2 out of 5

It’s probably time to lay this concept to rest.

The first Bats / TMNT crossover: pure joy.  Yes, also pure fan-service, but it provided this service in a way that served the story and made it fun to read, all the nostalgia nods aside.  The second one eked out a good book, despite cracks in the formula definitely showing.  But this outing, unfortunately, became rather a slog, both art and story, neither offering much to goggle at or over, with visual overload affecting the former and an idea that was sort of tired as soon as it was introduced affecting the latter.

B/TMNT III, having done the “Turtles visit Batman’s world” and “Batman visits the TMNT’s world” already, does the kinda logical next step by combining the worlds.  As we soon find out, a bad guy is up to multiverse messings, and has determined (in some lovingly loopy bad guy logic) that combining these two particular worlds will result in something something world domination.  It’s fine that it doesn’t really make sense; it’s a kooky plot borne of classic comics and morning cartoons.  So we get a plane of existence in which Splinter raised both an orphaned Bruce Wayne and the Turtles as his sons, and they all fight a Joker / Shredder mash-up together.  I’ll give it to Tynion, that this isn’t a bad pitch, but instead of focusing on exploring this world of mash-ups, as soon as we get rolling, a black-and-white, Eastman-drawn iteration of Raphael pops up to let us know about the above-mentioned multiverse problems.  Cool!  …Except we have seen this gimmick on multiple TMNT cartoons already.  Doing it in comics is novel, but it automatically shifts the series from a fun sense of discovery and exploration to a very limited ‘fight the bad guy’ scenario.

Freddie E. Williams II packs the pages… but rather to the series’ detriment.  We’re so cluttered with characters so quickly, and Williams has a tendency to flatten the perspective – bringing background elements into the fore by implying depth but then not actually treating the space realistically – such that pages are just a swirling collage of linework that your eyes soon stop reading.  It definitely makes for impressive pin-ups, and that flattening is a good skill when it’s not noticeable, but it cropped up so often here (due to the excessive “always on” nature of the story) that it became distracting.  Combined with the comic shorthand for multiverse problems – the sky is always a blurry red, casting a red light onto everything – and we even lose the dynamics of shading and coloring.  It’s just too much.

Extend this to the story, which then gives all of its many, many characters the opportunity to over-explain things, and I just sort of wanted the story to end.  Each “cliffhanger” is anything but, introducing a new character who we’ve already sort of seen – hey, look, it’s Shredder, who’s also confusingly mashed-up with Joker – leading to an incredibly senseless and confusing bid to separate / combine the universes.

Are there still ideas to extend this franchise?  I’m sure.  But not every universe crossover has to be a world-ending one; taking a lower key approach to things might allow us to enjoy the concept a bit more, and give the artists / colorists room to breathe on the page.