4 out of 5

While the content in this collection isn’t my favorite, this is kind of ideal for a trade: a completely isolated, 5-part arc.  However, just to keep my opinions wily and unpredictable, it’s odd that, even though the backup ‘Megadeath’ was split up across two trades, with the books’ editors (Justin Eisinger, Alonzo Simon) decided to print the pages back to back in each trade, in this trade, while the April O’Neil backups make a complete story, they ran them as they appeared at the end of each issue…  This is an instance where printing them together probably would’ve made more sense.

Volume 15 nears us to the end of the TMNTA run, so it’s kind of disappointing that we take a break from any ongoing threads to do a complete future TMNT arc, ‘Dreamland.’  I like the future TMNT, for sure, so it’s not that it isn’t cool to touch base with them and Verminator once again, there’s just no real rhyme or reason for it, except, maybe, as a tie-in to some cyber suits (which the boys don here) appearing in the Fred Wolf cartoon…?  So their inclusion is rather random and forced, and harks back to the product placement era of the book, and then there’s that the story would be much better suited to a mini-series than masquerading as something integral to the regular series.

The story is also wackily confusing, with a new villain who collects brains appearing to team up with Vermy – for no real justifiable reason – and the boys using the timeslip to travel back in time because something something Hitler’s brain and then there are zombies.  It’s rather a mish-mash to make the series come across as ‘mature,’ despite the big ol’ robot suits from the cartoon, which makes the rather hilarious suddenness of its ending… amusing.  The April backup, advancing a bit in her timeline to when she and Oyuko are older, living and working on their own, is notable for having work by longtime artist Gray Morrow, and is an interesting attempt by Clarrain at winding in some of the open ended writing he’d use as Steve Murphy on Puma Blues.  It’s not, in any way, tied to the same ecological themes as that title, but the more contemplative style reminded me of his narration there.

So rating the issues’ content, this isn’t my favorite TMNTA stuff, but after several trades with jumbled issue order, it’s cool to have a standalone story – five issues worth, priced appropriately – all packed together.