4 out of 5

Time traveling turtles ain’t a new concept in the TMNT universe, but it’s mostly appeared on the fringes, as Tales-type one-offs or stories that are hard to pinpoint whether or not they’re canon.  The Archie series, of course, has some much-loved future iterations of the boys, and we fans will forever pester whoever’s publishing the current incarnation to give us the Future War storyline until it actually happens.  So props to IDW for not only rolling this into the full storyline, but for also giving us a structure that allowed the boys to go both backwards and forwards in time, so we get, y’know, Raphael wearing a pirate eye-patch and stuff.  At the same time, the series is a little imbalanced between yuks and darkness, and it’s funny but unavoidable how we can separate the past into three books – dinosaurs, pirates, and samurai – but in time travel, the future is always just the future.  It doesn’t seem as compelling to chop up what’s to come into “5 years from now,” “15 years from now,” and etc., so you just flash-forward the onetime.  But since the future is when all of the ramifications should be evident, it actually deserves equal or more story-telling space…  Though perhaps I’m just projecting my disappointment that we didn’t see any future Archie Turtles references.  Come on.

Allor writes ish’s 1 and 4, Burnham 2 and 3.  Allor swings both the lightest – issue 1 – and darkest – 4 – of the mini, whereas Burnham’s middle books appropriately toe the middleground, although issue #2 gets stumped with resolving things in time since the boys find themselves interacting with their younger, human selves and Leo has a “should I kill Hitler when he was a baby?” time travel conundrum regarding the Shredder.  It’s sensible, but like the future issue, a lot to chew on in one book.  The series is at its best when it gives us bite-sized, era-only fun that inadvertently ties into current events.

Ross Campbell gives us our big, bubbly Turtles in the super fun opening book, with gloriously poppy colors by Sixth Gunner Bill Crabtree.  Allor drops us right into a dinosaur chase, then later Renet pops up (lazily introduced in the Annual by Eastman) and explains that the time-rod thingy is on the fritz, which is the only explanation we ever get and really… all we need.  C.P. Wilson III illustrates the Samurai-era book; although I found his squiggly lined style and old-man lookin’ Turtles off-putting, especially as it differs from most of the IDW artists we’ve seen up to this point, after I bit I started to see a visual kinship with Jim Lawson, and, well, that’s absolutely fine by me.  Jeremy Mohler nails the period colors.  Only nit here is that the Turtles use masks to obscure themselves from their human versions, and sometimes the masks are on, sometimes they aren’t, so…  Art problem?  Script problem?  Maybe they weren’t actually using the masks to keep their identities hidden?  I don’t know things.  Ben Bates does our piratey issue #3, which echoed the recent Dimension X TV episode as Mikey ends up taking the reigns for the issue.  Bates’ work is probably the most bland out of what the mini offers, but his water-color and heavy use of white approach did lend itself well to the period.  Lastly, Dan Duncan on book 4; Duncan’s style has cleaned up immensely since he started on the IDW book.  While he still often drops us on a flat background, his panels are super dynamic and colorist Ronda Pattison makes sure those flat backgrounds still pop.

The series ends on a surprisingly dark, but mature, note.  I do appreciate that IDW has attempted to keep several tones running throughout the series, but the issue-by-issue setup of this series would’ve probably worked just a tad better by keeping it lighter – like issues 1 and 3 – throughout.  Still, Turtles in Time is a lot of fun.  On the one hand, you could consider this another keep-’em-comin’ money grab, but I prefer to see the continual fleshing out of our modern TMNT world as evidence of how much fun our creators are having with enriching the universe they’ve been building.