2 out of 5

The Saturday Morning Adventures tonal juggling that Eric Burnham attempts – mimicking the show’s generally harmless vibe and 4th wall awareness with some modern lamp-shaded nostalgia – falters in this special, leading to the issue feeling more like a YA template (i.e. insert forced pun here), and relying on things self-resolving in a way that comes across as unmotivating as opposed to clever.

Our first story is an excuse to include Ace Duck: happenstances in the main series provide for dimensional shenanigans, and April gets ported to an Indiana Jones dimension where the population are fowl. She joins up with Ace to find a treasure MacGuffin (okay, there’s a character named Mcguffin, so points there), in exchange for some way to get home. This is all plausible setup, but again, Burnham underlines a few times that this stuff will self-resolve, and that further underlines the way everything (every joke) is overly telegraphed. Sarah Myer’s characters are again very expressive, and on-model while allowing the artist their own flair, but Burnham’s big action sequences still elude the artist, often cropping the frame to avoid dealing with much of it, but also then undermining the intensity.

Jack Lawrence arts on the backup, which is a “meanwhile” involving Mona Lisa and Raph and Mike. Lawrence has kind of “squishier” characters, which I enjoy – it’s a very modern cartoon look that syncs well with the SMA turtles. Burnham gives the artist a lot of talking heads, though, which highlights the churn we’re getting to justify the plot diversion. It works, just clunkily. Unfortunately, when we get to the main set piece – a big robot – Lawrence doesn’t do much with the design. It’s understandable to keep it simple if you’re drawing it multiple time, though it also could’ve been a nice showpiece.

Nothing egregiously bad, but the April Special is one of those one-shots where it’s not clear  – except to fill schedule gaps –  why it was needed.