Review: Tales of The TMNT #15

When I first saw the cover for Tales of The TMNT #15 (#13 and #14 represent another hole in my collection, if you're wondering), I assumed the story inside must be somehow related to the story from 1990's Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles #30, in which Casey Jones and the Turtles journey to an alternate dimension populated entirely by car racing lunatics who look much like the guy on the cover of this issue (That issue, by the way, was by Rick Veitch, making his return to the title after his three-issue, 1989 story arc, "The River").

That proved not to be the case, as editor Steve Murphy notes in his introduction. That character is "demon hot-rodder Von Clutch," and the headless lady riding shotgun is his girlfriend, Darlin'. They are apparently characters created by Laird and some Mirage co-horts for their "intellectual property development company" Funatix!, Inc.

Okay.

So this issue's credits include a plot by Murphy, Eric Talbot, Jim Lawson and Peter Laird, a script by Murphy, pencils by Lawson and inks by Talbot. The frontspiece is by Fernando Pinto, and features a fairly generic but dynamic image of Michaelangelo diving face-first into a hail of ninja weapons. The narration boxes all concern cars, and, as with the last issue we covered, it doesn't really "work" by the rules the creators have already established for themselves. After all, it's Michaelangelo who narrates the introductory page, saying "...Let me tell you a story.." But when it comes time for the actual story being told, the one that fills up the issue, Casey and April's adopted daughter Shadow is once again the narrator. And, as with the several previous Shadow-centric stories, that narration comes in the form of her journal entries.

She and Casey are taking his meticulously restored and cared for '57 Chevy Bel Aire way out west to where Casey spread Shadow's mother's ashes (in the "City At War" storyline that closed out the original 1984-1993 volume of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles). Michaelanglo, wearing the perfect disguise of a trench coat and hat, is riding along in the backseat.

As they're driving along, Shadow is reading about highway apparitions in an issue of The Fortean Times, and there's a neat bit where Casey harumphs Fortenalia in general, using old man words like hooey and malarkey. Given Casey's life experiences, you think he'd be a bit more open-minded.

"I don't think walkin' talkin' five-foot tall mutant turtles are allowed to be skeptics," Michaelangelo says when Shadow asks him what he thinks, and Casey eventually narrows his skepticism down a little: "I just don't believe in ghosts is all."

Before long, he'll have little choice but to believe, as he runs headlong into a specter the locals at a roadside diner tried to warn him of: Von Clutch, the guy on the cover, who drag-races hapless victims for their souls.

Casey, Shadow and Michaelangelo find themselves racing Von Clutch and Darlin' for their souls, but Shadow has a secret weapon: She found a human skull not far from the side of the road when they made a pit stop, and tosses it to Darlin'. Turns out her intuition was right; it was her skull, and its absence was what was tying her and Von Clutch to this world.

Her head reattached to her body, they ascend to heaven, releasing the souls of all the others Von Clutch has beaten in the past.

As our heroes ride off, one more ghost appears—that of Shadow's mother Gabby.

This is really the best kind of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles story, even if this particular installment is particularly light on Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles—Michaelangelo basically just riding along on Casey and Shadow's adventure. That is, the kind where something random and weird happens to our heroes, putting them in a conflict they can meet and defeat, generally in the space of an issue.

Casey and Michaelangelo are definitely out of their element here, with neither of them getting to raise a weapon, or even do any kind of fighting at all, and Casey appearing mask-less throughout. But the issue does give Lawson ample opportunity to draw cars, engines and motorcycles, things that are apparently among his passions. And the desert landscape makes for a refreshing change of pace from the normal urban (New York) or rural (Northampton) environments most Turtle adventures are set in.

This issue also has a back-up story, a six-pager by Murphy and Lawson once again starring Utrom scientist Professor Obligado.

Entitled "Apocalypse Vow," there's not really much to it at all, although I guess it's part of a series of stories (the introduction says it's a sequel to the story from the previous issue, and it ends with a "To Be Continued...")

The last few pages are sort of interesting, in that they are action scenes involving gunplay and martial arts, but the hero and his enemies are all Utrom aliens...meaning they are all fleshy, basketabll-sized creatures with little tentacles.

Review: Tales of The TMNT #12

It's the further adventures of the Raphael and teenage Shadow team, last seen fighting werewolves together in Tales #7, as they encounter the supernatural.

This issue is written by Steve Murphy and features art by Dario Brizuela over breakdowns by Jim Lawson. There's a big, rather irritating mistake in the transition from the frontspiece opening that all of these issues oepn with and the story itself.

The frontspiece, a rather gorgeous illustration by D'Israeli featuring the four turtles in a Paris sewer, the Eiffel Tower reflected in the rain-slick street, has Raphael narrating, saying "Did I ever tell you abut my first time in Paris? No? Well, then..." before getting to the required "...Let me tell ya a story."

But when the story begins, we have an entirely new narrator, Shadow, who is on an Honors French class trip to Paris, and writing in her journal about how psyched she is to finally be free of Splinter, Casey, April and her uncles.

Not that she actually is, of course. Raphael has stowed away on the plane, buried among packages and luggage, and sent to keep an eye on Shadow.

The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles in Paris, by the way, is a great idea for a Turtles story, given how big, old and exotic the world beneath Paris is; as far as sewers and subterranean environments below major cities go, it's pretty hard to beat that of Paris. Murphy and company, unfortunately, barely scratch the surface of this premise, as Raphael follows Shadow's class as it hits all the major tourist attractions by walking their itinerary beneath them, in the well-marked Paris underground.

It's in one such underground tunnel that Shadow meets someone named Jean-Louise, who has long-ish hair and is wearing a peasant's blouse. He warns her that her uncle should not have come to the city, which is the first she's heard of Raph's presence. Meanwhile, Raphael encounters first a blade-wielding killer known as "The Beast," who cuts him, and then the local version of the cops, who assume the masked giant turtle man is The Beast, and proceed to shoot him.

All parties—Shadow, Raph, The Beast, Jean-Louise the police—reunite in the catacombs for the climax, in which we see The Beast revealed for what it is for the firs time: A guy with huge blades, standing atop the shoulders of another guy (The placement of the logos on the front cover obscure Brizuela's depiction of these blades a bit, but we're essentially seeing a Beast's-eye-view of Shadow and Raph on the cover).

The real Beast catches all the bullets in this encounter, while Jean-Louise disappears after saving Raph and Shadow.

Who was that The Vampire Lestat-looking guy?

Would you believe, a ghost?

It's not the Brizuela's best work on the series (that would be Tales #1), nor is it Murphy's, but this particular issue does play around with some fun ideas. It doesn't make the most out of any of them, certainly, but it is by no means a bad comic, either.

Now let's check in with IDW's Tales of the Teenage Mutant Nina Turtles collections, which are still being colorized...poorly.

IDW's Tales of The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Vol. 4 is the second collection of the comics from the 2004-2010 Tales of The TMNT comic (the one that accompanied the Mirage-published fourth volume of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles comics; IDW's Tales Vol. 1 and Vol. 2 collected the original, late 1980s Tales title). The book contains Tales #5-#8, all of which have been colorized...with the exception of #5, which has to be black-and-white.

That's the Jim Lawson issue in which Leonardo is blinded by an opponent that he himself once blinded in battle, and the entire issue is told in reverse silhouette, with white silhouettes on black fields, as a way of approximating Leonardo's attempts to orient himself and fight without being able to see. It was curiosity about this particular issue that originally lead me to check out IDW's collections of Tales; the publisher has previously colorized every Mirage TMNT story they've collected (with the exception of the Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird issues from the first volume of TMNT in their Ultimate Collection series), and while the coloring generally doesn't do the comics any favors, the black-and-white was so integral to Tales #5, "Blind Faith," that I wanted to see if IDW would simply let that comic be or not.

They did. It is presented in this volume exactly as it is in the original comic, with only the Michael Dooney-drawn frontspiece getting the colorization treatment. You can see some color attached to Leonardo's Foot foe on Lawson's new cover for the collection, however. He's still in silhouette, but here it's a dark, classic silhouette; the lighting on the image is perhaps wonky to accommodate keeping that one character in shadow, but it works. Once again, the conceit of the image is the four ninja turtles squaring off against various foes from the stories within; here the blind Foot ninja from #5, a werewolf from #7, Foot ninja Cha Ocho from #6 and Leatherhead from #8.

I've previously read and reviewed three of these four issues. We've already discussed #5 briefly. The other two I read were #6, "Scars," by Steve Murphy, "Dean Clarrain" and Chris Allan and #7, "Darkness Weaves," by Steve Murphy, Eric Talbot and Jim Lawson.

As for #8, that is "Virus," a Leatherhead story plotted by Dan Berger and Peter Laird, and written and drawn by Berger. It's a pretty direct sequel to TMNT (vol. 1) #45, Berger's previous Leatheread comic (as it's one of the issues I did not get when recently ordering much of the run from Mirage, I'm going to forego reviewing it anywhere until I can get my hands on the original). So let's ignore that altogether for now, and focus on the by now expected godawful coloring choices made in the collection (One again, there is no colorist credited, beyond Joana Lafuente, who gets a "Cover Colors" credit.

As previously stated #5 is unmolested after the frontspiece (which is good...although I notice this trade is still priced at $19.99, or about $5 per originally-$2.95 issue it contains. If the crazy expensive price was to defray the cost of colorizing the comics, one would think this trade at least would be a bit cheaper, as they only had to colorize three of the four issues within).

"Scars" features the most problematic coloring. That's the one detailing the past history between Leonardo and Foot Clan ninja Cha Ocho, who gained his scarred visage via a "lesson" taught to him by Leonardo. He only appeared in color during the Mirage series on the covers, but there it was pretty clear he was meant to be a black man, and though his skin was technically paper-white in the interiors, it was clear that artist Allan was drawing him as a black man there too.

Sure, his face is in shadow there, but if you had to guess whether he was black or white, which would you guess...?

In IDW's colorized version, though? It's a little unclear, as his skin color darkens and lightens from scene to scene. Here are some Cha Ocho headshots, the first of which is from the frontspiece by an uncredited artist, the rest of which are drawn by Allan:

The weirdest change however, comes at the climax. Cha Ocho and Leonardo have been trying to track down the man who (accidentally) killed Ocho's wife several years earlier. When they find the man, they chase him into a church, and Ocho executes him with his sword on the chruch's altar.

We don't see the killing blow cutting into Ocho's victim's flesh; there's just a panel of his sword flashing down at the man, and then a cut to a close-up of of a crucifix, with blood splashing upon it.

In the black and white original, the blood was, of course, white,but here it's been colorized not red, but...cream? Pale pink...?

(Also, check out what the coloring does to Jesus' eyes. In the black and white original, he appears to have his eyes closed; but since the colorist colors Jesus' face a fleshy color but leaves the eyes white, it looks like the Son of God either has pupil-less white eyes like the ninja turtles do when they have their masks on, or that he's wearing very light colored eye make-up. Neither of which is a very good look for Christ.)

One gets the sense that whoever is coloring these collections is looking at the art without reading the comics, or considering what story the art might be attempting to tell. How else does one explain a panel that once showed a man's blood splattering a crucifix now looking instead like someone spilled a milkshake on a crucifix?

It makes other coloring decisions, like giving the Foot Clan brown uniforms rather than the bluish black ones they were clearly wearing at the time seem unimportant.

That issue also originally contained the short back-up story "The Raisin" by Steve Murphy and Jim Lawson, which is here colorized and, as per usual, the coloring looks quite rough over Lawson's heavily inked and textured artwork, which was clearly not meant to have color applied, as well as a pin-up which, oddly enough, is represented in the collection, but is not colorized.

As for the #7, the Raphael-and-Shadow-vs.-Werewolves comic, the most notably weird coloring choice comes on the Michael Dooney-drawn fronstpiece that precedes the story. It shows Shadow in her bedroom, reading her old journal. On the floor is a fluffy toy that appears to be Fluffy, a character in Dooney's own Gizmo comics. Fluffy is white, as one can see on the (color) covers of Gizmo and Gizmo and The Fugitoid.

Here, however, he's pink.

Finally, I was pretty freaked out by the revelation that the one lady cop in "The Raisin" was actually a Utrom wearing an super-advanced, lady-shaped android suit, as revealed in a splash page of a Utrom alien staring out from beneath her breasts.

I'm not sure if the image is more or less terrifying in color...

...I mean, they're both so terrifying; I can't really decide, you know...?

Review: Tales of The TMNT #7

The cover for the seventh issue of Tales of The TMNT is a pretty perfect one in that it tells you exactly what you can expect to find underneath it: Teenage Muntant Ninja Turtle Raphael and teenage girl Shadow fighting werewolves.

The story begins on the rather lovely Michael Dooney-drawn frontspiece, featuring Shadow—the adopted daughter of Casey Jones and April O'Neil, born to Casey's girlfriend Gabrielle in "City At War"—reading a diary she wrote five years ago, when she was a younger, apparently angrier and jerkier teenager (according to her own narration).

The story, "Darkness Weaves," is the story of Shadow's last night as a New Yorker, and it's the work of Steve Murphy, Jim Lawson and Eric Talbot. Murphy writes the script and Lawson handles the pencil art, while Talbot contributes to both, co-plotting the story with Murphy and inking Lawson's pencils. (As I've mentioned before, one thing I really like about the old Mirage comics is the way they are so often created by a group of creators who function a little like a rock band, everyone contributing to everything, just in different capacities or degrees of involvement. Even after Kevin Eastman left, and even on this sister book to the Peter Laird-written TMNT Vol. 4, you see the same small stable of Mirage studio mates working on many of the issues together as a group).

So it's a good five years or so ago, and Casey and April have gone on vacation, leaving Shadow in the care of her grandfather and uncles, Splinter and the Turtles. She's watching videos of her favorite singer Lilith—whose lyrics consists of bad, "dark" poetry in a font I hate—until midnight, at which point she attempts to sneak out of the sewer lair she's staying in. Raphael busts her however, and after some fun banter—I really like the idea of the now older, wiser Raph trying to parent his best friend's almost-grown daughter—she gets sent back to bed.

She eventually manages to ditch Raphael and meet her friend Sloane in the city, where Lilith happens to be playing. Raph trails her to the show, where no one seems all that surprised that the entire audience is female. Hell, even the two security guards are female. After another lame song, Lilith uses some ceremonial-looking knives to cut herself and fill a fancy chalice with her own blood.

It gets passed around for her fans to drink, while a skylight overhead opens, letting the moonlight in and, well, you've seen the cover already, so you can probably guess what happens to the girls who drink her blood.

Luckily for Shadow, she notices everyone turning into werewolves around her before drinking.

That dialogue in the second panel is the best.

Together she and Raph fight some werewolves and, before they can become completely overwhelmed, Shadow's other three uncles arrive.

In the ensuing fight, Shadow accidentally stabs Sloane with a sai, seemingly killing her (although, it wasn't silver...would that work...?), recognizing her mistake only when she hears Sloane say "frig," her favorite swear word, and apparently the only one that appears in the Turtles comics without being represented by a grawlix.

Lilith, herself a werewolf recognizable from the others only by her ankh necklace, swears vengeance against Shadow, and so Shadow is exiled to the Norhthampton farmhouse for her own safety, Splinter relocating there in order to raise her (And that's where we find the pair of them at the opening of TMNT volume four).

The very last panel includes a question mark after the words "The End," and the answer is, of course, no: 2007 miniseries Raphael: Bad Moon Rising by Bill Moulage, Jim Lawson and Eric Talbot would pick up where this issue left off, not unlike Leonardo: Blind Sight spun out of Tales #5 (Bad Moon Rising, by the way, features cover art by TMNT fan and EDILW favorite Ross Campbell; I know IDW is using their own rebooted continuity for their TMNT comics, but man, how great would a series set in the Mirage continuity and featuring the adventures of teenage ninja Shadow and her mutant turtle uncles by Ross Campbell be...?).

As straightforward as the plot and script for Tales #7 may be, it has some witty moments.

And the art is great. Lawson's work may be an acquired taste for some, but I've long ago acquired it and, as I've been working my way through Tales issue by issue, I've noticed that, perhaps because Lawson was drawing the TMNT series at the time (and/or that he's drawn the bulk of all the TMNT comics published), his contributions to the series seem some how more real or official than some of those by other artists.

This issue has little in the way of shading or toning, making for a particularly stark black and white type of black-and-white, more appropriate than usual given the faux goth nature of Lilith as performer, and the supernatural goings-on. While I would have loved to see what this issue might have looked like had it been penciled by Talbot as well (or by Eastman, whose Splinter always looked like more of a scary werewolf than a rat to me), I liked all the thick black he brings to the table drawing board.

There are several scenes in which Raphael appears more as white lines on a black shadow than vice versa...

...which looks particularly compelling when applied to Lawsons rough-hewn, semi-simplistic design for the ninja turtles.

Review: Tales of The TMNT #6

As previously mentioned when discussing the Peter Laird-led fourth volume of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turltes, the characters' co-creator decided to jump some 15 years worth of story time between the end of the second volume of the series and the launch of the fourth volume, having allowed the characters to age in more-or-less real time, and, incidentally, creating a decade and a half worth of "lost years" in which stories could eventually be filled in via flashback.

When the second volume of Tales was launched, filling in the blanks of those lost years became one of the title's main functions. This particular issue does just that, providing the back story of the enmity between Leonardo and Foot Clan ninja Cha Ocho, who appeared early in—and then off and on throughout—the pages of Laird and Lawson's TMNT. At that point, the Foot had honored their post-"City At War" vow to end their feud with the Turtles and had gone more-or-less straight. The Utroms had hired Karai's New York Foot Clan to provide security for them, which brought the Foot and the Turtles into close orbit once again.

For the most part they were cool, save this Cha Ocho person with the diagonal scar across his face; he was still pretty pissed at Leonardo. And this issue of Tales is the story of who he is, and how he came to be so pissed at Leonardo.

Based on editor Steve Murphy's introduction to this issue, the big news of Tales of The TMNT #6 wasn't which characters were featured and what story was being told, but rather who was telling it: Writer Dean Clarrain and artist Chris Allan, the pair responsible for the later, better issues of the Mirage Studios-produced, Archie Comics-published Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Adventures series, which started out as an adaptation of the cartoon show before going off into weird, wild directions all its own.

Murphy wrote that he was always hearing fans asking for the pair to return, almost as often as he was hearing fans asking for their return on the Archie Comics version of the title and/or characters, and that this issue marked a compromise that should please a lot of fans: The pair returned, but to the Mirage version of the Turtles, rather than the Archie version.

(An aside: A few weeks ago, Joe McCulloch discussed the apparently imminent return of Puma Blues in the course of his weekly column at TCJ.com, and, in the course of the piece, mentioned that writer Steve Murphy "subsequently wrote a huge number of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles comics...under the pseudonym 'Dean Clarrain.'" That struck me as tremendously odd, as it was just a few days before I read that particular column of McCulloch's that I read this issue of Tales, in which Murphy wrote about Clarrain. Five to ten minutes of Internet research assured me that McCulloch was right, and that Clarrain and Murphy were one and the same. I've never really understood the use of pseudonyms or pen names myself, probably because I'm so vain—despite the fact that I now kinda sorta wish a great deal of what I wrote in my twenties could now be hidden under a fake byline—but I find it particularly baffling here. Not only does Murphy write about Clarrain as if he were an entirely different person in his introduction, but the credits for this issue credit Murphy with the plot and Clarrain with the script; did Steve Murphy collaborate with himself on this comic...?)

The move to the Mirage Universe allows the creators best-known for their Archie comics to work in a more adult venue. There's a scene where Ocho, as a young boy, and his mother are being mugged in an alley. One of the gang of muggers pulls her purse strap away from her body with his knife, Allan drawing her breasts prominently in the image. "Hmm, nice..." the thug says, "Hey, kid, you're mom's pretty hot."

Later, a man has first his hand and then his head cut off on the altar of a church, blood spray landing on the face of Jesus on the crucifix hanging near by.

And, later, when Leondardo does battle with Cha Ocho, he defeats him with a pocket knife, and then carves a scar into his face, "a mark of shame."

Not exactly the sort of thing you'd expect to see in an Archie comic, or an early '90s TMNT cartoon show, you know?

This issue is basically the life's story of Cha Ocho, beginning with Dan Berger's fronstpiece image, of Cha Ocho peeling an apple with a knife in a grave yard, and then flashing back to his childhood.

As a kid, he and his mom are attacked by the aforementioned muggers after she picks him up from karate practice. Before they can come to any harm, a shadowy figure appears and renders all three armed, would-be muggers unconscious in less than five seconds, without even having to draw one of the two swords he's wearing on his back. This is, of course, Leonardo.

Ocho does not become a ninja turtle when he grows up, but he does become a cop. And, later, when his wife is killed and he's eventually kicked off the cold case for being too emotionally involved, he quits and joins The Foot Clan, during their post-Shredder, Karai-led existence.

It's as a Foot ninja—wearing the later, lamer version of their uniform—that he next encounters Leonardo, who finds him breaking into a police station to retrieve a file. After he explains himself, Leonardo takes Ocho back to the Turtles' sewer lair, and together they begin an investigation to find the murderer of Ocho's wife.

They do, and despite warnings from Splinter and Leonardo, Ocho cuts the more-or-less helpless and remorseful man down, chopping him into a couple of pieces. Leonardo is none too happy about this, and lectures Ocho on the difference between justice and vengeance, and the importance of honor and of the code of bushido.

Ocho calls bullshit on Leo. He doesn't point out that Leo's a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle and not a Teenage Mutant Samurai Turtle, but he does bring up that Leo and his brothers spent most of their lives training to kill Oroku Saki in order to avenge a murder (as we discussed a bit last time).

Leonardo argues that he's learned since then that "vengeance sows the seeds of future sorrow," which sounds about right given the cycle of revenge killings that have caused the Turtles and friends so much grief over the years, and, when Ocho accuses him of acting like he's "God," Leonardo counters that he's "never given much thought to God," which is interesting to me, if only because I wonder about things like the religious beliefs of various comic book heroes I read about (Although, on the previous page, Leo says to Ocho, "I can't believe you killed him, and in a church, no less").

To teach Ocho a lesson, Leo picks up the pocket knife the one-time, accidental murderer of Ocho's wife was using to futilely defend himself, and uses it in a fight against Ocho and his katana. After he defeats Ocho, he marks him with the scar and then disappears, in the same dramatic way he did when Ocho first saw him as a child.

Now I agree with Leonardo that cutting a dude's head off isn't the best way to go about punishing people, even those you hold responsible for something as heinous as killing the love of your life, but hell, I've never been in Ocho's situation, so what do I know? I like that Murphy and/or "Clarrain" make the conflict a good one, with more gray than the black-and-white art its rendered in—Ocho's argument about Leo's hypocrisy is a good one, and jeez, where does Leonardo get off fucking mutilating him just because? (There are additionally a few interesting digs taken at Leonardo regarding his inability to understand how Ocho feels—presumably because as an essentially gender-less member of a tiny, evolutionary dead-end mutant "species," Leonardo will never have a wife to lose).

Allan's art is a particular treat, and it's a kick to see his familiar style from the Archie comic applied to more sophisticated storytelling, complete with better Ninja Turtle character designs (although, much more than in the previous five issues, these Turtles look more like the cartoon/Archie Turtles...with pupils and everything!) and freedom from bad coloring and cheap paper stock.

The black-and-white of this issue is of the purest form, with little shading, no toning and no real grays, all the better to appreciate Allen's linework.

This issue also contains a 10-page back-up by Murphy and artist Jim Lawson called (sigh) "The Raisin," a sequel of sorts to their previous back-up story in #4, "The Grape."

The Utrom who died in a police raid in that story is briefly resurrected by a weird, alien monster that feeds on dead Utroms called a "Morto Mullocos." It is in the process of resurrecting the dead Utrom in order to feed on it, when the same police from the drug raid storm the morgue to capture the beast. And then a group of vigilante Utroms appear on what look like hovering Roombas with laser guns mounted on them to also capture the beast.

During the course of the fight, the female police sergeant gets the front of her shirt completely blasted off...

...which might make for a sorta sexy scene, did it not lead directly to this weird revelation...

I suppose it was only a matter of time before the Utroms made female body suits to walk around in, huh? A squishy, tentacled brain-alien in the abdominal cavity of a lady body, her breasts framing it like curtains, is one weird image, so kudos for that.

Finally, rounding out this pretty full 35 story-page issue, is a pin-up by Chris Herndon and Berger, of the Turtles fighting classic Foot Clan ninja on a speeding garbage truck:

All that, a prose introduction and a two-page letter column for just $2.95. Man, they just don't make Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles comics like they used to, do they...?

Briefly on IDW's Tales of The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Vol. 3

As I've been reading and reviewing my way through volume 2 of Mirage's Tales of The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles series, I figured it was time to check in with IDW's reprint program of the same comics. They have been collecting both volumes of Mirage's old Tales comics—the seven-issue, 1987-1989 volume one and the 70-issue, 2004-2010 volume two—in a single series of colorized trade paperbacks. Their first two collections covered the entire first volume of Tales, while this third collection features the first four issues of the second volume.

As with the previous Tales collections, this one features a new cover by artist Jim Lawson, who drew two of the five stories within (the "Seeds of Destruction" story from #2 and the six-page "The Grape" back-up from #4), and the cover scheme is basically the same as all previous Tales collections, with the various heroes (here, just the Turtles and Splinter) fighting the various bad-guys (one of the worm guys from #1, the Foot mystic from #2, the worm/shark/octopus/Oroku Saki monster from #3 and #4) in a single scene.

There are two changes of note from the original comics being collected.

First, the logo on the cover of this collection is that of the original Tales series, complete with the "Eastman and Laird's" being prominently featured as part of the logo, whereas the issues in this collection all bore the Tales of The TMNT logo, eschewing including the names of the creators and using the "TMNT" acronym, which was more prominently featured in the Turtles title this volume of Tales was tied into (I like the original logo much better, just from a simple design point-of-view).

Also, as with almost all of IDW's TMNT reprints, this collection is colorized...and no one gets a byline for doing the coloring. A Ronda Pattison gets a "cover colors by" credit, but that's it.

In the past, I've noted some strange, usually bad choices made in the colorizing process, but this volume didn't seem to have anything too egregious. The worm men in the first issue are all a fleshy, peach color, similar to that of earthworms, whereas I likely would have went with something closer to white, to reflect their centuries of living in a sunless underground cavern. And the hybrid ex-Shredder monster in "The Worms of Madness" is colored a golden brown, rather than the shark-gray I imagined him to be while reading the black-and-white original story. But these aren't mistakes, just matters of personal preference, I suppose.

This was the only panel that really jumped out at me during a flip-through as being too terribly off:

That's a panel from #3, the first half of "The Worms of Madness" by Steve Murphy, Rick Remender and John Beatty. It's a "cover" panel of one from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles #21, the final issue of the three-part "Return to New York" storyline in which the Turtles finally defeat the back-from-the-dead Shredder, whose helmet is always colored either gray or silver. Here, it's red and gold with a silver face plate, for some reason.

Oh, and there's a weird mistake in this Eric Talbot fronstpiece from the same issue. Check out the point of the sai in Raphael's left hand:

Not sure what that is, but I imagine it was supposed to be taken out before this went to press.

Review: Tales of The TMNT #5

The fifth issue of Tales of The TMNT proved a rather brilliant offering, one that's not only one of the best issues of that particular series I've read, but also one of the better Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles stories I've read, period. There's certainly a degree of gimmickry here, the book's form being quite unusual in its construction, but that form is also perfectly suited to the story being told. It fits perfectly with the ninja/martial arts aspect of the characters, and even the characters' origins as a reaction to Frank Miller's Daredevil comics, featuring the blind, ninja-fighting vigilante. Hell, it even makes perfect use of one of the TMNT comics' signature attributes: The fact that they're black and white.

Jim Lawson is the creator responsible, earning not only a credit for pencils, but also a solo credit for story. Peter Laird, who often shares story credits with editor Steve Murphy on this volume of Tales comics, provides the lettering and inks, although the book is so black and white, it's difficult to tell what's penciled and what's inked, or how the images were made, exactly.

Michael Dooney provides the obligatory "frontspiece" image, of Leonardo comforting a frightened Shadow, who is still a young child and who apparently just woke up from a bad dream, in her bedroom by flashlight. After that, the book is all Lawson and Laird, and told in the reverse silhouette style he employed in one of the short stories included in his Paleo comic.

That is, every panel of the story is a simple field of black, and the characters and pieces of their environment appear only as white silhouettes. These extend from the borders of the panels, which are placed upon bright, white pages, free of the gloss you find on many modern comics pages.

There are only two characters in the story, plus a third who at first seems quite incidental. We never see them as anything other than outlines in the black, however. As this is Lawson, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles artist, his Leonardo is completely recognizable, despite the fact that we never see any details (If you've read enough Turtles comics, then you know exactly how Lawson's Turltes look in profile, or the shape of their hands or Leon's sword handles, etc). His foe, a blind Foot ninja, is more mysterious in apperance; not only faceless, but completely featureless. We can see his shape, we know he's wearing a hat and can identify his weapons, but that's all we can really see of him.

The premise is pretty simple. "It's the last thing I saw..." Leonardo narrates, "...a cloud of tetsu-bishi...followed by the caltrops piercing my skin."

Leonardo's Foot foe hits him with a a score of little pointy projectiles, all covered in poison. It's not a lethal poison though, it merely blinds him. His opponent then waits for the blind Leonardo to realize what's happening and get to his feet, and then the battle resumes. Almost halfway through, the Foot ninja explains what's going on. In a previous battle, he was blinded by Leonardo—a battle that Leonardo doesn't even remember, he and his brothers have cut down so many Foot Clan ninja over the years—and the ninja was demoted to a weapon-polisher. He trained in secret though, until he became a master of blind-fighting.

He's back for a rematch, first stealing Leonardo's sight.

So the art is meant to evoke the way to the two character's "see" one another, themselves and their surroundings. They are good enough that they get the shape of things, they know who's who and what's where, but obviously they can't make out the details, like, for example, what colors their opponents are wearing, or the texture of a fence and so on.

Leonardo's narration, which tells most of the story that the art doesn't, appears in small, thin, white lettering, with no narration boxes; the letters reflect the look and feel of the art. What little dialogue there is in the story is similarly lettered white, the dialogue bubbles black with thin, white outlines giving them shape.

There's a sudden, sharp twist at the end that's strong enough to derail the story and even shock the reader, as the artwork lies to us in the way that Leonardo's senses lie to him, and he discovers too late that he was "reading" something wrong. With the transition of one panel tot he next, the silhouettes are altered slightly as Lawson's image reflects the sudden, too-late correction that Leonardo makes.

Our hero is handed an unequivocal, staggering defeat, even though he survives—as does his foe. The defeat is made all the more shocking and unusual given how abrupt the ending is. At the risk of spoiling such an old story, Leonardo attempts to finish off his foe, and finds out that he's actually run through an innocent bystander.

Surely he's not entirely responsible for the murder, as he was clearly manipulated into stabbing the guy—that was, after all, his foe's plan all along—but whatever the circumstances, Leonardo stabs an innocent man to death. And he only finds himself in this situation at all because of a previous fight that meant so little to him he doesn't even remember it.

The story probably seemed more powerful still because of how unusual it is to read comics of this sort in which the heroes regularly, readily kill their opponents—something few superheroes do, let alone similar characters who have been the basis for so much children's entertainment and merchandise over the last 30 years or so.

It can be difficult to remember that the Turtles are basically assassins with a seriously fucked-up, almost supervillainous origin story. They were trained from birth—well, from mutation—by their mentor and father figure for the sole purpose of carrying out the revenge killing of the guy who killed their master's master...because their master's master killed the brother of the guy who killed their master's master...because the brother of the guy who killed their master's master killed the lover of their master's master. Have I got all that right?

Anyway, the Turtles were bred for 15 years to kill Oroku Saki, The Shredder because he killed Hamato Yoshi, Splinter's owner/sensei-of-a-sort. In the process, they killed a whole bunch of Saki's ninja followers. That tends to get down-played in pretty much every Turtles story in every medium outside the very earliest comics.

Lawson remembers that aspect though, and uses it to fuel this pretty great done-in-one meditation on the destructive cycle of violence and vengeance that the Turtles are a part of.

I'm obviously not the only person impressed with the issue. Two years later, Lawson would continue the story started here in a special four-issue miniseries, entitled Tales of Leonardo: Blind Sight.