4 crampons out of 5

I know, I know, I too thought this would be a shoe-in for 5 crampons, but there’s something that feels just a little lackluster about this collection.  As with other Turtles reprints, you can’t really cover the stories themselves so much as the presentation, and the value of what is in the collection.

Now this was put out by Heavy Metal prior to the IDW reboots, so perhaps the bar has been set pretty high in retrospect, as IDW is really knocking it outta’ the park in terms of production quality.  Now, I realize that there was a hardcover version of this, and it was limited, so I can’t knock only being able to find the softcover version.  But we will knock the first umimpressive piece of this, which is the lack of a new cover.  Perhaps I’m spoiled by owning the originals, but 25th was released with a few different covers, and besides imposing the title “TMNT 25th” somewhere on the book, the covers are just from the first few issues of the original series.  It’s great stuff – I have a nice Corben cover, for example – but it’s the same color/painted quality as my original, so, thanks for the memories.

But the book is magazine sized, and the interiors have been cleaned up quite nicely, so we have larger, glossy-paged reprints of some Kevin Eastman picks.

Eastman only?  Yeah.  I guess Peter had already migrated away from the book by this point.  I don’t believe there’s bad blood between the two, so it’s weird that it was Peter solo running the empire for however many years, with it sort of seeming like Eastman had lost interest, but then as soon as Peter finally sold the rights, Kevin has been back on board, putting his name on this collection and co-scripting / writing the IDW series.  Kev naturally picks mostly Raphael stories (Eastman seems to lean toward the more action-intense, violent aspect of the turtles, Raphael’s aggression being a good match) and it’s a pretty well balanced collection of one-offs from the regular series and some shorts from the random Turtles books from the Mirage years, but nothing that seems pulled from any truly obscure archive.  Again though, I’m spoiled, because I’ve been tracking down this stuff for a while.  In terms of extras, we get a brief blurb from Eastman at the outset and then a collection of covers for the issues involved, along with some shots of random pin-ups or art, some of which I haven’t seen before, so that’s cool.

It’s well-priced for a big-sized book that is packed with stories, if a little trim on presentation and extras.  The art is clean but lacks the color pop of the IDW stuff (even when they’re printing black and white, the contrast is bolder), and the binding feels a little questionable, like these pages might fall out in a few years, but still, this was before we knew about all the goodness to come.  Alas and alack, this means that now I’d save your money for the IDW stuff if you’re intent on reading the back catalogue, but this is a nice little mix of long stories and shorts (with that Raphael lean) which would work as a standalone gift for a fledgling Turtles fan.