2 out of 5

An “enthusiast” remake of the Man-Ray introducing TMNTA #5, as produced by Russian imprint Turtles Club.

Turtles Club does a lot of awesome for the TMNT community. Years before we had IDW scavenging odds and ends for reprinting material, the Turtles Club crew (or their formative state) were making fan comics – with big name Mirage crew support – to close out storylines from the original books, or Adventures, or Image. This has grown to have some wild reach, giving us the UK Hero Turtles books and Italian comics (translated to English!) plus oddities like… this one: a re-do of a pretty classic book from the old-school Fred Wolf animated series spin-off.

Which has elicited a question you probably don’t want your remake to elicit: Why? I really can’t figure this one out, except that maybe the book made an impact on “Endname45” when they first read it… so the wanted to draw their own? There are definitely some changes from the original story, but nothing that substantially – or even insubstantially, really – changes the story: the guy who becomes Man-Ray is a little different; some scenes happen in a slightly different sequence; the Turtles aren’t as pizza crazy; and yeah, there are a couple swear words, but pretty innocuous stuff. So, like, this isn’t revisionist or an adult / matured take, it truly just reads like someone wanted to remake the issue, and add a couple more panels of the Turtles in human clothes and fighting Bebop and Rocksteady.

The art can be fun (there’s a very over-the-top animation to it but blended with overly detailed faces and bulbous musculature that’s all kind of Ed Piskor-y blended with Kelley Jones and, like, Mateus Santolouco’s TMNT designs…) but the translation (Alexandr Nikitin) is unfortunately pretty clunky, and some decisions in reordering the sequence of events makes, hm, not much sense.

Lastly, I’m super sorry, but Man-Ray’s design pales in comparison to the original. Shoot.

I appreciate the effort, and it’s cool Turtles Club gave Endname45 an avenue for exploring this, but: Why?