3 out of 5

Raph and Ninjara go on some dates; Michael Gaydos biffs some potentially awesome action.

Bookending things, Bill Fitts and penciller Dan Seneres have Raph and Ninjara on some downtime in two separate stories.  In Fox Trap, they go on a hike, then have to rescue Ninjara’s brother, Naga, from some trappers.  In A Perfect Evening, a date night is continually ‘ruined’ by interrupting poor weather, a lost cat, and some robbers.  In both cases, things bring our dating duo closer together nonetheless.

These are pleasantly distracting tales.  The figures have the kind of bulbous look of Fitts’ pencils (he did layouts on Fox Trap), with Seneres giving everyone a pretty rich set of expressions, and a slightly Looney Tunes sense of animation.

When things start off in John Gentile’s / Michael Gaydos’ Zen Million Years To Birth, it’s both a good potential story setup – Splinter taking the boys to the desert to refocus their training – and Gaydos’ art looks bad ass.  It’s an original, grounded take on the Turtles, years beyond his previous outings, and suggests something more in the vein of Mirage guest issues.   When they get to the desert, though, things fall apart.  Gentile’s story has a bunch of cues involving a ‘cactus thief’ and a relic the boys discover and, eventually, some mutant creepos, and none of these cues come across in the story at all.  The action is unintelligible and flat, making the conflict extremely disappointing, almost comically so.  It’s as though whatever time Gaydos was allotted he spent on the opening pages, then realized he was out of time and rushed through the rest.  Or maybe Gentile’s script was truly unillustrateable, I dunno, but it reads like there should be some cool ideas we just don’t see.