3 out of 5

Oh, Dooney.  This is pretty standard Dooney fair – light-hearted action with bubbly muscley characters and odd framing (characters butting up against one another in juxtaposed foreground / background shots), but its nice to see Mike’s work so clean and the format is unique enough to make it a fun addition to your Turtles stuff.

A ‘graphic novel’ with six chapters – a brief review of the boys’ origin, and then one chapter each dedicated to Splinter and our four mutants.  One of the rewarding things about Dooney’s Gizmo book was that that was his character, and so it matched Mike’s goofy scripting style to a T.  Because he has some cool ideas – evidenced as well by his ‘Xenotech’ title – he just seems to have a dash of impatience when drawing and scripting that makes everything slightly off.  So the more comfortable he is with the subject, the better off the final product.  Doones if comfy with the Turtles, of course, but they’re not his property, and not many people are great at finding a good balance of making the boys individuals without turning them into one note party boy / angry guy / leader guy / smart guy.  Which means that the Turtles in each of these short tales could be switched around to pretty much any effect.

That doesn’t distill the simple fun of it.  The Splinter story is a kick, actually, seeing the master beat up on his student, and the Raphael story takes a silly turn that’s totally Archie Comics Dooney.  Look around and you’ll see a lot of missing limbs or questionable anatomy, but there’s an energy to Mike’s drawing that just sorta makes it fun to look at, and it’s inked cleaner here and produced on nice white paper stock so that it looks so much brighter than the ‘dusty’ printing style of other Mirage books or the flat computer-colored stuff of his color work from the 90s – 00s.

So don’t pay a million bucks for this, but the digest-size and cheeky feel of the thing make it a nice read to satisfy, temporarily, your turtle needs.