2 out of 5

Yaay, mopey stuff.  Northampton is, uh, pretty cheesey and overwrought.  It looks pretty, thanks to Ross Campbell’s lush backgrounds and soft and friendly Turtles, but though the freedom of style is sincerely appreciated (editor Curnow speaks to this in issues #32’s backmatter), the after effects of City At War would have been more felt had our leads bean juxtaposed in some way with the naturalistic setting of April’s family farm.  His bubble-faced teens also makes the battle in the last issue a tough sell – everything’s been so tame and weepy that the transition doesn’t work.  But this isn’t helped much by the script, as this plot piece – another Shredder mutant goon has tracked the boys’ escape – feels stuffed in there just to add in some action and to prove that the IDW run is different from the original.  But, I mean, that’s why the original Northampton worked – because it was a full stop after twelve or whatever issues of aliens and ninja.  And let’s be frank – Waltz and Eastman are chock full of IDEAS, but the actual dialogue works best when things are moving at a nice clip.  When we’ve slowed down for more emotionally driven moments, the words just don’t hold up very well because… they’re not all that interesting.  April’s family fares better – meeting mom and dad adds a nice touch of personality to April, showing us where her independence comes from – and Campbell draws the teen Ms. O’Neil with believable hips and the elder with rather remarkably realistic proportions and features.  The humans look great.  As with the Turtles piece in things, the tail end of the family storyline feels rushed for no good reason; who knows if that will come back around or not, but Mom and Dad O’Neil handle mutants and ooze rather well, and make some pretty massive decisions without much consideration.

There are the shoutouts to previous incarnations in our Casey-in-the-garage scene and the burbling romance between Aloplex (standing in for Ninjara) and Raphael, but the whole folksy feeling of the Mirage and original movie Northampton sequences doesn’t have any room to grow here, and trying to develop Aloplex at the same time as recovering Leo is just too much for our writers to handle, resulting in both plot parts evolving a bit too easily.

And jumping back to Ross, and perhaps colorist Ronda Pattison – I just didn’t dig the liberties taken with Leo and Aloplex’s bandages – jumping from gray to black to show us when they’re good or bad.  It could be seen as a ‘subtle’ creative liberty, but it just felt dumb to me.  I already have trouble swallowing how many bandages all these dudes wear – like how long does it take to wrap that shit – so it stuck out that they’d taken the time to swap out colors for their moods.  Womp womp.

So the main sell here is Campbell, but mostly from afar.  Close enough to match the pictures to words and the effect suffers.  ‘Northampton’ should have been – wanted to be – a deeper emotional storyline to balance out the fairly epic City at War, but for as uncompressed as the Turtles team made the last arc, this one was surprisingly shorted, and thus ends up mostly as a shuffle just to get the guys back closer to the action.