“Yesterday’s” Comic> Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Adventures #2

“Didn’t you die last issue?” “Wrong continuity.”

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Adventures #2

Archie Comic Publications (October, 1998)

“Heroes In A Half-Shell!”

SCRIPTS: David Weiss & Patti Howeth

ADAPTATION/PENCILER: Michael Dooney

INKER: Dave Garcia

COLORIST: Barry Grossman

LETTERER: Steve Lavigne

The Turtles manage to beat the robots and finally confront the Shredder, who wants them to join his Foot Clan. They refuse so Shredder sicks the mutated Bebop and Rocksteady on them, but as Donatello notes “the mutations didn’t up their IQs any”. Rescuing their mentor, Shredder’s new plan is to “help” a roboticist named Baxter Stockman build his anti rat “Mouser” robots, which attacks Splinter at the sewers and later April’s apartment. Before that second attack April uses info left on the Mousers after the Turtles save Splinter to find his place of residence just as the Foot plan to off Baxter for knowing too much. Learning where Shredder is keeping the master control, Michaelangelo volunteers to go in alone but gets captured. Hoping to force Shredder to build his new body, Krang helps Mikey escape and destroy the master control. So Shredder hatches a new plan, to get warriors from Dimension X, but two stone warriors only come because they’re pursing a couple of flying hotrods.

What they got right: While not perfect, given that they’re trying to stuff five episodes into three issues means some truncating is necessary. Again, the story beats are there, and we do get the building of the Turtle Van.

What they got wrong: They’re still mixing up dialog, and seeing as too many people seemed to think all four Turtles act and talk like Michaelangelo this just makes things worse. You lose the individual voices of the Turtles when Don is speaking lines clearly meant for Raphael. Also, and this one is on the episode, the story seems to forget that Baxter was being tricked by Shredder and thus wasn’t involved in an attempt to take over the city. The original comic version of Baxter was, but not this version.

What I think overall: Some big errors but still a good version of the Turtles for younger readers without totally ostracizing the original comic fans unless they really hated Fred Wolf and Playmates’ changes. I don’t have the third issue and only the second issue of the ongoing series before getting into movie adaptations and a couple of spinoffs. We’ll start those after the holidays since I’m taking the “Yesterday’s” Comic break before my Christmas break.