kitsune magic.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles #12 – Review

By: Kevin Eastman & Tom Waltz (story), Dan Duncan (art), Ronda Pattison (colors)

The Story: Who says ninja have to play fair?

The Review: If you read my review last month, you already know I have a limited familiarity with the Turtles.  Somehow, rewatching those gnarly cartoons over and over, it never occurred to me that Master Splinter and the Turtles were family.  I guess I was too distracted by the creepy pink tentacles of Krang undulating from the ab-window of his mecha-body.  But then, I was six years old at the time, and thus quite stupid and rather prone to distraction—still am, frankly.

Eastman-Waltz have kept the family bonds among our mutant heroes front and center throughout this series, and dang if it isn’t my favorite part of the whole run.  Mainstream comics nowadays seem to be all about breaking up relationships, not building them, whether it be husbands and wives, best friends, or whole teams.  Heck, the X-Men have a complete internal meltdown two or three times a year.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles #11 – Review

By: Kevin Eastman & Tom Waltz (story), Dan Duncan (art), Ronda Pattison (colors)

The Story: As they say, an rat is hard to kill–especially one with a katana.

The Review: Everything I know about the Turtles, I know from the 80s cartoon.  Not only that, but I was limited to the seven or eight rerun episodes that my family randomly recorded with a third-tier VCR.  (A VCR, kids, is a video cassette recorder and I’ll only describe it by saying that they were inconvenient and fragile in every way short of being just reels of film in your hand, and yay for Blu-rays.)  So it’s safe to say my knowledge of TMNT continuity has limits.

And it’s with no little surprise and delight that I encounter each additional character Eastman-Waltz add to the series.  It’s good to know that the Turtles’ world extends beyond them fighting a thousand robot Foot Soldiers each episode, or watching Bebop and Rocksteady fail in some raucously amusing way once again.  This time around, we get the Purple Dragons, a gang from Joe Casey’s leg of the woods who aren’t too happy about four oversized reptiles moving in on their turf, in addition to all the other ninja, mutant or otherwise, hanging around.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles #10 – Review

By: Kevin Eastman & Tom Waltz (story), Dan Duncan (art), Ronda Pattison (colors)

The Story: He may be a humanoid rat, but he’s not the biggest rat at this showdown.

The Review: Maybe it’s just me, but I’ve always found the Turtles to be pretty lighthearted fare.  When you have a bunch of overgrown reptiles wielding traditional Eastern weaponry while chowing down on pizza…yeah, I’d say you have good reason to believe the story can’t be all that serious.  But in this series, Eastman-Waltz have crafted a tale that, while it retains all the silliness and charm that made it a hit, clearly wants to be taken as pure entertainment.

Part of their efforts includes portraying the Turtles as more dimensional individuals than ever before.  Understand, each of the brothers has always had his respective interests and personality which prevented him from being a total clone of the others.  But only in this series have they been refined such that their voices sound completely credible—human, as it were.  You might even say that their mutant, turtley nature has largely become irrelevant, which is nothing short of a major accomplishment, all things considering.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles #9 – Review

By: Kevin Eastman & Tom Waltz (story), Dan Duncan (art), Ronda Pattison (colors)

The Story: Doesn’t matter how big a robot is once you stick a knife through its motherboard.

The Review: I don’t know exactly when it happened—though I’m guessing probably sometime in the seventies—but at some point weirdness became an attractive quality to the mainstream.  Think about it: NBC comedies, reality television, films like Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter—it’s almost as if in our ever-increasing struggle for originality, we appreciate anything that produces surprise of any kind, however tepid or extreme.

Nowhere does that point seem more apparent than in this series.  In the opening pages, April O’Neil recaps the Turtles’ story up to the present day, covering their mutant origins, their training in the martial arts by a giant rat, and their rivalry with a mercenary cat with an eye-patch.  And that’s before we get to Michelangelo reminding Donatello, “…you forgot to tell her the part about us being reincarnated and stuff.”  So, yeah, this is some truly strange stuff at work.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles #8 – Review

By: Kevin Eastman & Tom Waltz (writers), Dan Duncan (artist), Ronda Pattison (colorist)

The Story: It’s generally not a good idea to take your girlfriend down a sewer on the first date.

The Review: The hot news this week is Michael Bay, director of the next Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles film adaptation, plans to revitalize the franchise by removing the “Teenage” and “Mutant” parts entirely and making them aliens instead.  In my determined pursuit of objective review, I’ll wait to see how the movie pans out before getting rendering judgment, but even I can’t help feeling like Bay will have a lot of work before him to make this idea work.

I understand the point of these changes is to remove some of the hokier elements from the Turtles’ conception and make them more believable.  But let’s say we revise Superman’s origins so he’s an Earth-born genetic anomaly rather than the last child of a doomed planet who happens to be sent to our planet.  Sure, it’d be more sensible and less corny, but I doubt many people would see it’s an improved story.

The stakes may be lower here, but the changes are no less significant for the Turtles.  The loss of their “teenage” status would remove a major part of their endearing and enduring appeal.  True, their jocky mentality and mannerisms can get gimmicky and a tad annoying, but that’s what make these freaks lovable rather than terrifying.  I mean, how can you be scared of giant turtle-men armed with traditional Eastern weaponry who call you “Bro” and compliment you on the “Cute girl” you have passed out in your arms?

That unconscious girl, by the way, is April O’Neil, brought by Casey Jones to the sewers to meet his turtle buddies, who also happen to be the ninjas she claims nearly killed her some time back.  The intersection between the human and reptile characters of the series means our core cast is finally complete, though it may be a while—especially on April’s part—before they all fight as common allies.  Looking forward to much entertaining exchanges among them to come.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles #7 – Review

By: Kevin Eastman & Tom Waltz (writers), Dan Duncan (artist), Ronda Pattison (colorist)

The Story: Can’t a turtle rest easy in his own sewer home without pests crawling in anymore?

The Review: No matter how you think about it, there’s just a major element of campiness about the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.  Their very concept is all kinds of silly: brash, adolescent humanoid turtles practicing the martial arts, eating pizza, and talking like they just rose out of the surf in a nineties comedy.  All these things make them perfect for kids, of course, but once you’re grown up, all that stuff can get pretty gimmicky pretty fast.

That’s not to say you’d want the Turtles any other way, however.  Better they remain the jauntily quirky characters they are than get “modernized” into dreary, angst-driven antiheroes, like half the comic book protagonists out there.  Fortunately, Eastman and Waltz have done a great job keeping intact all the weird things about the TMNT that makes them fun, yet brushing them up with just enough sophistication to make them intriguing, rather than solely comic, characters.

The first step has been to make the villains less hokey and more, well, villainous.  Take General Krang.  I remember him back in my cartoon rerun days as a gross-looking, but not necessarily threatening figure, especially with his high-pitched whine—and his resemblance to pink cottage cheese.  Here, he comes off a lot more impressive, if only because of his redesigned exo-suit, which bears a faint resemblance to an un-helmeted Darth Vader.  Old Hob’s not bad as a villain either, seeing how he’s willing to resort to some fairly ruthless measures to take down his foes.

Eastman-Waltz have also played up this reincarnation aspect of the TMNT lore, which injects a nice, esoteric, serious flavor into the title.  It gives the more serious turtle bros (Donatello and Leonardo) an interesting mystery to chew on, and actually a little bit of angst as well.  Leonardo, as the oldest and most dedicated of the turtles, seems to remember something more of his past life, though that seems to give him more pain than pleasure.  You have to remember that if the turtles are brothers and Splinter’s their dad, the absent momma will affect them at some point.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle #6 – Review

By: Kevin Eastman and Tom Waltz (writers), Dan Duncan (art), Ronda Pattison (colors)

The Story: Allez ninja, allez ninja, allez!

The Review: It’s been rather fascinating to watch the development of IDW’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Co-creator Kevin Eastman and script-writer Tom Waltz have been combining elements from the Turtle’s original comic series and the first cartoon show, as well as bringing in some new twists and concepts for this new on-going title. Yet despite letting the origin go on for five issues, many of the ideas have felt under-developed. I’ll get into the elements I think have been rushed in the Musings, but as I haven’t been reviewing this series until now, I think it fair to just review this issue on its own. And honestly, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles #6 is pretty good.

The writing in this issue is very tight. The Turtles are out on patrol when they sight a pair of ninjas chasing a mysterious Frenchman. They follow, allowing us to see the brothers interact as a group. The chemistry between the four is great, and if there are some cheesy lines like “These dudes take their Ninja Vitamins today, or what?” and, “Holy guacamole…”, well, this is the Ninja Turtles after all. However, the Turtles are physically so close to their quarry during the chase that I found it hard to believe the ninjas never heard the Turtles banter. At the end of the chase, things turn deadly, and despite internal disagreements, the Turtles don’t step in to help either side. They’re left with an ominous warning from the Frenchman, and the lingering question of whether they did the right thing by not interfering.

In the aftermath of their run-in with the ninjas, the Turtles regroup with their sensei, and Donatello expresses some disbelief at Splinter’s account of their origin. Splinter claims they are all the reincarnated spirits of a feudal Japanese family, killed in an internal power struggle of the Foot Ninja Clan. The reader is left with the question of whether this is accurate, or a by-product of the psychotropic drug used on Splinter when he was a lab rat. It’s good use of dramatic irony, and a bold move to throw doubt on a character that has basically been portrayed as infallible since his creation.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles #5 – Review

By: Kevin Eastman & Tom Waltz (writers), Dan Duncan & Mateus Santolouco (artists), Ronda Pattison (colorist)

The Story: Sorry Turtles, no one delivers pizza on Christmas Eve.

The Review: Much like my experience with Static Shock, I knew the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles as a cartoon long before I read them in comics, and even longer before I discovered they actually started out in pulp.  To this day, I still look back on the Turtles with a kind of fond wonder.  When you consider the very premise behind them, it’s rather amazing they took off at all, much less the multimedia success they’ve become in the last couple decades.

Reading this Eastman-Waltz penned series, it seems like there’s also room for the Turtles to grow as characters beyond the gimmicks and syndication.  Not having read prior issues, I can’t say if this one is a good example of the kind of thing you get on the series all the time, but it’s surprisingly cogent, intriguing stuff, with nary a catchphrase to be seen.

This issue dives into the origins of Master Splinter, which turns out more complicated and violent than I remember.  For one thing, his story begins centuries before the Turtles ever came into existence, in feudal Japan.  As you might imagine, this means his narration here in the present day required a spiritual reincarnation or supernatural circumstances of some kind, which alone moves the series into more sophisticated territory.

All the indicators point to a plain-and-simple reincarnation, however.  It can’t be a coincidence Hamato Yoshi had four sons, each with a distinctive personality which parallels with one of the Turtles.  Nor can it be a coincidence that his sons inherited his skill in martial artistry, and the Turtles seem to have an natural instinct for the fighting arts.  Both Donatello and Raphael note their training feels more like “fine-tuning something we already learned,” so the connection to Yoshi’s sons seems pretty strong.