2 out of 5

Okay, I can kinda get the premise here, doing an “event” with all of your Saturday morning cartoon-inspired books that seemingly just gets the characters out of their respective homes and to some lazy summer type setting. The Saturday Morning Adventures TMNT series lends itself to that especially well, taking place in the Fred Wolf-verse of the Turtles, whose later years had many episodes with any excuse to transport the boys to whatever bottle-episode locale, so pitching them as bored and going to the carnival… sure. And while any given Fred Wolf ep had the boys squaring off against a dumb Krang plot – which happens here – I’m not thinking we consider a good chunk of those episodes as more than distractions, i.e. not necessarily “good.” Dave Baker’s Endless Summer one-shot kind of falls into that camp, clunkily getting us to the carnival – Michelangelo experiences malaise; the others seek to cheer him up – and clunkily inserting Krang into the mix – the brain’s plot to use the carnival rides to power his gear is fairly inspired, but discovering his underground lair is accomplished without any real build-up – and Tango’s puffy artwork isn’t great at nailing the beats to paper over the gaps in the story.

On both accounts, the vibe is there, just very imperfect. Baker is writing some attempted middleground between playing to adult readers familiar with the Wolf stuff (references and puns for an older crowd) and the kids to whom it was originally targeted; Tango’s got the goofy models down pat, and I appreciate the “floaty” feel of the animation, but the book does require some sense of space and place that’s never well established.

Xenon Honchar’s colorwork is solid, balancing some modern touches with the bright palette of yore, and bonus points for putting a lil hat on Krang.