3 out of 5

Oh, okay, I get the twist now: The IDW TMNT universe is an elseworld in which the most evolved logical reasoning and emotional comprehension are of that of a three year old.  Nice!  This completely justifies all the mind-bogglingly dumb operatic decisions everyone – everyone – in the series makes, as well as the non-sensical, in-high-school-I-thought-this-vocab-sounded-pretty-slick pontificating that characters employ during their common (and commonly pointless) exposition dumps, and also the mopey he-said she-said motivations for, like, ninja stuff and world domination stuff.  What a wild twist!

In case the sarcasm isn’t coming through, I am down on this current run of the Turtles.  I wish I wasn’t.  I should be happy that it’s part of the current interest in the boys, and that there’s been a consistent TMNT book on the shelves for a few years now, but the unfortunate truth is that if the Turtles weren’t one of my devotee vices, I would have dropped this title long ago.  So I have to adjust my standards: I’m not going to tell you that the Mirage / Archie runs were the best writing ever, but there was almost always something slightly unique and goofy about the formula that kept it feeling like The Turtles.  And that’s… gone.  I dont know if it was ever there at IDW, to be honest.  The adjustment is that this book might as well be any top shelf Marvel or DC book at this point, with soap opera plot machinations, exchangeable villains, and one-dimensional cut-and-paste characters.  Everyone now and then it hits on something good – and these issues it hit that something a couple of times – but inevitably it goes back to being dumb cookie cutter crap.  So I guess I’ve gotta rate it on that level to be fair.

Issues 61 – 64 find us exploring a post-Shredder Foot Clan and New York, with Splinter leading things and the brothers a little undecided over how to feel about these changes.  This is a good direction to go (maybe some slight plotting nods to both the Image era and Mirage volume 4), and Waltz and crew find some value there, with Mikey’s sober response to things and Splinter’s need to assert control over what’s now a much larger family.  That value is often squashed by cheesy writing – perpetually overwrought, as I’ve snarked at above – that leads to completely facile justifications for things, including the “reveal” of Splinter’s motivations at the end of the arc.  These details come from good places, but the execution generally leaves me wanting.  There was an iota of self-awareness / lamp-shading this time around, though, which felt good; I hope Waltz can continue to smooth things out so we get to a point where the lampshading isn’t required.

The biggest highlight, for me, is artist Dave Wachter’s take on the foursome.  Initially clunky, he took some notes from Santolouco’s leaner character models and completely cycled it through his own style, which is much weightier than any artist we’ve seen on the book yet.  Its a look that matches the intended maturity of the series, much more than Santolouco’s overly innocent looking characters (an attempt to make them teenage-age appropriate that ends up looking either too gaudy or too cute for my tastes).  His thick linework and sense of space / pacing makes his sparser backgrounds completely acceptable, giving colorist Ronda Pattinson a chance to work some splash color magic that works with Watcher’s darker tone really well.  And his painted, moody covers were some of the best this series has seen.  While I’d hem or haw over whether to try to perfect the more dour storytelling or switch over to Bebop & Rocksteady Destroy Everything madness (which I thought was perfect), if they went down the former road, I’d love to have Wachter on board shaping things along the way.

Thus: By my new, lowered standards, this was an okay arc.  I’m glad we stayed away from most of the melodrama to try out some new villains (the Street Phantoms weren’t threatening, but I liked the low stakes feeling of it), but there’s way too much over-explaining / plotting in this book that undermines some of its more original decisions.