Last month, we ended the excellent (but somewhat uneven) Leatherhead story arc with another cliffhanger. This week, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles #59 reveals just how we got to the chaotic scene that our heroes in a half shell found after making it home.
Is it good?
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles #59 (IDW Publishing)
Observations
- Flashback to Shredder’s tomb. That’s probably a sign or something.
- When your evil house guest/prisoner starts painting stuff like that, it should probably raise some red flags.
- Much as I hated Jennika’s introduction, I have to admit that she’s grown on me a bit.
- Seriously, Splinter? How could you not see this coming?
Is It Good?
If we’re just talking about art, then yes. David Wachter draws some excellent action sequences. Also, his rendering of Alopex might be my favorite one in the series so far.
But then we get to the story, which is plagued by convenient ignorance and coincidence. It’s bad enough that Splinter had the coming attack all but spelled out for him. Part of me hoped he was just playing it cool and actually knew what was up, but that proved not to be the case when he immediately sent away the two people who could have helped him.
And then you have Kitsune, who might as well have made t-shirts proclaiming ‘I’M GOING TO BETRAY SPLINTER!’ As if that weren’t bad enough, she also pulls the classic ‘leave your opponent lying on the ground without checking that they’re dead’ move. C’mon Tom Waltz, you’re better than that.
KITSUNE ATTACKS WITH HER MIGHTY HAMMER OF FORESHADOWING!
We also get a major character ‘death’ at the end, which will likely be retconned and/or revealed to be a non-fatal wound by next issue. It’s something you pretty much have to expect and accept from major franchise comics, but we’re still a bit too close to the Donatello Incident for this to have much of an impact.
On the plus side, however, Jennika gets less and less worthless every time we see her. And like I said before, the action scenes in this one are fantastic. I’m also interested to see what Kitsune does with the item(s) she took, although the end result of her endeavors seems pretty obvious. Let’s hope that next issue can sweep aside all the plot holes and give us good old fashion mutant-ninja melee.
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