3 out of 5

Ay-yup.

Back when I was a youngster, I loved Milton Knight’s issue of Mighty Mouse.  The script on that helped, but Knight’s bizarro over-the-top style really nailed the 4th wall breaking plot.  While the plot of TMNTA Special #4 ain’t exactly normal – Christopher Columbus’ brother, Louie, runs a transdimensional farm that he keeps meticulously clean and that appears in Times Square every 100 years – it’s also not the kind of ante up to the ongoing story that the Mighty Mouse issue was; it’s just strange and goofy.

Which, of course, isn’t a bad thing, and Knight’s insanely distorted visuals and his wonderfully thick ink line make this, then and now, a really rich bunch of wild images to flip through.  The script from Robert Loren Fleming is reminiscent of his Ambush Bug years, with bits that pretend to be puns forced upon us, pausing for half-realized punchlines, and a story that seems to have happened only to justify the title ‘Louie’s Pasture;’ any time things seem to find a direction to pursue, Fleming abandons it for another yuk.  We get some new mutants (because apparently mutagen forever infests NY’s sewers) and Cudley Cowlick, but really, even actually reading this thing, I’m hardly invested – I’m just tittering at Knight’s stretchy, malmorphed, pudgy figures.  If you’re not against radically varying takes on the TMNT, the art definitely makes it worthwhile; words are optional.