Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Ultimate Collection, Vol. 3

It's surprising, looking at the original Mirage turtles run, just how insubstantial the "original turtles run" actually is. You have a VERY indie comic parody of Frank Miller, followed by a VERY indie series of screwball sci-fi stories, followed by a (successful) attempt at serious storytelling when the Turtles are run out of NY, a year and a half real-time of goofy, anthology-style guest stories of generally middling entertainment value and wildly varying tone, a (successful) return to serious storytelling as they come back to NYC, SEVERAL years more of goofy, anthology-style guest stories of generally middling entertainment value and wildly varying tone, and ending with quite possibly one of the best single story runs in comics with show more the 'City at War' storyline to end the original Turtles.

This volume, 3, is half and half insubstantial nonsense followed by an actually quite good solo guest spot (Eric Talbot, Issue #18) and the very nice Return to New York arc. The back half is why I read these books. The front half is why people skip most of these books. show less

We run out of First Graphic Novels at this point, so I switched over to IDW’s Ultimate Collection, which collect the Color Classics reissues of the original Mirage Comics just like the First Graphic Novels used to. It’s actually pretty appropriate that this is where I ended up switching over, because the last issue of Book IV (#11) was the last issue that Eastman and Laird exclusively did all of the art and writing on together. I’ll talk about this a bit more when we get to the next volume, but Eastman and Laird were starting to get too busy managing the larger phenomenon that Ninja Turtles had become to be as involved in the day-to-day production of the comic as they were up until that point.

The first bunch of issues collected show more here were all written by either Eastman or Laird, but never both.[1] And the quality of these issues was, in this reviewer’s opinion at least… uneven? Not that a shared Eastman and Laird writing credit was without fail always a guarantee of quality, mind you,[2] but it seemed to work out more often than not.

The last three issues in this volume, the “Return to New York” arc were the only in this volume that were written by both Eastman and Laird, and neither had an art credit on any of the three. This arc was noticeably better than the rest of the collection. Though I do have two fairly major complaints about even this arc.

Even though I knew it was coming, I was pretty disappointed with the whole weird worm clone explanation for Shredder's return. Like, he can just be back, guys! Also, the Leo/Raph conflict at the beginning of this arc… I gotta say, I think this has been handled better by nearly every screen adaptation.[3] And the resolution was just kind of… they completely ignored it when Leo, Donnie, and Mikey arrived in New York and kept going like it never happened? Just really not great character writing here, in my opinion. Still, this three-issue arc is easily the best part of this collection. The fights were great, and the Turtles' (especially Leonardo's) grim determination to defeat the returned Shredder was great.

Also I’m finally starting to see why everyone always says the comics are so much darker and more adult. The previous volume was trending that way, though given that parts of it were directly adapted by the first feature film it’s hard to say it was that much of a departure, but from here on out things do get a bit grittier for sure.

NOTES
1. Many of these issues were drawn by whichever of the two wrote them, but a few of them were drawn with credited help due to Eastman and Laird’s increasingly unmanageable schedules. There were even a few issues that weren’t written by either one of them, which this volume has skipped and I believe are largely considered not canon.
2. Just refer back to my review of Book III of the First Graphic Novels for an example.
3. Except for The Next Mutation. I mean, yikes. show less