4 out of 5

Dang, bros and brosies – this has been a good few months for Turtles issues.  As a seasoned doubter of the IDW stuff, color me four-star pleased.

I also have to compliment Sophie Campbell on winning me over: I was not keen on her ‘cutesy’ style with which she debuted in the TMNT pages, but whether it’s a conscious effort to match Karai’s Path’s more serious tone or just a general shift in / response to her style, she’s gone appreciatively brutal.  When not, perhaps, reigned in by Burnham’s co-script or Brittany Peer’s admirable and grounding color work – as in Karai’s Path backup, ‘Prey,’ which is a solo Campbell jam – she gets a bit too sketchy and loose with the layouts, and some of that exists in Path’s dream sequency sections, but on the whole, she rocks it with great big panels with lots of movement and emotion and proper spacing for letterer Shawn Lee to scribe the story.

And did I say brutal?  I just got done saying that the main series is better off staying away from the dramatics, but I think that’s because our leads (i.e. The Turtles… keep up) don’t have that stuff wired into their DNA.  Karai, however, especially with how she’s been introduced in this particular comic universe, is built around the stuff; this tale of her hunting down a mystical sword while coming back around to the Oroku Saki way of things gets surprisingly bloody at the end, but it totally works with the way the story is told.  The inclusion of Koya and Bludgeon is where the soap opera stuff comes in – both recovering from Turtles-inflicted wounds – but they’re mostly, thankfully, relegated to the background.  (And they’re the focus of the back-up, which I maybe didn’t enjoy as a result.)

On the way to the sword, Karai and crew are supposed to pass some tests, of which there was really only, like, one and then a fight, so I definitely could’ve used more of that.  But on the whole, this was the most interested TMNTU story yet, and one that essentially stood completely alone from the ongoing.  I also think it was the right choice to link the back-up and main story – it takes place directly after – even if I didn’t really dig the former.  It just makes the whole package more appealing.