1 out of 5

Wow.  That was… shit.  IDW has successfully pulled off this weekly-released antics format with the fantastically bonkers Bebop and Rocksteady, but magic does not strike twice here.  This was almost painful to get through.  Which is a shame, because it was such a golden opportunity to fan service Archie comics creations, something our various writers (a different creative team per issue, which is fine; that’s an acceptable economical way to maintain publish dates, which was necessary for this tale to properly sync between issues of the ongoing – however, it does require some editorial oversight to tie it together, and its that oversight that Dimension X just sort of farted on.) did, to an extent, but then unwisely, like, also didn’t.  Like they didn’t do anything with it.  The ongoing has done some throwaway appearances like this, but overall, their adaptation of various TMMT properties has been rewarding.  Five issues in a row of pointless (what amount to) cameos is hard to deal with, especially when the rest of the content is written almost insultingly stupid at points.  If there have been two main struggles for the IDW books, its been the inability to pick a tonal demographic – is this for adults?  Kids? – and their apparent unknowing of how to step outside the most generic version of each Turtle.  Dimension X commits this problems en masse.  I get that its hard to not do your favorite Mikey Is An Idiot bit when you’re just conscripted for a single issue, but that goes back to the lacking oversight, and the tone: This stuff was written for Fred Wolf-age readers.  Raphael grunts, Donatello says Beep Boop and Michelangelo goes boom.  Leonardo leads.

This is… (sigh) not to mention how piss-poor the story content itself is.  I’m totally down with there being no lead-in; that this just expects you’re reading the ongoing.  I actually think that’s pretty rewarding.  So the TMNT crew (and Neutrinos) are flying to various planets to procure witnesses for a trial against Krang, hopefully before a Krang-dispatched assassin, Haak-R, can off those same witnesses, there by giving us our structure for five new characters, some of which happen to be Archie-era “classics.”.  But there’s an incredible amount of illogic at play in each setup, plus an annoying clown-car treatment of the Neutrino spaceship in which the Turtles travel – the witnesses all stuff in there and we don’t see them / hear about them outside of their individual issue – that the minimal good will earned by the fan service is lost in a sea of eye-rolls.

I can complain about some issues issue nitpicks (could we even tell what Raph’s wrestling costume was via issue 3’s Mahfood-esque scribbles from Khary Randolph and the completely puzzling lack of colors from John Rauch?) but my opinion is likely clear by this point.

Disappointment reigns supreme for a squandered opportunity.