2 out of 5

It’s an inspired idea, but the execution is about as tepid and predictable as possible.

Ninja mutants in New York’s sewers?  Ghost hunters for hire working out of an old New York firehouse?  Sure, they should meet.  And Burnham and Waltz do a key thing right by waving the dimensional wand and fessing up that these are not the same New Yorks, thereby excusing our miniseries from having to retcon one group’s awareness of the other.  Along these lines, each set of boys are well versed in oddities, so meeting one another isn’t that big of a deal: everyone adjusts rather quickly.  This should leave plenty of pages to play around, with the freedom to get a little wacky since we have the multi-dimension escape clause in effect, but instead, we just go on a pretty standard monster hunt, with some forced drama – your friend is possessed!  you have 72 hours to get back to your home! – padded in.  There’s some meet-cuteness at work, and although I find Burnham painfully unfunny (the jokes are most certainly his), it’s nice that our writing team kept everyone’s personality intact, which means we have four scientists paired up with one sciency turtle and three martial artists.  Sure, you’ve got goofy Venkman for Mikey and Winston the marine for Leo, but this isn’t X-Men meets WildC.A.T.S. or something, where everyone is just a variation for someone else so, again, there’s room to play.  …Which… is left untouched in favor of mining pretty much the most generic versions of the Turtles possible.  Not that Waltz’s take on the TMNT is a masterpiece of scripting, but the proper series does have more maturity than, say, the Fred Wolf cartoon, which is close enough to the cut and dry version Burnham’s written in the youth-geared Animated Adventures Turtles series.

Dan Schoening, who I assume is the regular GB artist, has a nice bulbous style that’s very Saturday Morning, and it works well with Luis Antonio Delgado’s glossy colors, but man does it feel wrong for the Turtles.  I sorta dig that they look fat (that shell adds a lotta size), but I don’t dig that they suddenly look like not-teens, and that Casey and April have followed them into adulthood.  The discrepancy gains traction right away since the book opens with Cory Smith drawing the Turtles-verse, with his version of the team much more age appropriate…

So I credit this for not coming off as a rush job – god knows they take their time to tell a one-issue story for four issues – but if that aside ain’t a hint, the mini is also disappointingly unoriginal in all other ways, and feels like it misses too many opportunities to just have some fun.