Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: 40th Anniversary Comics Celebration
Writers: Kevin Eastman, Peter Laird, Jim Lawson, Tristan Jones, Gary Carlson, Chris Allan, Erik Burnham, Lloyd Goldfine, Ciro Nieli, Andy Suriano, Tom Waltz, and Ronda Pattison
Illustrators: Kevin Eastman, Jim Lawson, Paul Harmon, Frank Fosco, Chris Allan, Sarah Myer, Khary Randolph, Ciro Nieli, Andy Soriano, Michael Dialynas, Pablo Tunica, Freddie E. Williams III, David Petersen, Ken Mitchroney, Dan Duncan, Ronda Pattison, Sophie Campbell, Jodi Nishijima, and Stan Sakai
Colorists: Steve Lavigne, Adam Guzowski, Luis Antonio Delgado, Emilio Lopez, Aaron Hazouri, Ronda Pattison, and Emi Fujii
Publisher: IDW (07.11.24)
Spoilers Ahead
The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles are 40. I'll let that sink in for those of you who, like me, grew up with TMNT and suddenly feel old as dirt. Four decades of the Heroes in a Half Shell. Time flies when you're having fun, and the brothers have had so much fun that there are countless interpretations of the franchise out there to celebrate. IDW has opted to put together this anniversary comic which features stories focused on the following versions of TMNT:
3 Mirage stories
2 IDW stories
1 TMNT: Saturday Morning Adventures story
1 Archie Comics story
1 Image Comics story
1 2003 animated series story
1 2012 animated series story
1 Rise of the TMNT animated series story
1 new Kevin Eastman story
The comic comes in with a whopping $11.99 price tag, but thankfully at 83 pages there's a lot of story to be had. Whether or not that story is worth reading, well... continue on and find out!
As is appropriate, the first story comes from Kevin Eastman and maybe Peter Laird. It's hard to say as the credits only list Eastman, but the first page says up in the corner it's Eastman and Laird. The A cover also bears both of their names. It makes me happy to believe that they did indeed collaborate for this anniversary special, so that's how I'm going to interpret it. Not that there's a whole lot of writing here from the two of them. The Edgar Allan Poe poem Alone serves as the only text in this brief story. It's a little unclear what Eastman and Laird are trying to get across, other than that Michelangelo is "alone" by the time we arrive at The Last Ronin.
The pages are all just splashes featuring one of each of the brothers, with small insets of jumping and action in the background. Look, I get it, 40 years is a long time and Eastman and Laird are both getting older, but I would have enjoyed something a bit more substantial from the duo for this milestone. They're the headlining act here, as far as I'm concerned, so it was a disappointment that all we got is a few drawings with a Poe poem slapped on top of them. Is there really no hope that we'll ever again get a meaningful TMNT tale from Eastman and Laird?
The remaining stories are all from different creators who have worked on TMNT in various capacities across the decades. As the list above shows, these stories all pull from the numerous TV shows and comics that have been produced over the years. In theory I love the concept. Take all the different iterations of TMNT and create stories either homaging them or continuing dangling plot threads. From the Mirage days all the way through to Rise of the TMNT, there's a lot of potential for story ideas remaining in many of the discarded eras of the team.
Where things start to fall apart is the execution. I don't intimately know every single version of the turtles. Rise of the TMNT, for instance, is a show I've never watched, so when the story Farewell centered on that era begins, it launches into the action without any sort of setup. Leo is apparently trying to change the past so that he can say goodbye to Master Splinter before he dies, but I have no idea what the circumstances are, who the characters are, and so on, which kills some of the enjoyment.
And really, it shouldn't matter if you know the eras perfectly, because the stories should be able to hang on their own merits even without all the fine details. Farewell succeeds in that regard—even a bit lost, I could appreciate Leo's mission and the outcome—but Kraang Among Us, the 2012 cartoon's celebratory tale, left me baffled. The team takes on a creature called Kraang Primordius in an escapade that's fun right up to the very end, when the story comes to a screeching halt and concludes on an awkward cliffhanger. One minute the story is rocking along, then the next it's like IDW editorial said, hey, sorry, you actually only have a page left, leaving the creator to quickly wrap things up.
Honestly, I can't help but wonder if editorial is the actual problem here. Along with a couple of spelling errors that slipped through unnoticed, it comes across as though perhaps the editor was a tad too hands-off or inattentive when curating this collection. I know it's a lot of creators to keep track of, but at the end of the day IDW is still asking us to fork over 12 dollars to read the book, so it's fair to expect the editor to have pushed back when there was a lack of clarity and to go over spelling and grammar with care. It's an issue I've noticed at IDW of late, one that I hope gets resolved soon.
Jim Lawson's Rat King tale Monsters seems to want to play with the idea that the turtles are as much monsters in the eyes of the people they help as their enemies. The problem I had here was that the storytelling feels like a fever dream, which may or may not be meant to reflect Rat King's state of being. I have no idea and still don't after a couple of rereads, making this story too incoherent for my tastes. Downtime, meanwhile, is the Image/Urban Legends era of TMNT, and my concerns with it is that it's simply not a story! It feels like four pages that were left out of the sixth issue of the Image series (which the editor's note says this story takes place during). There's no plot here, just the brothers walking through the sewers and talking. A total head-scratcher.
On the plus side, some of the tales are decent. The Man Behind the Mask is the Archie entry, showing off April and Casey's first meeting in that universe. What About Tomorrow? comes from the TMNT: Saturday Morning Adventures writer and is about the brothers arguing over what their futures might be like. Splinter Forever is the 2003 cartoon's entry and centers around Splinter thinking about what makes each of his sons special as they fight Shredder. The best of the lot, I would argue, is the contribution from Tom Waltz, which is all of the IDW characters honoring Splinter on Father's Day. The major players all go to his grave and say something (or in Raph's case, don't, which is handled perfectly) in a really touching story that feels like the sendoff for Splinter that Waltz didn't quite get to give him when he wrapped his run with issue #100.
The backend of the book features some pinup illustrations from the likes of Freddie E. Williams III, David Peterson, and Stan Sakai. I wish all three of them had been able to contribute actual stories to this special, but pinups are better than nothing, I guess.
Artistically, there's a lot to like. Paul Harmon, Chris Allan, Sarah Myer, Khary Randolph, Ciero Nieli, and Michael Dialynas turn in the most compelling work. For some of these creators, this special was a chance to continue stories or show off ideas that never got the chance to be, or fill in gaps just for fun (like Casey and April meeting in Allan's entry). Some aren't my favorites, like Lawson, whose work is so different from when he was drawing City at War 30 years ago that I sometimes can't believe it's the same artist. I think the fairest assessment of this comic, however, is to say that whether it's the stories, the art, or both, your mileage is going to vary based on your degree of devotion to TMNT. The more you know, the more you'll appreciate what's here. However, as I pointed out above, even with knowledge in hand, some of the storytelling is a bit hit or miss regardless. Ultimately, I think this is a comic worth adding to any TMNT collection.
Comments