Today’s Comic> Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles FCBD 2019

The true origin of Raph keeping the red mask? Everyone else got to the other colors first.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Free Comic Book Day 2019

IDW Publishing (May, 2019)

front story (too short to call it the “main story)

STORY: Kevin Eastman, Bobby Curnow, & Tom Waltz

WRITER: Tom Waltz

ARTIST: Dave Wachter

COLORIST: Ronda Pattison

LETTERER: Shawn Lee

EDITOR: Bobby Curnow

“Road To War”

WRITER: Megan Brown

ARTISTS: Damian Couceiro, Michael Dialynas, Dan Duncan, Irene Koh, Andy Kuhn, Ronda Pattison, Brittany Peer, Cris Peter, John Rauch, Brahm Revel, Mateus Santalauca, Cory Smith, Tomi Varga, & Dave Wachter (I hope a typo didn’t slip into all those names.)

The important story is a lead up to issue #94, as the Turtles, Nobody, Casey, and Alophex try to get past Karai’s forces to get an dying Jennika to the hospital. With their way blocked without revealing their identity, Donatello has another plan and heads for the lab. I’m betting this is when Jennika becomes mutated into a Turtle herself, which shows you how far behind I am. I miss this series. There’s so much action for so little space and it does set up what’s going on currently in the comic.

Not that I have a problem with the longer story, a summary of events leading up the current story arc from throughout the entire series to this point as told through the eyes of Aka, one of the mystic siblings that troubled the Turtles during the last story arc I was able to review. The only problem I have here is that the Turtles are depicted with the ooze origin rather than the laboratory origin of the IDW Turtleverse. Otherwise, a great summary given what I know and filling in the parts I don’t currently know.

Yeah, I should have put this on my list of reboots done right. Consider this  #6. Unlike IDW’s Transformers their Turtles have been a really good reboot of the series and I have never had any complaints. If you haven’t been following this series before now and are able to, you need to track down the old issues or the collections and start following this series. The early 2000s cartoon series remains my favorite incarnation but this is easily second place by a hair. It’s that great a series.