Caleb's one-man book club: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Adventures Vol. 2

As I mentioned in the last post, the Archie Comics-published Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Adventures #5 is where Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Adventures really becomes the comic people talk about when they talk about Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Adventures. It is with that issue that Mirage Studios' Ryan Brown and Stephen Murphy (writing as "Dean Clarrain," which is how I'll be referring to him) come aboard as co-plotters, with Clarrian handling the scripts. This is also where the comic stops adapting scripts of the TV show, and thus begins to branch off in its own direction. As we'll see from the next handful of issues, #5-8, some of these seem like they could have been episodes of the TV cartoon, but the divergence between the two accelerates rather rapidly, and eventually Adventures becomes something of a cross between the cartoon continuity and Mirage's Tales of The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

For the purposes of this post, I'll be reading IDW Publishing's Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Adventures Vol. 2, published in 2012. The collection again features an original cover, this time provided by Jim Lawson, the artist who has probably drawn more panels and pages of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles than any other. Pictured behind the Turtles on his cover are four characters who appear in these issues, some of whom will become recurring characters in Archie's TMNT comics and their spin-offs. From left to right they are Cryin' Houn', Man Ray, Leatherhead and Wingnut.

The cover for issue #5 is by Ken Mitchroney and Dave Garcia, who continue as pencil artist and inker with this issue. It's a pretty dramatic cover, featuring without revealing the new mutant that is introduced within its pages, and also depicting Raphael and The Shredder in what appears to be actual combat, with their weapons and everything!

The issue opens on July 3 at Burroughs Aquarium in New Jersey, where the Turtles are wearing terrible disguises that make their usual trench coats and wide-brimmed hats seem effective. They're basically just wearing human clothing and hats, so I guess if someone saw them, they would just assume they were four green-skinned, nose-less hunchbacks...? At any rate, while they are marveling over a manta ray, a man who seems extremely excited about rays comes up and talks to them about how cool rays are for a little bit, how they are threatened by pollution, and then kicks them out; he apparently works there.

It may be worth noting again here that Clarrain wrote the late 1980s independent comic series Puma Blues with Michael Zulli, and in the near-future world of that book, a new species of flying manta rays played a significant role. Clarrain too, it seems, is pretty into rays.

The Turtles decide to walk back to New York City along the shoreline, unaware that just off the coast The Shredder, Bebop and Rocksteady are in a submarine shaped like an angry fish. Krang, who apparently let the two henchmutants join Shredder back on Earth after all, is having a Zoom meeting with Shredder, berating him for spilling a barrel of mutagen into the sewer, something Shredder says was actually Bebop and Rocksteady's fault.

Mutagen, of course, is the stuff that mutates humans into the last animal they touched...and, I guess, animals into anthropomorphic animals, if they had recently touched a human...? Anyway, mutagen in the sewer is how Shredder and the Krang got the Turtles in the first place, so yeah, they probably want to not spill any more of that in the sewer.

Meanwhile, the man from the aquarium pats the manta ray good night...

...and then goes off to engage in what he calls "some real work"; investigating a sewer pipe that discharges into the ocean for signs of pollution, as he suspects there are multiple violators. He's talking into a mini-cassette recorder this whole time, by the way, so there's an excuse to be talking out loud/to the reader.

In the pipe he sees a bright green gel that he touches, and then suddenly there's a rumble in the pipe and a sudden deluge of water shoots him into the sea.

You can probably guess what that gel was.

The Turtles have since doffed their disguises, and once again are nude save for their masks, as God and Eastman and Laird intended. They are frolicking on the beach when they are sighted by their foes on the submarine, who fire a torpedo. But before the torpedo can strike, large fins of some kind emerge from the water and flip it around, sending it back at the sub. The bad guys take the sub back to their secret dock in the sewers, where the Turtles manage to stumble upon it and stowaway on it, unaware that a new player already knows Shredder's plans to blow up the Statue of Liberty during the July 4th fireworks for, um, some reason, and is making moves to stop him.

After a brief tussle with Rocksteady and Bebop leads to the sub's sinking—Rocksteady's horn pierces the hull at one point—The Shredder seeks to escape, but runs right into...

...Man Ray!

After teasing the reader by showing mere snippets of the new mutant—his head in silhouette, his spade-like tail as he dives into the water, his hands in a sequence of POV images—the creators finally reveal him in this dramatic splash page. Yes, the guy from the aquarium was mutated into a pretty-ripped manta ray man. Not sure where he found a green and yellow unitard with matching boots and wristbands but hell, maybe the mutagen mutated his clothes into these new clothes...?

I wasn't sure why the character chose that particular new, mutant name for himself, but it puzzled me for years...not even a hyphen, like, say Man-Bat or Man-Wolf or Man-Thing...? It puzzled me until I got to college and learned there was a pretty prominent artist by the name of Man Ray (short for Emmanuel Radnitzky). I can only imagine how many of Clarrain and company's audience of children got the reference in 1989.

Ray and Shredder have a brief but dramatic battle beneath the sea, until Ray pulls out the tubes that are providing Shredder with oxygen and drags him to the beach. Shredder responds by kicking sand in Ray's face and running away, at which point the Turtles, who are more-or-less incidental to the plot of this issue, show up and briefly meet Ray.

He can't stay out of water long, and thus disappears beneath the waves. We'll see him again in the future, though; he's one of the several original mutant characters that are created during this series and will eventually end up forming their own super-team and getting their own comic as The Mighty Mutanimals.

Man Ray would get his own action figure in 1990...sort of. The toy version was named "Ray Filet." He seems to have had the he same origin and basic look as Man Ray (although he came packaged with plastic sidekicks/accessories Fish Stix and Scarfish). Like most TMNT characters from all other media, Man Ray eventually showed up in IDW's fifth volume of TMNT. While the spandex and color scheme leave something to be desired, I think I prefer the manta ray-man look of Archie's Man Ray to the less ray-like version that would show up in IDW's TMNT comics.

This next issue is pretty interesting, as it introduces another new mutant character into the series, but this one also existed as a toy and a character on the cartoon series...but also also existed as a Mirage Studios character before those incarnations, and he was the creation of Ryan Brown, who again plots this issue. That character is the mutant alligator Leatherhead.

Leatherheads's first appearance was in 1988's Tales of The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles #6, the penultimate issue of the series. Brown created the character and inked that issue, over Lawson's pencils. This original version of the character was a baby alligator that a pair of the Utrom aliens found in the New York City sewer system, and brought back to their secret headquarters in the TCRI building. Exposed to their mutagen, the same stuff that mutated Splinter and the Turtles, that alligator became an alligator-man, and worked with the Utroms until they transmatted away from Earth, leaving him all alone.

When the Turtles found him, he was being pursued by an evil big game hunter. Allying themselves with him, they let him move into their old, abandoned sewer lair.

Not long after, in 1989, Leatherhead showed up in the TMNT toy line and on the cartoon, and in both of those incarnations he was now a bad guy, allied with the Shredder against the Turtles. That's the year he also showed up in TMNT Adventures, sharing the same basic look that he did in the cartoon and toy line, but with a new and different origin from those versions, and a more complicated moral alignment. Leatherhead has actually shown up in four of the five volumes of TMNT comics (plus, obviously, this one) and on every iteration of the cartoon...at least up until the current Rise of..., which I haven't watched any of yet.

This version of the character starts out as Jess Harley, a poor man from "the bayou" who wants to get out of the crushing poverty of the area, so he steels himself to rob the hut of alleged swamp witch Mary Bones. He selects what appears to be a crystal ball, assuming it will be of some value, and then hops on a bus for New York City in order to fence it...but not before looking portentously at the alligator skin hanging on the witch's wall and the candle burning atop an alligator skull on her table.

Once in the city, he immediately notes that extreme wealth here lives side by side with extreme poverty...

...one of the many notes of a social consciousness in this comic for kids based on a cartoon primarily created to sell a toy line.

Harley is still taking in the bewildering sights when some rude, hunchbacked asshole in a wide-brimmed hat and purple coat THUMPs into him hard enough to knock the crystal ball out of his hands, sending it bouncing and rolling along the street and then down into a drain pipe. "Sorry, fella," the oddly-dressed New Yorker says, while another shouts "Hey look, there's the pizzeria!" and "Last one there's a rotten egg!" Yes, it was the badly-disguised Turtles who knock the ball out of Harley's hands and into the sewer; you would think that, considering their own origin, they'd be more careful about that sort of thing.

And what were these jerks in such a rush to do...?

There's a lot going on here.

First, check out their "disguises." I can't imagine what Leonardo's thought-process was in deciding to wear a vest over his shell. What on Earth must the human being that vest was made for have looked like, that it fits over a mutant turtle man...?

Second, I love how intense and/or angry they look while ordering their pizza...which actually sounds pretty normal right up until Michaelangelo gets to his toppings.

Third, I love the look on the lady's face throughout the sequence. The only thing that could have improved the scene would have been if the next page opened with her giving them a pepperoni and sending them on their way. (This series has yet to answer the question that has long bothered me—where on Earth do the Turtles get money for all this fucking pizza? Does Splinter collect a Social Security check for Hamato Yoshi? Does April support them? We're only on issue #6, though; hopefully they get to answering this burning question eventually.)

Anyway, while the Turtles are ordering pizza and annoying the fuck out of that poor woman, Harley finds his way into the sewer and recovers his lost crystal ball...and then discovers, standing right behind him, is the swamp witch herself, Mary Bones.

When he turns the crystal over to her, he pleads with her that he only did it for the money, to which she replies "Ah, the ubiquitous lamentation of the lost age."

Ubiquitous! Lamentation! Clarrain certainly wasn't dumbing this book down for kids!

Mary Bones then drops some exposition...

...and in a dramatic sequence uses the Turnstone to transform him into "...a Leatherhead!" And so the human Jess Harley becomes the alligator man on the cover, minus the hat and gold tooth.

After shouting "Nooooo!!" like Darth Vader, he rushes after Mary Bones, who disappears, and he ends up crashing through a wall, then falling through three stories of sewer floors and landing on a table in The Shredder's secret underground lair.

There, Shredder tricks Leatherhead into joining forces with him using a not-too-terribly-convincing story:

The three animal-men head out to bring the Turtles to justice and force them to turn Leatherhead back into a human ("Ha! Ha! Ha! I'm such a good liar!" Shredder thinks to himself), while Shredder calls Krang. Krang is watching intergalactic wrestling on his monitor—foreshadowing the next issue—when Shredder interrupts, and tells him about the Turnstone. Krang tells him that the stone is of vital importance, as not only does it contain great power and could help him regain his original body and conquer the dimension, but that this witch Mary Bones must also be a Dimension X warlord like himself.

Meanwhile, Rocksteady, Bebop and Leatherhead confront the Turtles on a bridge over an underground river, and during the battle, Leatherhead begins to question Shredder's story ("Do either of them sound like an accountant or a real estate agent?" Raphael asks Leatherhead). Realizing he's been betrayed and used, Leatherhead starts lashing his massive tail on the bridge, causing it to give out under him, and he plunges to his fate below, the Turtles and their foes separated by the now broken bridge.

As they walk away, Mary Bones appears to the Turtles, and gives them a brief, cryptic prophecy before disappearing once again. And then, we get this fantastic final panel:

Readers in 1989 would have had to wait a month to find out what that was. I can't imagine any of them would have guessed what it was. Because next issue? Next issue the series gets weird.

As soon as one opens the cover of this book, it's clear that something's different about this issue. Yeah, the cover itself is pretty weird, showing the various Turtles wearing different costumes as they fight a four-armed dog man wrestler, with one of them (It's Raphael) now suddenly jet-black. But that cover still appears to be drawn by Mitchroney.

The interiors this time? They are not. For this issue, Jim Lawson handles the pencils, and he's inked by a Gary Fields. If one looks at the faces of the Turtles, it's not immediately evident that this is Lawson's work; they have bigger, rounder eyes than he usually draws, and their faces also look rounder and more three-dimensional than the typical Lawson mutant turtle, but it's clear in the look of the other characters that this is Jim Lawson. Um, if you're familiar with Jim Lawson's work, that is. If not, this probably just looks a little weird.

Or very weird. This is the first issue of the series that really looks and feels like some sort of cross between an indie comic and a comic for kids, which is, in essence, what it is, as the folks from Mirage Studios were doing so much of the production for it, and Brown, Clarrain and Lawson? It doesn't get much more Mirage than that.

The book opens with Raphael re-capping the events of the previous two issues over the course of two pages, each evenly divided into a six-panel grid, ending with him saying, "And that's when Mike said: What's that?" (Although based on the coloring, it was Raphael himself who said "What's that?")

And then there's a splash page, revealing the "that" of the "What's that?":

That is Cudley, a "transdimensional Cowlick," which is a gigantic, sentient cow-head apparently affixed atop some sort of flying saucer that abducts people/mutant turtles by licking them up, flying through time and space and, when he reaches his destination, spitting them out: "PPA-TOOIE!"

It may be worth noting here that Ryan Brown, who co-plots this issue with Clarrain, would go on to create the Wild West C.O.W.-Boys of Moo Mesa cartoon. Brown was apparently interested in cow characters for a while.

Cudley spits the Turtles at the feet of two tree men, Stump and Sling. The larger one, Stump, continually plucks the dollar bills that grows from the branches on the head of the smaller one, Sling, and then tucks the bills in the hole in his trunk/belly.

They're wrestling promoters.

In not much more time than it took to recap the first two issues of the Brown/Clarrain run, Stump explains that the Turtles are in Stump Arena on the Stump Asteroid, and that they are chosen to compete in an Intergalactic Wrestling match. With Cudley the Cowlick the only means to return home, they have no choice to accept. The four of them will be fighting "The four-armed scourge of the Bohunkian Galaxy—Cryin' Houn'!" (He looks a bit like the sort of cartoon dog that might chase Bugs Bunny or another Looney Tunes character around...save for the fact that he has four arms. For some reason, his only dialogue are variations of the line "Mah name is Cryin' Houn'!"

Whoever wins, will face the winner of the other match, between champion Ace Duck, an Adonis-bodied yellow-colored duck-man in a Speedo (seen briefly in the previous issue, when Krang was trying to watch Intergalactic Wrestling), and Leatherhead, who we learn was saved from his fall by Cudley, off-panel.

But first, the Turtles have to put on their costumes:

That's Michealangelo, Leonardo, Raphael and Donatello, from left to right. But forget about the Turtles; check out the aliens behind them. What a glorious array of random weirdness from Lawson, particularly the top rows, where the aliens tend to be nothing more than abstract shapes with faces. The crowd rewards surveying. While there are some that look like off-model versions of, say, an Aliens xenomorph or Star Wars' R2-D2, you'll also see what appears to be a Triceraton in the audience, plus a character that looks like he might be Fluffy Brockleton from Michael Dooney's Gizmo comics.

While we're pausing, I suppose this is as good a time as any to mention that Ace Duck was a 1989 action figure from the TMNT toy-line, a duck/human hybrid accidentally created by Krang. He had blink-and-you'll miss 'em cameos in both the original cartoon and the 2012 series, and he appeared in IDW's sprawling line of TMNT comics. As for Cryin' Houn', he and Stump also reappear in the IDW continuity, in more-or-less similar roles, although their designs are less cartoonish, in keeping with the look of those comics.

The alien champions seem to have the better of the Earth-born mutant reptiles for a bit in the two fights, which are waged side-by-side in two different rings, but eventually Leatherhead gets Ace by the ankles and throws him bodily out of the ring...at the very same time that Leonardo delivers a devastating flying kick to Cryin' Houn', and the two collide mid-air in the space between the rings, collapsing in a pile, with cartoon birds orbiting their unconscious heads.

Unfortunately for Trump and King, I mean, Stump and Sling, it is at that very moment that Cudley burps, spitting out the Turtles' saliva-covered weapons. Gathering them up, they are able to renegotiate terms with the fight promoters, and Cudley licks the four of them up (Leatherhead opts to stay on the asteroid and be a space-wrestler, as on Earth he's a freak, but here he has a chance to be, in his words, a hero).

This next part is quite interesting. We see "inside" Cudley, where it's completely black, and all we can see of the Turtles are their eyes, and then he spits them out on a New York City rooftop. But he apparently spit them out in about 2089, not 1989, and this is what they see:

That was something of a surprise. And a rather depressing one, as this comic for kids showed a brief version of a terrible, possible future in 1988, and we've done precious little in the 30+ years to change that; a ruined, flooded New York City is still our possible future from climate change, melting icecaps and rising sea levels. If anything, I think the forecast has only gotten more dire; I don't know that there will be that many buildings left standing in New York City in 2088 if we don't get off fossil fuels as close to immediately as humanly possible. Hurricanes will probably bring them down at the same time the streets are flooded over.

It's quite a down note to end on, but there are only a few pages left in the book, as Cudley once more licks them up and then spits them out, this time in the right time period.

And that brings us to TMNTA #8, which I mentioned last week was the first issue of the series I had read, and as someone who missed the previous issue, it was something of a doozie of a story to walk in on, given how strangely the Turtles were dressed, as they're still wearing their wrestling costumes (although, in Raphael's case, it looks more like he was dipped in ink than wearing a costume, given that there are no seams or zippers or buttons or anything; if he's wearing head-to-toe black space-spandex, the holes for his eyeballs and mouth are so small that they fit just show, betraying no hint of green skin). Well, there's that, and the appearance of Cudley; a giant cow head that licks up and spits-out people as a form of intergalactic transportation is the kind of thing that requires a bit of explanation.

Other than those elements that carry over from the first issue, though, this issue is actually a bit like #5, in that it introduces a new mutant character that more-or-less just runs into the Turtles. Well, two mutants really, and "mutant" isn't really the right word, because even though they are animal-men, they're from a different planet, so they're technically aliens.

They are, of course, Wingnut and Screwloose. The former is the big, crazed-looking bat-man with the metal wings on the cover, while the latter is the little mosquito-man riding on his back. In addition to their role in this series and its spin-offs, they of course appear briefly in the IDW comics, and they are featured in an episode of the 2012 series, where they are a Batman and Robin like Dynamic Duo of superheroes who are brought to life. The Internet says Wingnut, or at least a character based on his design, also showed up in the original cartoon, but I either never saw that episode or have forgotten it.

Anyway, they make their first appearance in this book, where they nail Raphael on the back of the head with a rock.

And, as you can see, Mitchroney has returned to pencil, here being inked by Dan Berger.

The Turtles and Wingnut exchange a volley of words, but the Turtles can't do much of anything to stop him from hurling rocks at them, given that he can fly. They return to their lair, where Splinter is watching the news, and they find out how much of a menace Wingnut really is. A rash of rocks being thrown through skylights was a big enough story to make it onto the news, as is Wingnut's attack on the Goodyear G'Day Blimp, which he punctures with a claw to deflate.

The Turtles decide to take to their own blimp in an effort to stop Wingnut and Screwloose. Of course, Wingnut can and does pop their balloon just as easily, but luckily theirs is equipped with a detachable glider that allows them to give chase to their aerial enemy. It is now storming, and there's a brief, dramatic game of cat and mouse, in which the sky is suddenly pitch-black, and the Turtles can only catch glimpses of the pair when lighting flashes.

Eventually they get Wingnut onto a rooftop, and are able to tie him up. As he struggles, Screwloose plunges his lightning bolt-shaped proboscis into Wingnut's neck, putting him to sleep.

At this point, Screwloose explains their sad origin, and why Wingnut seems so insane.

Essentially, the bat-people and the mosquito-people of the planet Huanu, where they formed a symbiotic relationship, the former giving the latter blood in exchange for sedative bites that help them sleep. But when alien invaders lead by Dimension X Warlord Krang attacked, they killed most of the people on Huanu, including all of the females of Wingnut's species, which was apparently more than enough trauma to drive the giant bat, well, batty. They are now on Earth searching for Krang in order to avenge Huanu, and Wingnut assumes Krang must be hiding under one of those skylights. Hence smashing them with rocks.

The Turtles begin to see the two newcomers in a new light, but don't have much time to act on it, as Wingnut breaks free and flies off...only to be intercepted by Cudley, who abducts them both with his tongue, stopping long enough to explain that it was his fault that the skylight-smashing aliens arrived on Earth when they did, as he inadvertently opened a dimensional gateway when he last visited. This time he arrived to bring the Turtles back their regular clothes (or "clothes", I guess), and to take Wingnut and Screwloose to Stump Arena.

As wild and random as these last few issues have been, they will start to make sense in the next handful, at which point a bigger and clearer ongoing storyline will emerge, in which the evil of Krang and all of these new characters will factor. Next time we'll tackle Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Adventures Vol. 3, containing #9-#12, in which we will meet a handful of new mutant characters, a handful of new alien characters and see the introduction of another character that, like Leatherhead, first appeared in Mirage's Tales of... and would go on to appear in many subsequent cartoons and comics.