4 out of 5

Well, we’re here: the Future Shark trilogy.  As remarked over in the much more thorough, much more interesting, much better written reviews at TMNT Entity, it’s hard to express – in isolation – how this read at the time.  I’m not generally in favor of rating something based on that context, so it’s good re-experiencing this, years later, and seeing that it’s still pretty clear that this was a step toward / into something different, even with the improvements Dean Clarrain and Chris Allan had been making on the title for the couple dozen issues leading up to these.

But I still can’t express how mind-blowing this stuff was to a kid reading what he knew to be a “kid’s” book; that his grandfather bought for him alongside Archies, under the Archie publishing banner, and generally assuming the contents were gonna be goofy.  Fine, yes: still goofy from a certain perspective, but man was this stuff cool and risque to have leapt from Fred Wolf roots.  I had Batman books and the like that had their share of violence and PG swears, so it wasn’t that I’d never seen it before, but it was weird not having any TMNT loving friends at the time that I could trade issues back and forth with, eyes bulging at the sudden use of the word ‘hell;’ at references to mortality – a discussion concerning love, and future generations being a bum deal when you’re the last members of your ‘race’ and you’re all male – at panels featuring blood burbling from an empty eye socket, and a mutant cat digging around in his own brain.  Sure, the images aren’t nearly explicit as all that, but my kid brain was filling in details.  This was gritty stuff, making that battle with Armaggon in a giant mech suit all the more thrilling; the timey-wimey stuff all the more fascinating and weird.  And Allan, man, just getting better and better, with the colors (Barry Grossman) and inks (Brian Thomas) all making this look much closer to something mixed in with X mutants than something published by the imprint (at that point) known for its peachy keen namesake title and, like, Sonic, although the scanned-in quality of these trades undermines the crispness (and thus the impact) of some of the images.

So, yeah, its great reading this stuff under one roof, and even though the kinda stretched-out intro of Armaggon in Mutanimals #7 doesn’t tonally match with the trilogy, having it altogether is ideal.  That still leaves us with an odd man out, though, which goes to issue #41, which likely was a fill in, scrapped from earlier times.  It ties into the TMNT Meets Archie book, which, although the original issue had no such *see this book reference, I’m continually kinda flustered that these IDW reprints haven’t added minor notes along those lines.  The original printing could get by because the book it references existed under the same publishing house, but since that ish isn’t reprinted in these collections, it just leaves a big ol’ question mark for anyone who isn’t aware of the tie.  Does it break anything?  No, and the fill-in isn’t the best issue anyway – it reads rather rushed, and adds in and drops detail in a way that makes it clear that we’re just trying to get in and out by the last page.  It’s just the smidgen of effort to include some callout would’ve been appreciated.