2 out of 5

Good stories, but sort of a crap collection.  Firstly – out of order printings, as the conclusion of ‘Megadeath’ chronologically comes after Mutanimals #8 and 9, which are collected in the next trade.  Second – my beef with splitting up Megadeath in the first place; I’m positive there was consideration regarding pricing and page count – and that it leads directly into the TMNT books following the issues collected here – but it’s still an unsatisfying way to read it, even if, sure, it’s not the best thing ever written.  Lastly, and this is what mostly affects the rating, there’s a page missing, with a duplicate page from an earlier issue reprinted instead.  It’s entirely possible this only happened with a certain print run of the book, but it’s there, and I can’t help but think that it’s balls if this is the way you were planning on reading these issues, i.e. you don’t have the originals.  Mistakes happen, but it still sucks, and it had me checking to see if the floppy had the same problem (and maybe they were going for accuracy in the reprint…) but, no.  Which led me to compare the quality of these page scans to the originals, and man, they’re sorta crap.  The colors are dark and muddy and the scans themselves kinda blurry; the older issues still look fantastic, and you do lose degrees of impressiveness in these collected versions.

Had you not distracted me with my firstly, second, and lastly, IDW, I probably wouldn’t have cared as much.

…Those complaints aside, the stories here do bundle together well (Megadeath aside) as a sort of nostalgia stroll down early-issue lane, with old creatures and pals – Scumbug, Wyrm, Katmandu, etc. – returning, drawn with great gusto by Chris Allan.  The two part ‘The Animus War’ is rather humorously a lot of noise for nothin’, but it’s an interesting short take on the manipulative power of words – via religion – that doesn’t dress it up for the kids, signaling how much the TMNTA crew is accepting that their reader base has likely grown up.