“Yesterday’s” Comic> Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles #7 (Dreamwave)

“Let’s force that Pat Lee guy to pay the writer and artists!”

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles #7

Dreamwave Productions (December, 2003)

FINAL ISSUE because Pat Lee spent the company’s money on fancy cars for himself and his family and couldn’t pay the writers and artists, so the company died here.

“Kali Flower”

WRITER: Peter David

PENCILER: Lesean

INKER: Erik Sander

COLORISTS: Stuart ng, Jono Im Lee, & Sigmund Torre

FLATS: Kenny Li

LETTERER: Matt Moylan

Dheeraj beat the bad guys and got the girl. The story should be over, but now he’s going to be drawn into a sequel. The Thoogs want a fighter that good on their side, and they plan to force him to join by sacrificing Java to Kali in hopes of summoning her. Learning of this, Leo and his brothers use the theater the Thoogs are operating out of to put on a show of their own, pretending to be Kali and threatening them to never attempt to summon “her” again. Java’s not sure what the shell happened, but she’s safe and back with Dheeraj, who know at least some of what happened.

What they got right: I’m glad they got to finish this story before Dreamwave went belly up. There’s even a teaser for the next story that we’ll never see. The art style is even closer to the cartoon, and I would have liked to have seen if that got better as the title went on. It’s a good follow-up, though the Turtles take center stage (no pun intended) over Dheeraj in this one. It is their comic, after all. We even get Casey and April making appearances so as an accidental last issue we got to see all the good guys.

What they got wrong: Not paying the creators for one thing. Pat Lee’s a real jerk. They also had to get in that one running gag the 2003 show did with not letting Michaelangelo use his surfer boy catch phrase from the 1987 cartoon. I never liked that gag. Either don’t use the catch phrase or let him use it. At least it wasn’t some stupid gibberish like “bookalakasha” or whatever the shell 2012 series had him saying.

What I think overall: The comic was just finally finding its stride when Dreamwave was killed, and that’s the biggest shame here. Dreamwave had great creators that were treated poorly. This comic, Megaman, and Transformers had some of my favorite stories featuring these characters, Megaman’s adaptation errors aside. I’m sorry this didn’t get to continue, and I wonder if the teased next issue, where Baxter’s computer goes sentient and seeks revenge on the Turtles for trashing the mousers, would have been any good? The episode adaptations weren’t that great, but I do recommend the original stories if you were a fan of the 2003 cartoon or just the Ninja Turtles. Sad there weren’t more of them.