3 out of 5

Man, these Steve Lavigne covers.  At first, they just seemed goofy, but looking at this now – a flat, bubbly, let’s-all-smile-at-the-viewer reference to issue #40’s Columbus stuff – it’s almost nightmarishly weird, and I imagine pasting all the trade’s covers side-by-side would make for quite a hallucinogenic visual journey.  So maybe that’s something.

Collected here we have the United We Stand, Divided We Fall 3-part arc, which I mainly remember from my youth for three reasons: being wildly hyped to have the three connecting covers; the crazy surreality of the Mighty Mutanimals’ issue’s artwork from Mike Kazaleh; and this sense of satisfaction from having my two Turtles books crossover that I was reading / witnessing some grand event to rival anything I missing over in, say, Spider-Man.

While reading it all in one sitting definitely minuses out the expectation build that comes from waiting between issues, and not knowing whether or not your grandpa will remember to buy the next issue for you when it comes out, the arc still holds up pretty well: it’s fun seeing aaallll the heroes come together (and Chris Allan, damn, his several splash pages and fight panels are glorious), and the devil-horned Null is a creepy, absolutely evil dude.  The villains are certainly left field, but no moreso than any other random baddie the TMNT have fought, and the way they’re extended to the dream-ish sequences in the middle chapter – each themed around one of the four horsemen they represent – is pretty scary stuff, giving the issues some legit stakes.

To keep the trades at a 4 / 5 issue size, though, we then have to have the history lesson of issue #40, which takes a really compelling time travel setup – the boys are on a by-sea journey back to NY, when a storm waylays them on an island that Christopher Columbus suddenly shows up to to ‘discover’ – and completely weighs down its conclusion with a long-winded ‘and then we killed all the natives and ‘discovered’ slavery’ explanation.  The info isn’t necessarily uninteresting, and while Clarrain’s heavy-handed way of working this kind of stuff in is partially obnoxious, I do appreciate that he wasn’t scared of adding topics like this into what was still a kid’s book… it’s just literally a wall of text, delivered by a deux ex machina-type character who’s very obviously otherwise irrelevant (I very much remember having kid thoughts at the time along the lines of ‘wow, this is some bullshit’), and his wordy spew takes up so much space that there’s no time for a proper conclusion, so, fade out…?

So the trade takes a knock just by happenstance of having to back-up a solid 3-parter with a lame duck of an issue.  The other knock, though: we skipped a whole bunch of issues between the trade 8 collection and this one.  Like, 5 Mutanimals, and 6 TMNT issues.  Why?  Good question.  Some of that might be to skirt having to ‘warn’ parents about an image of Mohammed and some non-Christian religious symbolism in some issues.  Okay.  But the Mutanimals issues…?  And some of the issues on either side of those?  No idea.  Except that maybe there was no ideal way to package those together, so they just skipped ’em.  Part of that is frustrating from the perspective of someone trying to read this stuff for the first time in this format, as it’s implied you’re getting a full reprinting and then there’s the hole in the schedule, but even setting that aside, there’s a clear story jump between the two trade volumes.  It’s clear that you’re missing something, and there’s no editor’s note, no reference, no recap, no anything.  Which just felt like a poor reader experience.

Lucky collectory types like me can jump back to our single issues.  The rest of you unlucky types will have to lie awake at night, wondering what the heck could have happened in those mystical issues, haunted by my denials for you to come over and read them while wearing silk gloves, mouth covers, hair nets, and eye protectors, and the pages are turned for you ‘neath the glass display cases in which I individually display every single comic I own.