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.