4 out of 5

The rebranding and revamp of the animated TMNT book proves itself right away.  Interestingly, you could say the structure of this isn’t too far off from how that book was initially structured – one story per issue – or ended up, with a two-parter split between two issues with back-ups.  In both cases, we’re really dealing with a self-contained full-length tale, and the second structure is exactly matching what they seem to be doing here.  The difference, though, is in the tone.  Apparently the book has been approved to go off into its own canon while using the main characters (I can’t cite this, but believe I read it on TMNT entity somewheres), and has also been okayed to get a bit more fighty with its weapons.  This eradicates the complete pointlessness of every issue of the previous animated incarnation – the writers did their best, but it was way too clear that status quo had to be maintained – as well as leaning more toward stories instead of set-ups for punchlines or endless iterations on mutates-of-the-week.  While the two-part Zodiac does, essentially, just introduce another creature, that said creature ties into Splinter and Shredder’s past is a big, showy way of saying that the book can now play around as it pleases.  The story is a bit too compressed – no mention is made of why Zodiac looks the way he does if he’s from a time when Splinter was a human – but it’s still a massive improvement over what came before, and proves that Walker can do right by the boys when he’s not leashed to having to come up with different ways to make silly harmless jokes.

We’re also using a great find from that run on art, Chad Thomas, whose dynamic and clean panels are the perfect antidote to Brizuela’s tossed-off sketchy style.  Heather Breckel’s colors are the perfect compliment to this, with her keen sense of balancing background / foreground colors.

The backups are also surprisingly fun – another change, as previous both main story / backup were just goofs, and now the aim is to go a bit indie with these, so we get engagingly different takes on the look of the TMNT from James Kochalka and Noah van Sciver.