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.