3 out of 5

I think my main disappointment with the IDW TMNT series is the tone.  It swings between melodrama and embarrassingly cheesy humor; not cheeky humor, like the main Mirage guys tended to write, but actual attempts at yuks that are either completely senseless – puns or one-liners that don’t quite sync up to the scene – or like the kind of jokes that you overhear teenagers telling one another i.e. not funny and generally uninspired.  Part of this is, I think, because the writers – or Waltz, since he scripts over the trios’ story – isn’t that funny, and then part of it is the weird hole the IDW series has written itself into, needing to up the ante continually.  It has to be top of its game because its been successful… something of an ultimate curse, having attracted attention of TMNT fans from several eras plus new ones and burst out of the niche the last iteration catered to…  And so everything has this sort of artificial gloss to it.  I don’t envy the task of working on the title, because, in my reading, there’s really not a clear way out of that mess once you’re in it.  So we’ll continue to get excessive references and forced drama and Turtle-isms that will continue to feel like “because that’s what we have to write” versus something closer to distilled fandom.

(Not to suggest the creative team aren’t fans…)

One solution to this, though, are short and sweet storylines.  You don’t have to go massive; not everything has to be a crazy dramatic or emotional payoff.  Mikey taking a break to chill with the Mutanimals fits the bill nicely.  Issue 53 has to keep a couple of the other plotlines rolling – Casey and April, primarily – filling our melodrama quota, and issue 54 loses itself in some schmaltzy moralizing with Hun /Hon and some of the aforementioned stupid one-liners during the fights, but the pages in between are pretty well-rounded fun, dotted with enough comic logic to lead Mike back home.  And its during those between moments that I remember that there was a point when I was really enjoying the IDW run: when its action and intrigue felt balanced between homegrown and homage, and the character interactions allowed in just enough flexibility to not have to toe the “Donnie’s the smart one; Raph’s the hot-headed one…” party line.  So it’s definitely possible to hit those notes, and I am glad they’ve “rebooted” things as of late with the Foot leadership angle.  And now Mikey’s mopey times are past, so these issues do put us in a good place to move forward.

On the art tip, would love to see Michael Dialynas return.  All of the characters had a lot of personality and didn’t look too cutesy (Campbell) or too diminutive (Santoluco’s version of Mikey, blech), and his thick-lined expressiveness reminded me, interestingly, of Doug TenNapel, which is cool in my book.  April also looked suuuper doughty, which I though was great.  April occupies a strange role in the book, and though her dialogue portion mined the stupid Casey relationship nonsense (I prefer the TV show’s more independent treatment of April), seeing her drawn as truly a regular looking girl felt right, and sort of truer to the humdrum nature of the title.

50 plus issues of ongoing storyline, though.  While IDW is hitting my pockets hard, this is still a fun time to be a Turtles fan.