Some notes on IDW's Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Ultimate Collection line

Eastman's cover for Ultimate Collection Vol. 5

I was looking for a particular image from Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird's original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles comics the other day, and checked out one of IDW's Ultimate collections from the library and, before long, I fell into something of a rabbit hole--well, turtle hole, I guess. I ended up reading the first six volumes of the publisher's Ultimate line--there's a seventh volume, apparently just featuring covers, on the way--as well as re-reading Mirage's full-color, short-lived second volume of TMNT in comic book form.

These ultimate collections are nice-looking books, and I'd certainly like to own copies of my own some day, but I'm at the point in my life where I think I need to buy a house in order to fill it with bookshelves in order to fill those with graphic novels. My one-bedroom apartment is just about at capacity now, and I really shouldn't try to squeeze six or seven atlas-sized collections of comics I already own in several formats in here if I can avoid it.

The books are about 8.5-by-12 inches in size, so the comics within are presented at a notably larger size than usual. The many splash pages and double-page splashes of the earliest TMNT comics are basically big enough to be placed in frames and hung on walls like piece of fine art. Only the covers for the individual issues aren't blown-up within these collections, which I found to be sort of irritating (although if that seventh volume is going to be devoted to collecting the covers, maybe that was the reason why they are presented so small within).

Each collection features a new, original wraparound cover by Kevin Eastman, who is still working surprisingly closely with IDW on their fifth volume of the comic. These covers are all essentially collages of the contents of the volume. These are kind of fascinating in that they reveal the way Eastman draws the characters now, without the visual input of Peter Laird or any of the other Mirage artists he would collaborate with (like Jim Lawson and Eric Talbot, for example), and while his style hasn't changed too drastically over the last three decades or so--that is, Kevin Eastman's artwork is still immediately recognizable as Kevin Eastman's artwork--it is interesting to note those changes.

Also, it's fun to see him draw characters he had no or little input into before. So, for example, the cover for the second volume features his drawing of the Kirby character from 1986's Donatello, which Laird did much of the work on (and comparing the Kirby in the comic to that on Eastman's cover makes this clearer still), and the third volume (above) has Eastman's "cover" versions of Doctor Dome, the Domeoids and the Justice Force superheroes from 1988's TMNT #15, an Eastman-free Laird and Lawson issue.

Aside from the blown-up size and the original covers though, the comics are also all annotated by Eastman and Laird, with every issue being followed by a page or more of memories, reactions and behind-the-scenes notations from the two creators. If you've read these comics at least once before, then the ultimate collection probably provide the ideal way to re-read them, as the effect is a little like having Eastman and Laird reading along over your shoulder, and volunteering their commentary.

All of that stuff is pretty fascinating, and, I'll be honest, sometimes a little shocking. For example, when I was reading these comics as a teenager--I think 1991's TMNT #37 was the first issue I bought new at a comic shop, and after that point I started hunting for back issues while keeping up with new stuff as it was released--I had no idea the pair ever had a falling out of any kind.

They don't detail the ins and outs of their disagreements herein, although they allude to not speaking to one another or being unable to be in the same room with one another quite a bit. That was pretty surprising to hear, although I guess it explains why their collaborations dwindled to almost nothing for a while.

So after 11 issues of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (and the four character-specific one-shot "micro-series" and sundry short stories)  published over the course of  three years in which the pair worked as an exceptionally entwined creative team, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles #12 was a Laird solo issue. TMNT #13 an Eastman solo issue (with Talbot assisting on inks). TMNT #14 was the first of many fill-in issues,  and then  #15 was Laird and Lawson, #16  was another fill-in issue and then #17 was Eastman and Talbot. It wasn't until #19-#21 that Eastman and Laird collaborated again--that was the "Return To New York" story arc--and even then it wasn't just the two of them, as Lawson and Talbot were heavily involved in those issues.

Despite the now decades-old disagreements though, the pair seem quite effusive in their praise for one another's respective skills throughout (although Laird never seems to miss an opportunity to point out when there's a typo), and neither seem too terribly eager to re-litigate their conflicts. I guess I'll wait to their biographies (And man, I do hope someone is writing their biography, and that they are both gradually working on their own autobiographies, because what a fascinating story those two lived!).

A couple of things that occurred to me while reading this volumes, and re-reading the comics within for, like, the hundredth time...

Laird's inks on Lawson's pencils over Eastman's layouts in 1989's TMNT #19

•I've talked before about the fact that one of my favorite aspects of these comics were how homemade they feel, and the fact that the particular, long-mysterious-to-me system that Eastman and Laird employed in their creation meant that each issue had a sort of alchemical style, a fusion of each of their significantly different personal styles...sometimes with those of other studio mates also transmuted into the resultant comics.

Sometimes it's quite clear who did what, and thus how each artist's style might have impacted the art--the three-chapter "Return to New York," for example, were inked by Laird, Talbot and Eastman respectively--other times, it seems like two-to-four pencils and pens were involved with every page, and a comic might have a "Mirage Studios" style rather than anyone's personal style.

The notes detail that Eastman and Laird did have a system, although it is interesting to hear them discussing the very earliest issues, particularly TMNT #1, in which neither is exactly clear on who inked a particular page, and it seems that both of them contributed pencils and inks to each page.

The system they ultimately settled on seemed to be this, according to Laird:

1.) They would initially "write" the story in conversation with one another, hammering out a plot together.

2.) Eastman would handle the layout, on which he would include rough dialogue.

3.) Laird would do finished dialogue.

4.) They would pencil the comic based on Eastman's layouts and, after the final dialogue was lettered--originally by them, later by Steve Lavigne--they would ink the art and add toning (that last bit is something I never realized was involved with the construction of these comics, and helps explain the gritty, textured look of the black and white art).

As Laird explained it, they were ideally communicating throughout the entire process, so even though layouts might have been Eastman's "job" and finished dialogue Laird's, they both had and took opportunities to address any and all concerns as they were going.

In the earliest issues especially, Laird said, they tried to make sure they each penciled and inked a piece of each page or panel, and that this would take place by the pair literally handing pages back and forth between them in order to get a true blend of their styles.

Repeatedly throughout these annotations they each note that when they would meet readers at conventions, they were always being asked about how they worked together and who did what. Comics readers in the early 1980s apparently couldn't get their heads around the idea of two writer/artists working on a comic book together as writer/artists, perhaps because so much comics production fell into either the assembly-line method established in the Golden Age (with a writer handing a script to a penciler, who handled his pencil art to an inker, who then gave the finished art to the colorist, etc) or a solo cartoonist doing everything herself.

It is an unusual method, though, one that requires pretty much constant proximity to one another--which I suppose was likely a factor in the eventual strain in their relationship.

Eastman and Laird's final page of 1984's TMNT #1

•The focus of these books is the issues of the original series that Eastman and Laird worked on, to the exclusion of all the fill-in issues. It was striking to see how many times throughout that relatively short run of comics by the pair themselves--just 38 issues total including the one-shots, out of the 62 issues that the first volume of TMNT ultimately ran--that Eastman and Laird seemed to reach natural, organic would-be, could-be endings for their series.

It's pretty common knowledge that they never really anticipated TMNT lasting longer than a single issue, and despite the fact that they both desperately wanted to succeed as comics creators, they were caught off-guard by how successful that lark featuring a silly idea and elements of parody and homage of Frank Miller's Daredevil work ended up being, and how much market demand there was for what such a weird concept.

Re-reading 1984's TMNT #1 with that thought placed in your mind, it's abundantly clear that the comic was created as a 40-page complete story unto itself. There's no cliffhanger, no dangling plot lines, no questions yet to be addressed. In those pages, the pair thoroughly introduce and explain the characters' origins (built atop the origin of Marvel's Daredevil, of course), the history of the enmity between their master and his archenemy and then there's a huge, action-packed, 10-page ninja battle ending with the death of their enemy and the resolution of the conflict that we are told was their life's mission.

Yeah, it's a pretty complete story, and it's not hard to imagine that, had it not caught the imagination of comics readers and, eventually, cartoon-watchers and toy-players-with, it might have just ended up being a strange stepping stone to other endeavors by two talented creators.

Once they committed to a second issue though, a story arc quickly emerged. In issue #2, the TMNT met their first human friend April O'Neil and their father/sensei Master Splinter went missing, all a result of villain Baxter Stockman's robotic mousers. In the following five issues, the guys move in with April and search for Splinter, unwittingly uncovering details about their origins, travelling to outer space and having a rather wild, pulpy adventure that concludes with a reunion with Splinter and the formation of a new configuration of a family, now including April.

It is very easy to imagine Eastman and Laird's TMNT ending with issue #7 then, too, as #1-#7 tell a pretty complete story that ends happily (Raphael, which came out between #2 and #3, doesn't really play into that arc at all, but is more of a side story focusing on his personality...and introducing Casey Jones, who wouldn't play a part in the series for a while yet).

After that, there are some done-in-one stories, including the Michaelangelo and Donatello one-shots, the epic 45-page TMNT #8 featuring a crossover with Dave Sim's Cerebus (and introducing Renet and Savanti Romero), and a rather Splinter-centric flashback to the Pre-Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles in #9.

A continuing story arc reemerges in Leonardo, the most action-packed issue up until that point, as it is basically one long fight scene, which leads directly into #10, an unexpected rematch with the supposedly dead Shredder and the Foot Clan, featuring a last-minute save by Casey Jones, who at that point joins the team and their narrative on a permanent basis.

Eastman's cover for 1987's TMNT #11

TMNT #11, set at the farmhouse in Northhampton, is another natural "ending" to the story, as it has the various characters struggling to process what just happened to them in New York City, and, gradually, all making their peace with it to some extent. It has a pretty happy ending, and it's not a bad place to end the story, really, although it does suggest that our heroes have lost...at least in terms of their battle against the Foot Clan, if not at life in general.

The first time I read these comics--hell, the first 40 times I read these comics--it was in a big, fat, phone book-sized collection featuring the four micro-series and the first 11 issues of TMNT. It's easy to see why they collected them in this fashion, as they do read as a complete (even completed) unit.

Then, after a series of adventures mostly set in rural New England as opposed to New York City--the previously mentioned efforts by the then sort of split-up Eastman and Laird team of #12, #14, #15 and #17, plus fill-in issues  by Michael Dooney, Mark Martin and Mark Bode that aren't included in the ultimate collections--Eastman, Laird and their Mirage Studios partners reunite for "Return To New York." That three-issue arc really resolves our heroes' defeat at the hands of the Foot in #11. They have re-killed The Shredder, this time once and for all--the resurrected Shredder isn't quite the same one they killed in #1, of course, as is explained--and they have re-fulfilled their mission in life and are able to move on. At that stories end, the four brothers are in New York, burning the body of The Shredder, and are apparently now free to go wherever they like or do whatever they want.

Again, this too seems like a natural ending point for Eastman an Laird's TMNT narrative. And, in a way, it was. The title kept going, of course, but it would be another three years and 26 issues before Eastman and Laird returned to the book, and for the rest of the 62-issue volume they would only draw a single issue issue together and then share writing credits on 14 issues, the job of drawing the turtles now falling to Lawson, with new inker Keith Aiken, and assists from Talbot and a few others.

The end of that epic storyline would, of course, be another natural ending point--and finally was. The book ended when the 12-issue "City At War" did, only to be relaunched for an ill-starred, 12-issue, full-color run that now seems to be even more forgotten than the Image series was.

Veitch's cover for 1989's TMNT #24

•Because the focus of the ultimate collections is the Eastman and Laird issues of Eastman and Laird's Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, that means that many issues of the series are left out. So Dooney's #13 Martin's #16 and Bode's #18 aren't here. And none of the issues that fell between the end of "Return To New York" and  the two-part "City At War" lead-in story arc "Shades of Gray" are included here. That's a lot of TMNT, and a lot of great comics: Two more Mark Martin issues, Rick Veitch's three-issue "The River" arc and a later done-in-one, Michael Zulli's gorgeous but weird "Soul's Winter" story arc, a three-issue arc by Rich Hedden and Tom McWeedy, comics by Steve Murphy, Michael Dooney and Keith Aiken, Dan Berger, Rick Arthur, A.C. Farley, Mark Bode and, my favorites, #37 and #42 by Rick McCollum and Bill Anderson and #41 by Matt Howarth.

There is some reason to quibble with the curation of these ultimate collections.

Some of these guest comics are pretty far afield of those told by Eastman and Laird, the more "canonical" ninja turtles stories, and are best read as the Mirage equivalents of Marvel's What If...? or DC's Elseworlds or Silver Age "imaginary stories." Just before and for a long time after "Return to New York," TMNT was basically an anthology series, akin to Legends of The Dark Knight. Like LDK though, if some stories strayed too far to be considered in continuity, others fit in perfectly well with Eastman and Laird's stories. Many of the above stories are set in and around the New England farmhouse, for example, and others have the characters re-encountering characters from earlier in the series, like Renet, Savanti Romero, Romero's previously unrevealed wife and the superheroine Radical and supervillain Carnage.

By excising all of these from the ultimate collections, there is a rather strange compressing of time, and a reader doesn't get the sense that the characters were ever really lost in the wilderness, trying to figure out their next move after their defeat in #10. When Raphael starts fighting with his brothers in the first chapter of "Return," complaining about how long they have been hiding out in New England while Shredder and The Foot are alive and well in New York City, here only some 186 pages and four issues, instead of twice that.

And even less time passes between the conclusion of "Return To New York" and the beginning of "City At War"; in fact, because "Shades of Gray" is basically an unofficial first two chapters of "City At War," both of the big, Eastman and Laird-written storylines about the turtles returning to New York City to sort out matters with the Foot Clan happen back-to-back in these collections.

I don't know what, exactly, would have been a better solution, I just know the series reads very differently when presented with all of the fill-ins excised like this.

Talbot's cover for 1988's TMNT #17

That said, I thought the inclusion of #17 was somewhat surprising. That's the Eric Talbot solo issue, the bulk of which is a rather weird, random stream-of-conscious fantasy story set in in feudal Japan and starring a version of Michaelangelo....although it turns out to be a dramatization of a story Michaelangelo himself is writing. Eastman is credited as a writer on it, both in the collection and on Mirage's website, but Eastman himself seems surprised by the credit in his annotations of the issue, and doesn't remember having done enough work on the book to have deserved the credit.

Meanwhile, Eastman did contribute to the Mark Bode issues--#18, which he co-wrote and helped ink, and #32, which he helped ink--but neither of those are included herein (Those are both really fun ones, too, sending the Turtles overseas to Hong Kong, where they kinda sorta team-up with a Bruce Lee stand-in, and to Egypt, where they fight Anubis and other characters of Egyptian mythology. I really liked Bode's Turtle designs, and the way he handled dialogue, the balloons and sound effects all appearing above the panels).

I suppose both of those issues lean pretty hard away from the canonical Turtles, of course, but if the organizing principle here is the complete Eastman and Laird TMNT and co-writing #17 was enough, to qualify, well...

Splash page by Lawson and Aiken from 1992's TMNT #51

•When we get to #48 in Ultimate Collection Volume 4, Jim Lawson has become the official Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles artist and, in fact, it is his art we will see for every issue included in the next two volumes, with the brief exception of the 42 pages of TMNT #50, in which Eastman and Laird reunite on both story and art.

I remember it being a real treat at the time the book came out--I had signed up for a subscription of the book at the time, and that was and remains the only time I ever had a subscription to a comic book series--although looking at it now, it sure is jarring to see the Lawson art get replaced by the infinitely darker, busier, more textured Eastman/Laird art, only to give way almost immediately to Lawson's more streamlined, abstract and expressive art (Confession: I used to hate Lawson's TMNT art. Now he's one of my favorite TMNT artists).

Lawsons' cover for 1987's Tales of The TMNT #2, introducing Nobody

"Shades of Gray" sticks out a bit in this curation of the series, if only because the character Nobody plays a rather significant role. A more traditional vigilante/superhero based in Springfield, he was introduced in Tales of The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles #2 (written by Eastman and Laird and drawn by Lawson and Ryan Brown), and, because no issues of Tales are collected here, isn't really introduced to the narrative properly, but rather just appears.

Still, those two issues--TMNT #48 and #49--are pretty important, as they include the events that kick off the splintering of the TMNT family that sets up "City At War." The first official chapter of which, #50, is silent.

Eastman and Laird's cover for 1992's TMNT #50

•"City At War" is an extremely unusual story arc for even this extremely unusual comic, lasting 12-14 issues, depending on if we count "Shades", and dwarfing the longest sustained story arcs from the book's previous 50 issues. (Remember, "Return to New York" was just three issues, albeit 40-ish page issues, and the unofficial search for Splinter arc was just about six issues).

It was also probably the most emotionally mature of the TMNT stories, with Eastman, Laird and Lawson splitting the characters up into four different units, each experiencing their own story arcs. In the case of the two human characters, their storylines are positively mundane--Casey moves away, meets a woman, falls in love and tries to settle into a normal-ish domestic relationship with her, while April moves to Los Angeles to live with her sister and start a life free of mutant ninjas and their attendant secrets.

Meanwhile, Splinter finds himself in extremely dire straits and faces death alone, and the Turtles themselves return to New York City and find themselves trying to sort out a massive gang war involving warring factions of The Foot Clan...the result of their having cut off the head of the organization when they killed Shredder for the second time.

And then there's a random New Yorker who was caught in an explosion during the Foot's initial war against itself, and we follow his recovery throughout, a somewhat frustrating element because a reader keeps expecting him to turn out to be someone important to the plot somehow, but he is instead just there to dramatize a real person who suffers during wars in general--a point that was made in the first issue, and thus didn't really need 11 more issue's worth of example.s

I recall finding the story somewhat frustrating the first time through, read in monthly installments--again, this story was a huge change from the 50 or so TMNT comics that preceded it, as they were mostly big done-in-one adventures--and even the second time through, but this time I found it pretty engrossing. I started it late at night, with the intention of reading the first few chapters, and ended up staying up late enough to read the whole thing in a fit of pure can't-put-it-down-ism, blowing way past my bedtime.

It's kind of striking how unusual the story felt for a TMNT comic, given how basic, even generic elements of April and Casey's plot lines were, and how simple what Eastman, Laird and Lawson ended up doing really was. While the A plot was basically that of the ninja turtles doing ninja turtle stuff and questioning their purpose in life more than ever, starting to come of age in a way that felt uncomfortable in the context of everything that came before, the overall purpose of the story was simply to break up the characters' extended family, send them off in different directions to learn why they are together in the first place, and then reunite them via soap opera like events and coincidences.

This storyline gave us the character Karai, who isn't too terribly well-developed here, but would play a pretty large role in TMNT mass media adaptions in the 21st century, and Shadow, who would be a recurring character in Laird's fourth volume of the TMNT title...a character with a lot of potential that I don't think ever ended up being met (Actually, I suspect there's a lot of unrealized potential in the space between the time jump of TMNT Vol. 2 #12 and TMNT Vol. 4 #1, a great deal of which was explored in Tales... Vol. 2, which ran alongside TMNT Vol. 4. (I mean, a teenage girl named Shadow raised by sports equipment-wielding vigilante Casey Jones, with four ninja masters for uncles and a fifth ninja master as her grandfather...? She'd basically be a blend of the Casey and April characters, with skills on par with the mutant ninjas).

Eastman and Laird's cover for 1987's Anything Goes #5

•Now Eastman and Laird made a lot of comics between the time 1984's TMNT #1 became a hit and when issue #62 shipped in 1993. Even if one ignores all the comics they merely had a hand in, while other Mirage Studio artists did the heavy lifting, the early days of their characters saw them contributing short stories to a variety of anthologies and original content to the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Other Strangeness role-playing games source books (which I liked better than Dungeons & Dragons back in the day; it's been a while since I looked closely at RPGs, but I remember the Palladium system being a lot easier and more intuitive than what was then the TSR Advanced Dungeons & Dragons system).

In figuring out how to collect all that stuff, IDW apparently opted to publish it all after the stories that ran in the main TMNT title (and the four one-shots). Thus, the first five volumes collect the most Eastman and/or Laird-heavy issues of TMNT, while the sixth, epilogue-like volume is stuffed with about 30 short comics of various short lengths, all produced between 1985 and 1989.

They're culled from all over, too: Back-ups from TMNT reprints, the Palladium source books, the Mirage-published anthologies like Turtle Soup, Shell Shock and Gobbledygook, a Grimjack back-up, the Fantagraphics-published Anything Goes and some benefit books.

In addition to the guys who have their name on the cover, there are comics included in here from many Mirage Studios regulars, like Lawson, Talbot, Michael Dooney and Ryan Brown, all working in various configurations in terms of who was doing what and with whom. There are also some stories by artists not as closely associated with the characters, like Stephen Bissette, who writes and draws an extremely eight-page story entitled "Turtle Dreams" (and those dreams are much scarier than the those in Matt Howarth's TMNT #41); Michael Zulli, working solo on one story and with his Puma Blues partner Steve Murphy on another; and Richard Corben, who inked a four-page Eastman-written and -penciled story that was created specifically so that Eastman could work with Corben (Zulli and Corben would both later do more TMNT, of course; the former drawing the aforementioned "Soul's Winter" arc featuring the most dramatically distinct version of the Turtles to ever appear in their own comic, and Corben collaborating with Jan Strnad on TMNT #33).

I've read many of these, but there were a few that were brand new to me, and thus quite welcome surprises. For example, there's a 10-page turtle-less Triceratons story by Laird that appeared in a Mirage anthology entitled Grunts that I had never heard of, and an Eastman and Laird collaboration entitled "Casey Jones, Private Eye" from a Mirage mini-comics project that I was similarly ignorant of. The latter's nothing special, really, and the format doesn't flatter artwork obviously created to be read much smaller, but the Triceratons story was pretty interesting, and introduces a race of humanoid bears that oppose the Triceraton Empire. I'm actually a little surprised they didn't show up in the last TMNT cartoon, given how diligently it scoured the comics for inspiration.

While the first six volumes of this series were devoted to following the canonical Turtles story of their creators as closely as possible, focusing on the work they themselves did more than the many, many comics they simply had a hand in or sanctioned, this volume really gives a good sense of what the title was like for a portion of its run, what the studio's output was like, and just how fertile the characters and concept were as a springboard, and how generous Eastman and Laird were with their creations and their work.

In a sense, this is actually a good volume to start with, as it is the one that gives the best idea of what the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles comic was like and what Mirage Studios was like. I mean, it's probably a pretty lousy place to start in terms of the story of the TMNT, but it's a perfect place to get a feel for the Turtles and the guys that made them.

And to return to that aspect of the Mirage Studios comics that I mentioned earlier, regarding the who-did-what-where nature of their output, and how first Eastman and Laird and then as many as a dozen different collaborators would conceive of a flexible Mirage "house style" that slid along a particular spectrum, this is practically a text book for that, as there are so many different combinations of the Mirage Studios artists, all appearing within the same covers.

Some of these shorts absolutely fit into the "real" TMNT story, being the work of Eastman and Laird and tied closely to the events of the monthly--there are several set during their time in space, for example--others are of the sort of off-to-the side larks or riffs of Tales or the micro-series, and some need to be massaged into the narrative, but nothing herein seemed to really not fit in with the extremely broad mandate of the Mirage Studios Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles comics which, at it's most basic was basically just, "Whatever, just so long as it has at least one teenage mutant ninja turtle in it."

Among the stories I most enjoyed reading or re-reading in the sixth volume were the Eastman/Laird Anything Goes story in which the guys go on a secret stealth mission...to see Aliens at the drive-in, which I long ago managed to find at a garage sale in Ashtabula after many summer afternoons of studying the Overstreet Price Guide for TMNT appearances; the Eastman/Laird Grimjack back-up story which I recalled similarly looking for but never actually finding; the Eastman/Corben collaboration; the Laird story "Technofear" from 1986's Gobbledygook, which featured what I guess is now vintage computer art; and Zulli and Bissette's strange versions of the characters.

I'm looking forward to the seventh volume, and am curious if there will be a volume eight or beyond. After all, for volume four, Laird did much of the writing, and, for IDW's volume five, Eastman was rather heavily involved, although IDW has plenty of collections of that already...

Anyway, let's meet back here to discuss volume seven once that's released, and maybe we can talk about the 12-issue TMNT series that immediately followed the conclusion of this one, since that's still pretty fresh in my head.

Review: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Annual 2014

Well this is one strange comic book.

The slim, 48-page special came with a spine and was drawn in its entirety by Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles co-creator Kevin Eastman, who has been co-plotting and providing covers for IDW's volume of TMNT comics. It's not often that Eastman provides interior art for these comics, but it's always an extra incentive to read them when he does so.

Sure, his presence always bestows a imprimatur of legitimacy on the proceedings, and the more involved he is the stronger the imprimatur, but I just generally really enjoy his inky, gritty artwork, and it's always a pleasure to see him draw pretty much anything, but his Ninja Turtles always look realer than anyone else's (with the exception of the ones Eastman drew with Peter Laird, of course).

It always amuses me when he does draw IDW's Turtles and associated characters, though, because he basically just draws his original versions, with no real concessions to the redesigns they've all gone through. His Splinter is always a Batman-eyed werewolf, his Casey Jones is always an adult with 1980s hair, and so on.

None of that has anything to do with how strange this particular comic book is, however.

What makes it strange is that it essentially offered a bizarre continuity patch to a then almost 30-year-old comic book story that was no longer part of the IDW iteration of the TMNT's continuity.

In this story, Eastman and co-plotter Tom Waltz–Eastman scripts the book himself himself–introduces Renet and a barbarian parody of the old Marvel Comics version of Conan into this particular TMNT narrative. That Conan parody is apparently meant to be a stand-in for Dave Sim's Cerebus The Aardvark, who of course appeared in 1986's Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles #8 by Eastman, Laird, Sim and Gerhard.

That was the comic that first introduced Renet, Savanti Romero and Lord Simultaneous, and while they've all appeared elsewhere through various TMNT comics and cartoons, Cerebus has not because, well, he's Cerebus, and not really a TMNT character (Stan Sakai's Usagi Yojimbo, who similarly shared story-space with the Turtles back in their pre-cartoon fame days, did appear in toy form and in two different iterations of the cartoons, though).

But here's the really strange thing. While there's a new, non-aardvark Conan parody in this comic book, it is not a retelling or new version of TMNT #8. It's an entirely different story, with only a few surface similarities, like the presence of Renet, Simultaneous and the Turtles.

I can't really figure out what's going on here, or, more precisely, what was going on in Eastman's head when he made this book. It's the presence of Baltizar, the Conan/Cerebus stand-in, that really confuses me, as he evokes TMNT #8, and serves as a constant reminder of that comic.

So the story is this. A heavily redesigned version of Renet–that's her on the cover, at the top of the post–appears in the Turtles' current church lair, and she recruits them into a vague mission that involves their fighting for her. She knows them, and on account of being both scatter-brained and a time traveller, isn't sure if they know her or not.

"Either we've already met and you know who I am and what I'm talking about," she hurriedly explains, "Or I've come back before our last adventure and you have no idea what I'm talking about and think I'm some kinda crazy loon!"

I kinda like this set-up, where it doesn't matter overmuch if this is their first meeting or not, because, obviously, it's not, and this has happened before...repeatedly, even. Renet, like readers, knows that, and the best way to approach this story (and this comic in general) is probably not to fuss overmuch with what happened when and which stories "count" and which ones do not.

Then things get weirder still, as she transports them to some big, floating inter-dimensional city...at which point colorist Ronda Pattison stops with the full-color, and the narrative becomes black and white for most of the rest of the comic. It's a reverse Wizard of Oz, but rather than the black and white of the Mirage comics, it's a heavily shaded and toned black and white; black and various shades of gray, really.

The Turtles are promptly thrown in a cage where they meet Baltizar, who is as big a rambling, motor-mouthed fool as Renet, only more so, really. Contrary to the image on the cover, interior Baltizar has a little lame goatee to further distinguish him from Conan and, when color resumes during the framing sequence, he is shown to be blonde (see the image at the bottom of the post).

Baltizar and the Turtles are among the many warriors forced to fight in deadly gladiatorial combat at the behest of "The Dimensional Council" for the entertainment of a stadium full of people. Apparently Renet, the apprentice of exiled council-member Simultaneous is to...ummmm....Well, there's going to be a few days of her squad fighting, and then they will eventually convince all the other combatants to turn on the Council, most of whom don't really like these fights and just go along with it because the most evil of their number is a big, mean jerk, I guess...?

I don't know. It doesn't really make much sense.

But we do get to see lots of Eastman drawings of Conan and the Turtles fighting various alien warriors, including, at the climax, a Triceraton named Zog.

And then, with the games abolished and the idea of replacing them with a more humane "Battle Nexus" floated, Renet zaps the Turtles back home (and into color) and she and her boyfriend Baltizar hang out in dinosaur times for a while.

Maybe the weirdest part of all, however, is that Splinter spends most of his panel time on the toilet, which is really something I didn't need to see. I mean, I've gone about 30 years of my life never once imagining the Turtles or Splinter going to the bathroom, and now here their creator is, drawing Splinter, reading a newspaper on the toilet.

And what's that "Holy s..ah...smokes!" bit all about Eastman? The other word may start with the same letter, but it's a different phoneme!

As a story, this was a pretty mediocre one, although I did enjoy the artwork. I was a little frustrated that it had absolutely nothing to do with the mini-series Turtles In Time however, where Renet appears repeatedly, and is the apparent source of the Turtles' being lost in time and traveling through various eras in each issue. That story had its moments (i.e. the entire first issue, drawn by Sophie Campbell), but it seemed to be missing something, and I assumed that it seemed that way because I read the collection of that miniseries before reading this annual, in which Renet is introduced.

But nope. Neither comic has anything to do with the other, to the detriment of Turtles In Time. As a story. As a collection that includes 20 pages of Sophie Campbell drawing Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles fighting dinosaurs, Turtles In Time remains a masterpiece.

Like most of the IDW TMNT comics I've read then, this one left me disappointed. That is one comic book series that I really, really want to like–hell, I want to love it–but it rarely if ever rises above mediocre, and certainly never seems to get the best out of the source material.

Review: Fistful of Blood

Kevin Eastman's relationship with IDW Productions would seem to be a rather fruitful one. In addition to allowing him to keep a hand on the rudder of their Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles ongoing comic–though he is the "Eastman" of "Eastman and Laird's Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles" fame, Nickelodeon has own the franchise for a while now–IDW also indulge Eastman's far less commercially promising projects, like Fistful of Blood.

They published the comic as a four-issue miniseries a few months back and then collected it into this 120-page trade paperback, but the back-story of the comic is a bit more convoluted. Eastman and his friend and one-time studio mate Simon Bisley originally created it for Heavy Metal magazine circa 2001, and it looks like it was previously collected in 2002. This version isn't that version, at least, not exactly. Eastman refers to it as a "re-mastered version" in the ample back matter included after the actual story, noting that he redrew every page (and colorist Tomi Varga turned the once black-and-white comic into the full-color version that fills these pages).

Even without knowing that, it's evident that Eastman and Bisley both had a great deal of creative input on the pages of this book, and while their precise working method isn't exactly defined, the results reminded me quite a bit of Eastman's early collaborations with Peter Laird, where they both seemed to have written, penciled and inked every panel together, and it was difficult to tell exactly who did what. This is a little like that, as there's a lot of Eastman and a lot of Bisley on almost every page and, interestingly, some pages look a lot like the work of Bisley. In the behind-the-scenes section, Eastman says that they discussed the book together, he did the lay-outs (many of which are included), Bisley did the pencils and then they both worked on finishing the pages together...and now, of course, they've been re-finished and colored.

It's an unusual kind of collaboration, really, more like the construction of rock music by a band than the normal, strict division of duties often associated with comics: It can be hard to tell where Eastman ends and Bisley begins, and, as a fan of either or both artists, it's a blast to try and pick out who drew which line, and who designed which background character throughout (Do note that the cover of the book, above, is clearly all Eastman).

As the title and the Western setting allude to, the comic was created as a deliberate reference to 1964
s A Fistful of Dollars. Eastman writes that it was mean to be a parody of the classic Eastwood Western, but its more of a high-concept riff, "with Zombies, Vampires and Aliens...long before they became all the rage." A quick couple of keystrokes confirms that this genre mash-up predates Platinum Studios' controversial Cowboys & Aliens comic book by a half-decade, and the resurgence of the zombie genre with 28 Days Later by a year.

The basic plot construction is borrowed directly from A Fistful of Dollars. A woman with no name stumbles into town. She is comically well-endowed in the way that only a comic book character could be–and clearly designed and drawn by Bisley–and dressed only in a bra and underpants.* She is immediately set upon by one of the two local gangs, and dispatches them all pretty quickly. Later, she's attacked by a member of the rival gang, and kills him handily as well.

One gang is a bunch of zombies, the other a bunch of vampires, and they've turned an abandoned Western movie set into a literal tourist trap, where their human servant helps them lure visitors in with the promise of a Western theme experience, and then the two warring gangs of ghouls divide up the blood and flesh of their victims.

The woman with no name, the taciturn character sometimes called "Blondie," eventually agrees to help each gang dispatch the members of the other, but it all ends with a huge battle in which her true nature is revealed (Eastman's quote above spoils it; if you didn't catch it, let's just say she's a very strange stranger indeed) as is the real reason she wandered into this particular town in the first place.

The relative slightness of the plot, and the fact that it is borrowed from a movie (which, of course, borrowed it from another movie) means how much fun a reader will have with the book likely revolves around how much one enjoys the work of the two artists. (Personally, I'm a big fan of both.) That, and, perhaps, how much affection one might have for horror creatures like these.

They are very Hollywood in their conception. The zombies walk and talk and are all-around sentient, and they're always all dressed up in cowboy style; they look a bit like Jonah Hex all of him was as ugly as the one half of his face. The vampires, by contrast, all look like variations of the title character from Nosferatu: Bald, big ears, eyes and fangs, billowing black robes, long skeletal fingers ending in claws. A few of them are more colorful, dressed in Asian exotica fashions and looking pretty bizarre.

The designs are all fairly cartoonish, and bear Bisley's general aesthetic. Eastman shares his original designs for the characters, and it's amazing how different (and different for the better) they ended up, with the main character being the one with the least bit of redesign. That back-matter I keep referring to fills 32 pages of this collection, and there's plenty of commentary from Eastman, along with sketches, lay-outs, character designs, storyboards for a movie adaptation that was never made (at least, not yet) and so on. Apparently Eastman adapted it into a film script with a few friends (one of whom was comics writer Paul Jenkins), and came up with ideas for a pair of sequels based on For a Few Dollars More and The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly, which "will see the light of day...one day, either as a comic series or some other form."

I don't know about movies–this particular story is scant enough that it looks like the sort of narrative that could very easily be ruined by filmmakers trying to fix it**–but I'd be interested in seeing those ideas as comics. Particularly if Eastman could re-team with Bisley, because their collaboration is a large part of what made this book so much fun.

In fact, it's kind of hard to imagine this book without Bisley, as his style incorporates so much caricature into the cartooning that it keeps one from ever taking the proceedings too seriously. As high-concept as this might be, it's a rather low-brow form of high-concept, with meant to be laughed with. Despite the horror tropes, it's much more of a B-movie splatter-stick kind of affair than an actual work of horror meant to scare a reader. Under the pencils and pens of different artists, this could be anywhere from terrible to offensive. Under those of Eastman and Bisley, however, it's a damn good time.



*I was going to write "panties" but it has recently come to my attention that women don't like, or even use the word "panties." Is that true, ladies? Or only true of the women I talk to...?

**Well, unless Quentin Tarantino, or someone who similarly loved the source material and was similarly talented at "sampling" other films in their work were was the filmmaker doing the adaptation. But one imagines that From Dusk Till Dawn is the last horror/western mash-up Tarantino will be involved in. For what it's worth, the plot of this comic is far superior to that of From Dusk Till Dawn though.

Is Dark Knight III: The Master Race a comic book, or just a vehicle for variant covers?

That's probably not too terribly legible, but it's the credit page for the first issue of Dark Knight III: The Master Race. Those long columns of credits are the artists responsible for the "retailer" variants; there are another handful of "regular" variants. All in all, there are 49 variant covers listed on this page, although I'm pretty sure between black-and-white versions, blank covers and the super-rare incentive variants, there's likely well over 50 variants for this book, making it, perhaps, DC's answer to Mavel's Star Wars #1, which I believe had somewhere in the neighborhood of 10,000 variants, if I put the comma in the right place.

Looking at that list, I can't help but wonder if maybe DC shouldn't have just published a comic book format "gallery" like they used to occasionally did in the 190s, a tribute to Frank Miller's Dark Knight comics by top creators (If you've seen many of the variant covers, you'll notice none are specific to this new series, of which only one issue has been released, after all, but to the original Dark Knight Returns series).

It's a very strong line-up, including some of my favorite artists--

--and at least one from an artist I never would have expected to produce a variant cover for a prestigious DC superhero comics project, Kevin Eastman--

(Although given the fact that it was already announced that Eastman would be contributing variant covers to the upcoming Batman/Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cover, his presence seems much less out-of-left-field than it might have otherwise.)

On the other hand, I'm sure DC is going to make many, many, many times more money publishing a new Miller-attached Dark Knight comic book series with 50-100 variant covers than they would just publishing a Dark Knight Returns tribute gallery book.

The good news is that the book itself is pretty alright, particularly if you view it for what it is--Brian Azzarello and Andy Kubert doing their best Frank Miller impressions in homage to Dark Knight Returns, with an actual Frank Miller mini-comic embedded in the middle of it. Also, there was at least one incredibly shocking moment in the book, something I never expected to see in a DC comic book. Not because it was over-the-top or anything (it's not; it's a perfectly natural thing, really), but given the particular character and the fact that what she's doing is still deemed "controversial" in some circles, I was surprised to see it appear here, and in the way it appeared.

Anyway, I'm sure I'll be talking in greater length and with (hopefully) greater insight on the book at some point later in the very near future. In the mean time, I just wanted to point out that Good God that is so many variants! and, while I generally think variants are a pox upon the industry, it is at least nice to know that it lead to so many great images from so many great artists, like those whose work is pictured above.

Forgive me; I neglected to mention Ice Cream Kitty.

In my enthusiasm about the version of Casey Jones that was introduced during the second season of the current Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles television show yesterday, I completely forgot to mention the other new character introduced during season two who would become a member of the Turtles' family.

It is, by far, the weirdest mutant in any iteration of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, which, considering some of the character introduced over the decades, is a pretty bold statement, I realize. I am, of course, referring to Ice Cream Kitty.

Ice Cream Kitty was once an ordinary stray cat, lurking around the background of various episodes until season two's episode "Of Rats and Men," in which The Rat King returns and attempts to take over the city with an army of giant rats. In one scene, April brings the stray cat to the Turltes' lair, and asks Michelangelo to watch it for a moment. I was fairly certain it was going to end up being the cartoon version of Klunk...until it licks some spilled ice cream of Michelangelo's, and then some mutagen and began to grotesquely disintegrate (Mutagen must be delicious, based on how often it gets licked by animals in this show). Luckily for the cat, falling apart was just part of its mutation, and it then transformed into, um, Ice Cream Kitty—a cat made of ice cream.

It became Mikey's pet, and he stored it in the Turtles' freezer, where it would generally cameo whenever someone needed to get something out of the freezer. When the Turtles flee the city at the end of the season, Ice Cream Kitty comes along—in a cooler.

The above image is actually from season three, during a scene in "Buried Secrets" where Michaelangelo opens up to it while making a cherry-topped whip cream turban for Ice Cream Kitty.

Kevin Eastman apparently voiced Ice Cream Kitty (whose dialogue is limited to "meow"), although I noticed he didn't get a voice credit during any of the episodes in season three. If he did continue voicing Ice Cream Kitty after the mutant's first appearance, Eastman does a pretty good cat impression, as Ice Cream Kitty would hiss, yowl and make various other cat noises beyond the standard meow in season three.

Review: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Vol. 7: City Fall Part 2

This volume collects IDW's Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles #25-#28, wrapping up the seven-part "City Fall" story arc*, in so much that it collects the last issue labeled as part of "City Fall"...the story arc is here a sort of false construct, as the narrative just sort of bleeds from one issue to another, only the most minor of the sub-conflicts ever seeing real resolution. As serial comics go, IDW's TMNT has been truly serial...probably more serial than most.

The previous volume ended with a dramatic showdown between our heroes and the villains, in which Splinter and the Turtles discovered that The Shredder and his allies were able to "flip" Leonarod through magical brainwashing; making him a loyal warrior serving the interests of the Foot Clan (and trading in his good buy blue mask for a bad guy black one).

In this back-half of "City Fall"—still scripted by Tom Waltz from a plot by Waltz, TMNT co-creator and cover artist Kevin Eastman and TMNT editor Bobby Curnow and drawn by Mateus Santolouco—the now evil Leonardo has joined forces with The Shredder's granddaughter Karai to lead the Foot Clan in their war with rival martial arts criminal organization, The Savate. As fiercely as Leonardo may fight for the Foot, he still has a line he won't cross; he doesn't kill his foes, which causes Karai to doubt his loyalty, but Shredder doesn't want to push his new disciple too far, for fear of breaking the spell.

While the Savate and Foot fight, our heroes engage in their own little sub-plots, as Waltz and company maneuver everyone into another big, volume-closing clash. Raphael gets out of control, and tries threatening and roughing up thugs and dirty cops for information on Leonardo and The Foot. Michelangelo conducts undercover work as a pizza delivery man. Casey Jones is in the hospital, still healing from The Shredder's blow to his interior organs in the previous volume, tended to by April O'Neil (who kisses him, consummating their romantic status) and, occasionally, his friend Angel, a former Purple Dragon gang member.

Meanwhile, Splinter seeks an unlikely ally in Hob, who offers his help in exchange for a favor (He wants Splinter to steal him some mutagen with which he can begin to build a mutant army), Donatello seeks some high-tech gear from his irritable inventor friend to help them fight the Foot and the ghost of the Turtles' mother—a human woman, as in this version of the story, the Turltes are reincarnations of the human children of the human man that Splinter is a reincarnation of—picks at Leonardo's brainwashing, trying to awaken him.

And, in the oddest twist, Casey's abusive, alcoholic father decides to quite drinking cold turkey, rips off his shirt and pretty much immediately turns into Hun in a transformation more rapid than any mutation so far in the series...although there is an asterisk and a footnote saying to "See TMNT Villain Micro-Series #6: Hun" in one panel, so perhaps that explains how Hun grows a few feet and loses about 20 years in a matter of pages.

Hun, by the way, was a character created especially for the second TMNT animated series, the one that ran from 2003-2009. He was the leader of The Purple Dragons, and served as one of the primary villains. He was introduced into Mirage comics continuity in 2008's Tales of The TMNT #56, where he was a criminal who had a particular enmity toward Casey Jones, Casey having scarred and blinded him when Hun attacked him; this is his introduction into the IDW series...although I guess he's kinda sorta been in it all along, just in a different form and under a different name.

It all culminates in an abandoned theater, where The Shredder calls together all of the criminals in New York City (with even Storm and Walter White attending; see below) in order to execute the leader of the Savate in front of them all to prove he's the undisputed kingpin of crime now.

And then Splinter and the Turltes attack, and Waltz, Santolouco and company introduce wave after wave of characters into an escalating battle that fills about 25 pages at the back of the book; that's a pretty respectable amount of action for an American comic book.

The Shredder, Karai, Alopex, Brainwashed Leonardo, The Foot Clan, Hun and a bunch of criminals are all present when Splinter, The Turtles, April, Casey, Angel, Hob, Slash and Casey attack. As the battle starts to favor the Turtles, the creators throw in a suprrise: Bebop and Rocksteady, the mutant warthog and rhinoceros who were bumbling henchmen in the original TMNT cartoon series, now presented as bigger, scarier antagonists, and a genuine threat (The fact that Santolouco draws them gigantic, pretty much proportionate to the Turltes helps; as does the creators giving them a chainsaw and sledgehammer to fight with, although the weapons are dwarfed by their massive hands.

Eastman's variant cover gives a pretty good indication of just how many players there are in this fight scene:

It's essentially the same ending as that of the previous volume—a tie between the two sides, both of which withdraw—only this time the good guys get Leonardo. And Alopex, who defects mid-battle, leaping on The Shredder when he's about to kill Splinter.

As the heroes escape, April mentions that she knows a place where they can hide out while they heal from their wounds. The last panel includes a next-issue box reading, "Next: Northampton," which is, incidentally, the name of the very next collection. Echoing the events of the original volume of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles comics, April, Casey, Splinter and the Turtles retreat to Northampton after a particularly vicious battle with Shredder and The Foot Clan.

As climaxes go, this is certainly a good one, as Waltz and company manage to get almost every character to appear in the series so far in the same room to duke it out with one another.

Putting both Hun from the 2003 cartoon and Rocksteady and Bebop from the 1987 cartoon into a Turtles comic book at pretty much the same time does feel a little forced and uncomfortable; I suppose it will remain to be seen how they work out, but, at least as read in the trade collections, it seems like fan-service (of the nostalgic type, rather than the manga meaning of the term) has overtaken overall quality plotting and storytelling (Alopex's conversion similarly comes out of nowhere...at least, from what is evident in this comic; IDW does tend to leave out parts of the overarching story if its told in one-shots, miniseries or specials of any kind).

At least Santolouco manages to draw the living hell out of Rocksteady and Bebop, making them distinct enough from their bufoonish original incarnations that they seem new here.



*According to the copy on the back cover, this is "The biggest event in TMNT history," which can't possibly be true. Even if they want to define "TMNT history" as whatever happens in the comic books, well, the first volume of the series concluded with a 13-issue story that nearly doubles the length of this one. That story, by the way, was called "City At War" and seems to have inspired the title of this story arc, if nothing else.

Review: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Vol. 6: City Fall Part 1

One often frustrating aspect of IDW's Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles comics is co-creator Keven Eastman's heavy involvement in the series, which he has earned co-plotting credits for since its launch, and has always provided covers for (and sometimes even breakdowns for the interior art). Sure, he's only one voice in the mix—one of several writers contributing to the plots or stories–but his presence is important, an unspoken but powerfully communicated endorsement of everything going on in IDW's series. And that series has featured a dramatic reinvention of the characters and their story (the most dramatic reinvention in comics, outside of Archie Comics' based-on-the-cartoon comics series Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Adventures).

As puzzling as some of the creative choices might seem to readers, and as poor as particular aspects of particular issues might seem here or there, Eastman seems cool with it. And these characters are all his creations—well, co-creations, anyway—so whether he owns and controls them anymore or not (not; they're Viacom's now), if he's okay with whatever IDW's doing in any given comic, well, who are we to get too bent out of shape?

That said, I've been pretty uncomfortable with a lot of aspects of the reboot, perhaps most particularly on its reliance for the original animated adaptation as a source of inspiration...hell, it's prime source of inspiration. Other aspects of the reboot, like Splinter, the Turtles and Shredder all being reincarnated ninjas from feudal Japan, for example, and Casey Jones being a teenager whose abusive father is the Purple Dragon gangleader, well...I'm still struggling to get used to that stuff.

This particular volume collects four issues of IDW's TMNT ongoing series (#21-#24), but the title story doesn't begin until the second of those issues, #22. Before that comes Eastman's heaviest contribution to the series so far, #21. Eastman not only co-plots it with two others (Bobby Curnow, who is also the series' editor, and Tom Waltz, who scripts each issue), he also provides all of the interior artwork.

That is, of course, a treat. I've liked Eastman's art, and been a fan of it, for as long as I've liked comic books, and while he's refined that style over the years, it hasn't evolved into something new and unrecognizable, nor has it dulled at all. The word "gritty" is overused when discussing action comics, which usually use it to describe the tone of the stories, but the word really applies to Eastman's artwork—full with little flecks of ink and bits of crosshatching, theirs a texture to the work. It's easy to imagine running ones hands over the original pages and feeling the patches and bumps of ink, or holding the original page up and finding it heavier than it should be.

In addition to always enjoying Eastman's visual contributions to IDW's TMNT comics, I also find them amusing. Eastman draws the characters in his own style, the way he's always drawn them, regardless of their new designs. His ninja turtles are all identical, they're all pupil-less, and they wear the same kneepads and elbow-pads they've been wearing since the late '80s, while the IDW artists distinguish the characters pretty widely, and have their arms, legs, hands and feet wrapped like those of fighters, rather than wearing any kind of pads.

Eastman's Splinter still looks like a pupil-ess, shaggy little werewolf, while the other artists draw him taller, with shorter hair, and with a shorter snout and a long goatee and fu manchu mustache. Eastman's Casey looks like he's always looked—that is, a grown-up—rather than a teenager, and his Shredder looks like his Shredder, not IDW's.

I suppose it makes sense that Eastman would just draw his characters how he wants, just as it makes sense that Curnow and/or IDW would let him do as he pleased to keep him happy. In the first volume of Turtles, when Eastman and Laird were both drawing and, later, when they would be joined by their studio-mates, their designs and depictions of the characters changed rather dramatically, and, eventually, different artists would be drawing disconnected stories on an almost issue by issue basis.

Here, however, it's somewhat jarring, as unlike the original Mirage TMNT series, IDW's series has told one big, long, serial story; groups of issues sometimes have individual names and form story arcs, but they all bleed into one another, with no conflict ever being resolved so much as being continued.

That all-Eastman issue is a bit of a tour de force for the artist, as a good 17 of its 22 pages consist of nothing more than fighting. And Eastman manages to pack a lot of action into so relatively few pages, a more remarkable feat still when one considers it contains two single-page splashes and a single two-page splash. How does he accomplish it? With panels; lots and lots of little panels.

Several pages have more than 12 panels on them, allowing the characters to really fight, as in trading blows and so forth. Despite the fact that so much of American super-comics and action genre comics tend to revolve around fighting, there's generally precious little actual action in them; here, at least, there is.

The plot of the story is thin, but then, it's really just a showcase for Eastman. The title characters are on a rooftop and about to head home for the night when they are suddenly attacked by a mysterious robed and hooded figure in a clown face mask, a figure with unnaturally bent legs, suggesting he's not human under that mask.

The character repeatedly attacks, defeats the Turtles and then retreats; each time employing a different combat style, which he rather irritatingly lectures them about while doing so.

At the end, he removes his mask to reveal...

...it was Splinter all along. Nevermind how he concealed his tail, changed his voice and learned to trash-talk as he did, how did he manage to smoosh that big-ass snout flat under a face-mask made for humans?

The last few pages finally move the mega-plot forward a bit, as they are set in Japan, where The Shredder, his grandaughter Karai and The Foot unearth a casket, within which lies a perfectly preserved, glowing woman in a kimono, a ceremonial fox mask by her side. Shredder calls her "Kitsune," and she'll prove an important character moving forward.

After that issue, artist Mateus Santolouco shows up and "City Fall" proper begins...or, I should say, continues. The first page of the storyline opens with The Shredder and Kitsune back in New York, discussing a group called "The Savate," who dress like Naurto characters and are lead by a brash young man called Victor. They are apparently a rival martial arts gang in NYC who oppose The Foot Clan, and an asterisk helpfully instructs us to "See TMNT Annual #1." That comic was never collected in trade paperback, which kinda/sorta defeats the purpose of trade collections, really. (Similarly, the recently-released Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Turtles In Time collection does not include TMNT Annual 2014, which kicked off the storyline; I reviewed that book briefly here).

So it looks like a gang war is shaping up, and it's to be waged between The Foot and The Savate, with the Turtles and company caught in the middle. But before it comes to that, The Shredder has a reeaallly complicated plan to pull off.

He has Karai and The Foot capture Casey Jones and Raphael but then let Raph escape and summon Splinter and his brothers to help him rescue Casey. April drops the guys off at "the docks," where Shredder meets Karai and Alopex (the fox mutant introduced in IDW's Raphael #1) and then shoves a bladed-gauntlet into Casey's stomach, horribly wounding him. This draws the Turtles out, everyone fights and they try to retreat and get Casey to safety...and, during the melee, Shredder and company capture their true target: Leonardo (Why not just capture him in the first place? I do not know).

They the Foot turn Leonardo over to Kitsune for mystical brainwashing, which leads to a string of guest-artists including Dan Duncan, Ross Campbell, Andy Kuhn, Ben Bates and Eastman himself again, each drawing a two-page spread of a fantasy sequence set inside Leo's brain. Campbell, for example, draws a bunch of Foot Ninja pursuing a mask-less Leo, the ninja spontaneously mutating into hairless, desiccated rat men before a big, scary version of Splinter throws him off a rooftop, only to be rescued by Shredder. Eastman draws Splinter siccing the reanimaed corpses of the other three turtles on Leo, and again Shredder saves him.

Meanwhile, April and Casey's friend Angel, an on-again, off-again member of the Purple Dragons, watch over him at the hospital, and mutant Old Hob and huge mutant turtle Slash offer Splinter and the Turtles their assistance in finding The Foot Clan. They do find The Foot, but they also find the newly brain-washed Leonardo, now decked out in a black bandanna, with black fabric wrapped around his limbs, and sporting a bit of armor and a Shredder-like gauntlet. The guest artist-drawn flashback sequences have flipped Leo's loyalties from Splinter to The Shredder.

Everyone fights, and it ends in a draw. Both sides return to their corners, and The Shredder retains Leonardo, who is now in his thrall.

This volume marks the beginning of Santolouco's stint as regular-ish artist on the series. Unlike the previous artists on IDW's TMNT comic—Dan Duncan drew the first three volumes, Andy Kuhn the foruth and Ben Bates the fifth—Santolouco redesigns the individual Turltes to make them look more distinct from one another, and he leans pretty hard towards the designs of the current, 2012-launched television cartoon (perhaps by directive, rather than choice).

So now Donatello is a head taller than Raphael and Leonardo, and somewhat lankier; he even has a gap in his teeth. Michaelangelo is almost a head shorter than Raph and Leo, and his bandanna is noticeably shorter than those of his brothers, leaving hardly any "tail" flowing behind his head; they all have much rounder heads now, and resemble compromises between the designs of the TV show and Duncan and company's earlier Turtles.

He draws them well, and draws all of the other characters well as too—I'm not fond of some of the designs, like that of Slash or The Savate, but he inherited those—but it's a pretty jarring change from what came before.

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Despite the unfortunate tendency to not collect important parts of the stories just because they get published outside of the main title, the trades really are the best way to read IDW's TMNT comic. After all, if you read the issues serially, you'd only be able to get one cover, and thus miss out on Eastman's often quite awesome covers, or the many awesome variant covers from great, usually unexpected artists.

Like, for example, have you ever wondered what Dean Haspiel's Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles might look like? Wonder no more!

There's definitely something weird going on with the way he draws their shells at the crotch.

Or hey, remember how great those first issues of the the latest volume of Marvel's Moon Knight series were? Did you find yourself wondering what artist Declan Shalvey's Shredder and The Foot Clan might look like? Behold!

I feel like there may be some sort of Foot Clan/Declan joke to be made, but I can't quite find it.