4 out of 5

It’s not that there’s anything particularly noteworthy about this reprint – the Penny Press border, a ‘Welcome to Turtles’ editorial column and a small checklist of other series-related books to look into – and it’s not even that the premiere issue of this series was great.  I was surprised, at the time, with how much they were relying on an in-built audience, as the story is short on introduction and instead includes a lot of ‘and here’s April,’ ‘and here’s Casey,’ beats, putting pieces into play for telling us how the Turtles came to be and trying to grab attention with a battle with Old Hob, but it lacks the punch of the opening of the first series since we’re stepping in the middle of some already instated rivalry between Splinter and Hob and all we can see are a group of mutated cats and rats without much explanation.  That Raphael is missing and the ‘cliffhanger’ of Raph coming to Casey’s rescue only have impact if you know the brothers, and know that Raph is quick to anger and etcetera…  In-built audience.  Plus, Dan Duncan’s sketchy art had to yet to hit its beat here, just finding his style for the forms and playing around with some paneling parallels.

So it’s not any of that.  For new readers, it’s nice that the dollar reprints don’t skimp on print or page quality at all, but I’m not sure this would be the key issue to rope in a new fanbase… except that you have to stick with the whole #1 concept… For those who need this issue to fill gaps in collections, I have no idea how much the first ish goes for used, but regardless, obviously a buck is cheap.

What I’m giving the extra star for is for the effect it had on me, a returning reader.  Why did I buy the issue?  I dunno, half collector mentality, but it’s not like I buy both covers of every issue, so… um?  It was cheap?  But re-reading it made me realize how far the series has come, that I’m not making up that it’s developing into one of the best and most balanced Turtles runs yet, despite the somewhat wayward approach taken when it was starting up.  I was just happy to be reading another TMNT series when I went through the first few issues.  Now I actually find myself curious where they’re going to take the story.

So go, support the line, read it again, and remind yourself that just a couple years has allowed for huge leaps forward for IDW Turtles, and that you were lucky that fandom led you to get into a book at ground level that’s turning into a pretty hefty and moody and twisty crime/action/sci-fi tale.