3 out of 5

I initially went looking for some narrative that proved that writer Jason Aaron had had his TMNT run cut short, given how sharp a drop-off in storytelling there is from his first arc to this one, but no: this had been announced as a 12-issue run from that start. Standing back to view the whole thing from afar, the “drop-off” is more understandable, as it’s more that Aaron got to work some magic in his kickoff issues, rescuing the TMNT from the narrative Hell of the preceding IDW eras, and then had to sigh and do the normal comic book nonsense of introducing a dumb new villain and not really changing anything. The wrinkle is that there are four turtles, so when you do your fun reboot bit, you can spread that out over four issues, which he did, and that’s obviously a significant part of a six-issue arc, giving you a win by percentages.

The rest of this is very by the books. Which doesn’t have to be bad – Aaron inserts some nice tweaks to the TMNT formulas – but I was also really surprised at how lazy some dialogue / setups were, and how little the writer followed up on some of those setups. That’s why there’s the promising diversion of blaming this on being a shortened run: there are good ideas that seemingly go nowhere, or are wrapped up with the littlest consequence. (And these are not ideas that would carry over for another writer.)

We do still have Juan Ferreyra on art, though you really can’t carry a book on visuals alone, and – yeah, I’m gonna get cranky even here – I tired of artists who go crazy with page design when it doesn’t really enhance the story. Like I get that that’s the job of comic artists in a very simplified fashion, to make things look good, but if you’re taking a standard sequence – and even a fight can be a standard sequence – and doing wild geometric designs and panel arrangements, it enforces drama and focus onto panels that may not be supported by the story. Very possibly this was in Jason’s script, but if so, the argument is the same: have a reason for making things look a certain way beyond “make it look cool.” If every page is made to look cool, it loses effectiveness.

Dialing back on that a bit, and being somewhat contradictory, the art is a reason to read this. The Turtles do look cool, undeniably, and Aaron’s initial pitch of putting the Turtles on different social tracks gives Juan a lot to lean in to to differentiate how they look and act, and he sticks to that. And also dialing back on the story criticism, top down, it’s… fine. It’s very much a bad-guy-of-the-week thing, stretched out to eight issues, minusing the four intro issues for each turtle. But it is thus absolutely not the gamechanger suggested by those intros.

In NYC vs. TMNT, Hale amps up his war against muties in a really toothless ICE parallel (this was written in 2024 / 2025, if you’re reading this in the future…), made more toothless by how completely, cartoonishly villainous Hale is – which still qualifies as commentary on current politics, it’s just surface level, and doesn’t accomplish anything beyond pointing a finger at clearly bad folks – and the Turtles have to figure out how to fight together again if they’re going to get the public back on their side and topple their enemy. April gets a cameo with A. some of the most cringey dialogue B. a really cool costume / cover and then C. cheap deus ex machina deployment, and Aaron confesses he didn’t do any research for a court scene beyond having watched some Perry Mason episodes at some point. Also: Karai exists.

Stuck in the middle of any previous IDW run, all of this would be fine, and actually hit above average, since Aaron at least remains 95% focused on his story (IDW previously is like 95% setup for a side story or the next arc) and doesn’t cloud pages with excessive dialogue, but the fact that the back half of this arc would easily feel at home between past arcs tells you quite a bit about its quality and impact.