2 out of 5

With sincere apologies to writer Kenny Porter, this is very close to being the equivalent of comic book slop. Annuals are always hard, because unless you’re committed to using them as setup for another storyline, they are tangential: they’re a weird, money-grabbing comic book notion that sometimes offer the opportunities for fun one-offs, but more often just become very unrequired extras that are given the unfortunate framework of needing to tie into continuity but not change anything. That’s compounded when you have changeups in the creative teams on either side of your annual, making it less likely you can do anything of consequence, lest you change an outgoing piece that’s needed for the next person.

So, with sincere apologies to Kenny Porter, who was likely dealt a bad hand, but nonetheless: this issue was a rough one.

Situated post Jason Aaron’s soft reboot 12-issue run, the 2025 annual is one of those “let’s catch up on some other stuff that happened in the last year” annuals, that gets a good gag out of that structure – you have four turtles’ stories to tell, and Raphael’s is humorously brief – but rather flubs the other two tales.

Er, wait, two? Yeah, that’s the big imbalance of this: Mike’s story is an interesting concept that uses what could be a twist up front, making the rest of it centered around an intended emotional payoff that doesn’t connect well with the initial tone; Raph’s story is a two-pager; and then we dive into Leo’s oh so serious story for the remainder of the book, and this thing hardly holds together. Between Mike’s and Leo’s, you get the high level pitch Porter was aiming for – mostly because it’s spelled out as loud as possible – but it’s like he retrofitted two unrelated stories onto that pitch, making a lot of the dialogue clunky as heck.

On the art side, Michael Shelfer has – at times – a loose, hashed and heavy style that positively reminds me of James Harren, but it’s also wildly inconsistent in that application. Character models and inking styles – noting there’s an additional inker here, Maria Keane – keep shifting, making the tone vary undesirably between comedic and dramatic, and Shelfer is just a bit too lose with geography for the action or talking scenes to feel concrete enough.