5 out of 5

Yes, yes, maybe taking a full stop-by-stop world tour with the Turtles will end up stretching the attention span of our younger audience… so let’s use a transdimensional cowlick to jump back to New York.

Or not, as Cudley implies Stump and Sling, and sure enough, the boys (and Splinter, and Ninjara) are only granted their ticket home if they agree to another wrestling bout.

Clarrain uses a fun fan-service call-back to bring things together pretty successfully – introducing Splinter and Ninjara to outer-space hijinks, having a moment to try and address the latter’s rather sudden bad guy/good guy flip-flopping – and to give the TMNT some stakes-free chances to duke it out, which, contextually, works, because we’re inbetween a whole bunch of other stakes-filled battles in preceding and upcoming issues.  Peter Laird’s excellent cover spotlights how Dean and Chris Allan make sure to give each Turtle a moment in the sun, and the reappearance of our Stump wrestlers is full of quirkiness.  The stinger of the final wrestler – El Mysterioso – is also amusing.

This is one of those five-starers that there just ain’t nothin’ wrong with.