3 out of 5
It’s glossy, it’s over-sized, it comes with like ninety toys per issue (a seemingly unique trait to UK kids mags)… The 2013 incarnation of the Turtles Magazine is definitely slick, matching the vibe and CGI presentation of the 2012 series. Now, I haven’t read – or even been able to find – the ‘Flash Forward’ magazine, so no clue as to the standards there, but comparing this to the old Welsh Publications mag, there’s an odd parallel: the 90s mag was happening in conjunction with the Fred Wolf cartoon which, more often than not, was pretty hokey and silly. This Panini mag is happening along with the Nick cartoon, which, often, surprises with how sharp and smart it is. And the mags flipped / flip the formula: the Welsh volumes were nicely varied, and actually required kids to read. Yes, they had mostly the same features issue to issue, but I can honestly say that they felt like legitimate attempts to educate along with Turtle-inate, via articles about the world’s reptiles, showing kids involved in unique activities, and also including (gasp!) text stories as ‘told’ by Splinter on occasion, all written at a comfortable beginner’s level but never over-simplified insultingly. Plus: comics by dang Jim Lawson. The Panini books, on the other hand, are… pretty dumb.
Each issue requires a couple brain cells to get through: find “hidden” objects and “decipher” messages where the text is backwards, or find your way through a maze that’s essentially a straight line, all of these couched as different “skills” of a ninja, and then essentially repeated with different colors every book. No text stories – don’t you even dare. So it mostly amounts to a picture book, with all of the art clipped right from the show’s components, including CGI’d backgrounds to match. To be fair, the mag is skewed toward a younger audience, but based on the art submissions (both mags had / have a similar letters column) – readers were / are a similar age… so… either kids are dumber, or we’re just totally comfortable with under-estimating them.
Okay, so let’s assume we’re fine with the content being this basic; I’d still lower my rating because there’s no variation, as suggested above. You get a different poster or character to color, but the puzzles are 100% interchangeable. So: thank goodness we still get extra comics included, and, on the whole, they’re better than the monster-of-the-week yuks of Lawson’s comics – though of course those were charming in their own way. And because I’m an IDW hater, the Paninis best that as well: IDW’s various takes on the 2012 Animated series forever felt too safe and sanitized to really excite, whereas the work in these Panini mags has a sort of off-the-cuff feeling to it that energizes the visuals and stories. That said, about a year in, some artists and writers move back and forth between the publishers, which… caused some degradation in that vibe as the years went on, though I still enjoyed these strips more than their American-published counterparts overall.
Magazine: boring. Comics: mostly great. Worth the shipping and handling at the time to get it from overseas? For me, a dumbass collector, sure. But I actually felt like I got my money’s worth from the old mags between the content and comics, whereas with these, I know I’m just being a collector, even if the 12 pages of comics per ish were pretty fun. (If we can praise IDW’s money-hungry reprints of reprints, it’s that eventually they brought these comics in-house in much more affordable trades, sans the mag excesses.)
