1 out of 5

No. I’m tired of making exceptions for the IDW Turtles-verse, of taking a “well, I guess people enjoy it…” approach. I don’t enjoy it. I’ve been rating it almost exclusively in comparison to itself, and there have been occasional highlights, for sure, but on the whole, this project doesn’t work for me. You can tell me a story about how Turtles have the spirit of reinvention within their DNA, with Pete and Kev handing over the reigns from the start, but yeah, that’s kinda sorta been exactly the point: instead of embracing the spirit of reinvention, IDW has gone done the DC/Marvel-shaped rabbit hole of trying to make everything connected and event-sized and cross-overed, and they can’t leave well enough alone, and nothing epitomizes that more than the shameful cash grab of The Last Ronin-verse, which took the notoriety of some story scraps from our original TMNT creators and hyping the book up as the last story from Laird, then tying it back into the IDW-verse and just dropping more and more Last Ronin tie-ins, each stupider than the one before. As of this review, supposedly there is to be a “final” installment in the Roninverse, and we’ll just fucking see about that – we’ll see how many director’s cuts of director’s cut issues they release before doing some Roninverse / IDW-verse event and so on.

In “Training Day,” the “present” Turtles offspring are given bookends illustrated by Ben Bishop which have an aged Casey and even aged-ier April training the new foursome, causing April to flash back to a time when she was less aged and Casey was, like, a teenage upstart – mind you they both still look the same – and the latter was being trained by Mr. Last Ronin himself, Michelangelo. …Who then POVs the entirety of the rest of the book, despite this being April’s flashback. Top tier writing.

The Escorza Brothers art this bit, which means that Mike is a ten foot tall giant and everything is Image-comics sized. I don’t dislike the Escorza’s, necessarily, but I tend to find their work somewhat repetitive, layout-wise, which is not helped by the very repetitive writing, which has Mike and Casey trade barbs in a way in which no one talks – no adult, no teen, no millenial, no gen-Xer, no future kid, ever, I promise; only old men trying to talk like younger generations talk this way – while we repeat the 1000x used Turtles trope of one of the boys realizing that their own weakness is reflected in whomever they’re interacting with, i.e. the Raphael one-shot Kev wrote a billion years ago. This, alongside a Fast and the Furious depth of “family” and some pointless relationship drama forms the entirety of the IDW stories.

Inserted into Casey’s / Mike’s “training,” which ends with them – gasp! – both learning a lesson, Freddie E. Williams II arts some relevant flashbacks (Mikey has a two-page daydream in which he learned the exact same lesson he’s teaching Casey OMG mirrors reflecting mirrors forevermore), and Williams does a very strange big-headed chibi thing I’m not sure about.

Luis Antonio Delgado keeps a consistent color palette throughout – which has its pluses and minuses, since the Ronin-verse is very, very brown and red i.e. a bit bland – but I appreciate that they relied on the art styles for distinction and didn’t try to do anything cutesy with the colors as well. To spread the criticism around, though, whomever decided to stick with the angular word balloons for all of Ronin… stop it. It doesn’t make sense, tonally. Whether or not that was letterer Shawn Lee, there were several sequences I read out of order to which I’ll look their way for blame, though that is also partially on Escorza for doing random horizontal two-page layouts without clear visual indications.

I quit IDW at issue #50. I bought trades to stay in the game, and was kind of intrigued by Sophie Campbell’s restart enough to dive back in to what was happening (that’d be about 50 issues later), only to find that it was… all the same stuff, to the extent that I swear it was the same goddamned storyline being dragged out from the 50 issues prior. Last Ronin brought me back once more, immediately burning me with pointless spin-offs – this counts, as there is not one single thing of character or plot importance that happens in this issue (mentioning “remember when we trained together?” with an asterisk 100 issues later won’t do it, y’all) – and then Jason Aaron’s run got me again, only to underline how I think IDW is just going to prevent these books from ever feeling like the real thing again, because… it’s all a business now. Now matter how much of a fan any given writer or artist is, that spirit of reinvention is not just the spirit of reinvention – it’s to slap a new #1 on there and get suckers like me reading again.

No.