I’ve got to say, I absolutely love the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Well duh, right? I’m a red-blooded American male in his 20-30’s who grew up with the antics of Mike, Leo, Don, & Raph. That being said, I can’t really watch any of the original cartoon (aside from the earliest episodes) without realizing nostalgia is better left as such. After I outgrew the turtles though, I discovered their adventures on the printed page and fell in love all over again. These much more violent (I’m not going to say mature, because come on) tales made me realize that the Turtles were highly adaptable, and there is room for multiple interpretations of the characters (Michael Bay notwithstanding). With that in mind, when IDW launched their new comic version of the TMNT, I was intrigued. The main reason for this is that while things are somewhat drastically different in the IDW-verse, there are many concepts that stay true to my childhood & adolescent memories, or even improves on them, which brings us to TMNT Micro-Series #7.
Ostensibly taking place between issues #12 & #13 of the main series, the issues opens with the Turtles along with April riding in her van. It’s a nice shot that establishes the current status quo. It would be a perfectly serviceable story if it just focus on the turtles and their current lot in life, but since this one-shot focuses on April, she gets to shine. Some worrying from Donatello galvanizes April to go to Stockgen, and disable anything that Baxter Stockman & Krang may be using to track the turtles. It’s a long story, see the current series to catch up.
This version of April is a scientist, but she’s no slouch in the action department either. She infiltrates her work, finds out that Stockgen is much more evil than it turns out to be. Using guile, pluck, some fighting skills learned from Casey Jones along with pure luck, April manages to escape from the evil lab with her mission accomplished and her skin intact. It’s a fine story (Barbara Kesel knows her way around a script), but those aspects are not why I love this book. I’ll tell you, but it’s kind of spoiler-y, so I’m going to giver some spoiler space before i reveal it.
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OK. Still here? Good. This issue not only introduces a version of Slash, the “Evil Turtle From Dimension X”, it actually makes him a plausible character, and one whose continuing story I really want to know more about. You see, during April’s shenanigans, she caused a power outage. During this outage, there are a few obvious looking cloning chambers. I don’t know if that’s what they actually are, but let’s go with it. Anyway, due to the outage, the tanks fail. It’s unknown what happens to the majority of the tanks, but out of one, a very turtle-y creature appears. He’s probably not all there though, again, due to the fact the the cloning (or whatever) process wasn’t complete. The emerging turtle has deformed fingernails, which could be considered claws, two different colored eyes, and a penchant for palm trees. That last bit could be considered silly, as it was a hangup of Slash from the 80’s cartoon, but in this incarnation, he seems to have fragmented memories of April caring for the original turtles in their tank (they were originally Stockgen experiments, but April got attached and gave them their names)which happened to have a palm tree. For me, this bit was worth the price of admission alone. TMNT Micro-Series #7 is available now at you local comic shop, and also digitally for $3.99.
From this…
- To this…
