1 out of 5

The majority of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles’ comics are not, admittedly, narrative masterworks.  Peter Laird was alternately cheesy and verbose; Eastman was forced tuff-guy posturing; the Tales volume 2 years were generally rather predictable and lightweight; the Archie comics stuff floated through the eye-rolling environmental moralizing…  But: as I would often explain to anyone who was questioning of my ongoing dedication, and continued appreciation up through Laird’s open-ended volume 4, the 4K cartoon, and the CGI film: all of those iterations felt like The Turtles.  What, I believe, we kids had latched on to in those Fred Wolf animations was the boys’ innate sense of brotherhood and mirth, so different from the bitter X-Men or world-ending antics of the DC Universe.

I’m not alone in that analysis, and I’ve mentioned it elsewhere.  There are some oddities in the Turtles history, and it’s seemingly when Eastman and Laird – though more directly Laird, I now want to say – weren’t directly involved: the Image series; Next Mutation.  This is a “review” of five issues of the IDW series, so I won’t go down that alley either, but what I’m waaaay getting ’round to is my acceptance / realization that Eastman is not the same brand purveyor Laird was (as the boys’ oversight essentially belonged to him for much of the latter eras), and the current crop of comics do not appeal to me because they are not the Turtles.  In the same way that Image sought to “shake things up” and essentially produced a title that used the characters but not the template, we have editors and people working on the IDW book who know the Archie and Mirage world enough to add nods to those series, but it’s the same type of nods horror movie fans give to Evil Dead or Romero, whilst producing shit that’s not even close to those works.  And friends: TMNT the IDW version is shit.  It’s disposable comic crap.  Nothing matters.  The characters all talk in horrid, rote cliche or overwrought page-filler, and huge events – like a race of talking dinosaur people – happen and then unhappen in five issues, tearing up streets with laser battles, menacing poses and one-liners and cutaway shots to side characters to remind us they still exist.  No one has personality.  And yes, it’s a world of mutated Turtles and talking rats, but some attempt to seat this in modern reality would be appreciated, instead of waggling “government shutdown” and blurry cellphone videos as justifications for not having to figure out why the world isn’t freaking out about this.

I’ve been struggling to find a foothold in this series along the way, especially when the Nickelodeon cartoon was handling the property infinitely better – amazingly, as a matter of fact – and so I wanted my cake and to be all eatin’ it too, but I don’t think it’s to be.  This is not the turtles.  Name-dropping Burne Thompson ain’t gonna cut it.  I could swap in the X-Men at this point and be reading a Marvel book, but I don’t spend my money on Marvel because it doesn’t interest me.  So congrats, IDW team: you’ve made a lifelong fan consider not buying material related to his – I thought – addiction.  Because it’s feeling like a TMNT knockoff at this point; they just happen to actually have the license.

Real quickly: artist Damian Couceiro came and went halfway through this arc.  His take on the figures was good, but his panels lacked motion, to me.  Interestingly, replacement Brahm Revel, though presumably rushed to the point of not having time to, like, draw feet in a lot of panels, ended up delivering some of my favorite art on this title yet.  I didn’t think much of Revel in a TMNTU back-up, but he really nailed the energy of the fight scenes, even if the accompanying scripting was teeth-churningly dumb.