4 out of 5

I think I would likely adore this if I wasn’t… always kind of bitter towards IDW. Like, they have done much for the Turtles franchise; so much that it’s really not comparable to any other run or efforts of other creators – excepting the originators who created the thing and kept it alive, of course. But that’s still where I get mentally stuck, because that undeniable effort firstly isn’t a direct mark of quality – even a short run like Rise has elements I’d rate highly; and something like the 2012 series is an all-timer for me, even if you can summarize that as “one” product versus IDW’s many-tentacled output – and secondly, the immensity of IDW’s Turtles coverage, for highs like reprinting the Image series, has the lows of relatively flooding the market. Accepting that the stuff that brought me into the fandom – the Fred Wolf show – was selling toys and stuffing merch into all aspects of our lives, something about that felt naively more honest than the let’s-take-every-opportunity-to-reprint-something IDWers. Alongside my ongoing complaint that the attempt to “broaden” and “mature” the Turtles book has caused me to put those terms into quotes when it comes to referring to canon IDW stuff.

So for every Urban Legends and Batman mini-series, we get wallet-glutting “Best Ofs” and storylines that have felt rehashed again and again in the exact same way as Marvel and DCs ongoing #1ing that the Turtles stewards have, regrettably, sought to mimic.

Okay! What does that have to do with this book?

Vibes, man. The vibes on this book… are IDW vibes. Not all of the Mirage bits, or and not the Archie bits, and not the Image bits, and not the animated bits – and to be fair that’s the majority of the book! – but yeah, Kevin Eastman’s vibe in the opener is still sorely lacking Peter Laird’s moderation, which has leant the whole enterprise a certain lean from the start, and that pops up periodically throughout, with Erik Burnham’s Saturday Morning Adventures short representative of the irksome nostalgia baiting of IDW, and the closing two bits that take place in the IDW-verse itself as exposition dumpy and repetitive as ever.

See? I’m bitter.

This 40th Anniversary Celebration is really well conceived, and surely well-intentioned. Aside from all that work I’ve already mentioned (or maligned), editor Nicolas Nino and the team went above and beyond to gather folks from the original runs or behind the various Turtles animated series, and had them write / draw some shorts taking place during each era. Sometimes these are meta (like Tristan Jones’ excellent Mirage-era Tales entry); sometimes they’re – as complained about – a bit too steeped in lore to be good for a “celebration,” but I guess that’s in keeping with the style of each universe. So on the whole, the task was: create something representative of what you’re known for, and whether I ended up liking that or not – everyone met the task, supremely well.

If I can sneak in one non-IDW criticism (although in my head it’s still tangential to the vibe): I think putting in a small, sentence-long blurb of context for each entry would’ve gone so far in grounding each. It would’ve explained why they were / are a big deal, or given just the briefest bit of background to set a stage. There was room for the on the opening page, though I appreciate that table of contents (which does point out the “era” each story is from; very cool – thanks, designer Nathan Widick), and the pinups are all pretty badass.

I’m an old, sad Turtles fan. Don’t let me stop you from checking this out.