3 out of 5

Spoiler: this is an absurd and amazing amount of effort – as written by Patrick Ehlers, designed by Shawn Lee, and edited by Alonzo Simon, standing atop the work of all the various writers and artists that’ve fluttered through IDW’s 150+ issue TMNT run and growing – and I’m going to pish-posh on it a bit for very subjective reasons that kind’ve just serve as my response to the question of: “What is a sourcebook?”

So let’s talk about that.

Admittedly, a sourcebook to me may be something different to you, but at a high level – it is complementary to the main material. Occasionally this can be a compendium of events, but I’d often see that as not a sourcebook – like Spider-Man Saga, for example, to which I’d say these 100-page four issues are comparable. For RPGs, which I most associate with this concept in media, they’re… extras. Extra tales atop the base. And then more technically, a sourcebook can be a primer to something, like a way to catch up before diving into a more complex or advanced version of the topic. In comics specifically, I’ve seen titles do sourcebooks in the RPG vein, but more often I feel like I’ve seen this as a combo of the primer plus character summaries, which are very much primer material as well.

The IDW TMNT Sourcebook, meanwhile, reminds me exactly of how I feel about the IDW run in general: IT’S TOO MUCH OF EVERYTHING AT ONCE. I realize the fact that I’m a bit negative on IDW’s take might be influencing me here, but I was really looking forward to using these sourcebooks as, y’know, a primer, to reignite my interest in the series / keep me apprised as a card-carrying TMNTer, and upon discovering that the books were going to be dense explanations of everything that’s happened in the series alongside character bios… I mean, that was maybe even better, as I’d get the full download. But I was having a lot of trouble reading the damn things.

Because they are too much of everything at once. Take all the variations of sourcebooks I mentioned, and put them all together. And loosely group them by topic, which breaks the chronology, and which causes repetition across bios, and repeating vignettes even within individual issues that hop back and forth in the timeline, such that reading them to catch up on characters isn’t directly helpful – these are half-written as bios, half-written as plot summaries – and reading them to catch up on storylines is batshit crazy, because you’re getting snippets out of order, and only if you’d read the original tales and know what to look for can you really navigate it.

…Even then, things are not alphabetical, and there’s no index, and you have to read to the end of the foreword of each issue to know what that book’s focus is – the covers aren’t synced up with the focus, fun stuff – so good luck finding much of anything.

It’s just information overload. Cool if you’re already in the mix, I’m sure, and probably works if you’re down the IDW soap opera, so many words later, I’ll cop to my bias definitely affecting my take.

However, I want to double back and underline how much effort went in to summarizing all of this material, and that it’s really well written given that scope – with only the most minor of typos, like less than a standard 22-page comic, or standard full length book, for sure! – and even if I would’ve wanted the QOL stuff like an index, the arrangement of text + choice of images (and creator credits for each image) and overall consistency of design are really, really well done.