On the second season of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (i.e. the one where they introduce Casey Jones)

Despite being the exact same length as the first season—26 episodes—the second season of the current Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles TV series seemed to be much longer, perhaps because of the fact that the scale of the stories increased dramatically. There's that, and, I think, the fact that this particular season is broken up into several smaller arcs within the overall, season-long conflict of the Turtles trying to save New York City and the world from The Foot Clan and the invading extra-dimensional alien conquerors, The Kraang.

Those smaller arcs include the opening one in which the now over-confident Turtles try to finish off The Kraang, accidentally releasing a bunch of canisters of mutagen into the city. One of these lands on April's father Kirby O'Neil, transforming him into a hideous bat-monster for much of the season (Michelangelo attempts to ub him "Wingnut," the name of a humanoid bat character from the old Archie Comics Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Adventures, but the others prevent him from assigning April's dad a villain  or monster name). This drives a wedge between April and the Turtles, who she rather rightfully blames, and for a while she cuts herself off completely from her mutant family and spends all of her time with her new human friends, a rough kid named Casey Jones and a Daria-like classmate named Irma (whose name, at least, is imported from the original 1987 cartoon, but who is otherwise quite thoroughly redesigned, looking more like Enid from Ghost World than the other Irma from a ninja turtles cartoon).

Later, a great deal of focus is spent on Karai, who is torn between serving two competing father figures—The Shredder and his Foot Clan, and Splinter and the Turtles—and Leonardo spearheads an effort to convince her to leave The Foot, which results in a tug-of-war that ends quite badly for the character (I spoiled her identity in the last piece on the series, so I guess there's no harm in spoiling something about her story in this piece to: By the end of the series, she too is mutated, becoming a snake monster, although apparently able to revert to human form by "shedding" her human skin).

And, finally, there's a pretty epic battle in which Kraang Sub-Prime (Gilbert Godfired) and Kraang Prime (Roseanne Barr) recruit The Shredder's Foot Clan and together launch an all-out invasion of New York City, one that destroys large sections of it, including the Turtles' lair, and takes Kirby O'Neil out of the picture again, some time after he was cured of his bat mutation. The Kraang/Foot alliance starts early in, with Baxter Stockman reverse-engineering new robot Foot soldiers from Kraang technology (The first season's Foot ninja were, like those in the original comics, actual human ninja; in the second season, they are replaced by robots then, making them like the Foot Soldiers from the 1987 carton series, although these are designed the same as those form last season, save for the fact that they can sprout an extra pair of arms, tipped with outlandish weaponry like buzz-saws and drills).

That battle, which plays out in the two-part "The Invasion," is a pretty dramatic one, pitting The Turtles, Splinter, April, Leatherhead and their new ally Casey Jones against The Foot and Kraang, including a giant robot housing the giant Kraang-Prime. These episodes offer one of the more distinct echoes of the original comics, as Leonardo is split from his brothers and is hounded and harried by The Foot Clan (as in 1986 one-shot Leonardo) and the Turtles and allies have their home destroyed and retreat from the city in the face of overwhelming odds (as in 1987's Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles #10), fleeing for April's farm house (where a good chunk of that first volume of Turtles comics was set).

It's a surprisingly down ending for a kid's cartoon—Leo badly wounded, Splinter even more so after what looked like a savage fight to the death with The Shredder, Kirby lost, our heroes all turning tail and leaving the city to the alien invaders—but a fairly spectacular climax to the season (and the show so far). The cliffhanger ending is in sharp contrast to the ending of the first season, in which April and the Turtles have a post-invasion repelling dance party.

An even louder echo of the original cartoon comes in the episode "The Good, The Bad and Casey Jones," which is essentially this series' cover version of 1985's Rahapel one-shot. After losing his cool badly while sparring with his brothers—here, however, Raph doesn't nearly kill one of them in a fit of rage—Raphael takes to the streets to cool down, and meets a kindred spirit in human vigilante Casey Jones. After fighting one another, the two become friends.

Of all the re-imagined characters that appear in this series, I think the producers and designers did the best job with Casey (That's concept art for the character at the top of the post). Introduced in that aforementioned one-shot, and officially joining the cast of the original comics series in the also aforementioned TMNT #10, Casey Jones was conceived by Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird as a parody of the typical street-level superhero or action movie character. Rather than being motivated to fight crime by an actual tragedy in his own life, he's instead motivated by cop shows and action movies, and makes his own costume and weaponry in order to become a vigilante crime-fighter (Note this was 23 years before Mark Millar and John Romita Jr.'s Kick-Ass #1, which introduced a superpower-less, regular New Yorker motivated to become a vigilante crime-fighter by comic books and movies).

Originally portrayed as a psychopath in the comics, when Casey reappeared later, he was essentially just a regular guy hanging out with the Turtles, Splinter and April. He was a sort of POV character, and, the most regular and relatable character in the series, even more so than April.

Here, of course, Casey is re-cast as a teenager, as was April. We first meet him as a somewhat abrasive, extremely arrogant punk kid with a crush on April, his tutor. He's not friends with April long before he starts getting pulled into the craziness of her life, helping her fight against The Mutagen Man and, later, Foot robots, which he battles on the ice rink while practicing hockey, hitting them in their heads with hockey pucks.

When Casey finally suits up to fight crime, the producers design him in what is easily the best-equipped and coolest looking version of the character, even more so than that of Rick Veitch's Casey Jones from Casey Jones: North By Downeast, who was pretty thoroughly armored in hockey padding and carried a golf bag bristling with more weapons and equipment than the comic book version usually sported. (Ha! "Sported.")

This Casey fights with hockey stick and baseball bats, wears tricked-out hockey mitts and various padding for defense, and even has skates for transportation and fighting purposes, which are apparently folded up along his calves and spring-loaded to attach to his feet when necessary. He also has a bunch of awesome gadgets. He has spray paint can bombs and hockey pucks (some with M80s attached) as ammunition, he has a homemade taser made from a potato masher, and the bike he rides to fight crime on is even tricked out with a flamethrower. . He's got a real  Goonies sort of feel to his equipment, or maybe a Home Alone kid-meets-MacGuyver, in order to play Q vibe. His entire aesthetic is much more that of a high school punk rock/metal homemade superhero than in any other incarnation, and it fits in perfectly with this particular show's look and cast.

His hockey mask is spray-painted to look more skull-like, and, in one great scene, the Turtles remove his mask to find he has his face painted in the same skull pattern, and he hisses at them.

Because of the all-ages nature of the cartoon, this Casey isn't quite the violent psychopath his comics inspiration was, but he's an all-around pretty awesome character, and the fact that he's a high school kid renders a lot of his unusual choices in hobbies and style charming (Seeing the TV show's Casey, I was really quite retroactively disappointed in IDW's Casey Jones, as they similarly made Casey into a teenager instead of a grown-up, but little to no effort was put into making him look different, let alone cool). That is, a grown-up Casey outfitted and acting like this seems kind of crazy, but a high school juvenile delinquent doing it fits, as you'd expect a 15-year-old to think all of this stuff is cool (His "war journal" is another nice nod to the comics, as he draws himself like Kevin Eastman drew adult Casey).

As Casey first appears as a classmate of April's, he's closer to her than the Turtles, and in addition to becoming best friends with Raphael before their first episode together ends (One of the Turtles says something along the lines of, "Great, now we've got two Raphaels"), he has a romantic interest in April, which provides some conflict between the two, and a stronger still conflict between Casey and Donatello, who is also interested in April (Man, there's a great scene in this where Splinter calls Donnie into his room and knocks him down, saying he's trying to teach him to enjoy being knocked down. After a couple of falls, Donatello protests, that it's impossible to make someone like something they don't like, getting the lesson before even finishing the sentence. Great life lesson! Where was this cartoon when I was, like, 22?)

In further acknowledgment of his creators, Casey uses Laird and East-Man brand hockey equipment, and his battle cry is "Goongala!", whatever that means.

(I'm not afraid to admit that the first time Casey shouts "Goongala!" on the show, and is shown jumping up in the air ready to bring a piece of sporting equipment down on a foe as in the above image, my heart skipped a beat).

Other characters are introduced to the show in this season, obviously, although none with as prominent a role as Casey, obviouslier.

Raphael's pet turtle Spike gets into some mutagen at one point, and grows into a much bigger and scarier version of a mutant turtle. He convinces Raphael that he's a better teammate for him than his brothers, and Raphael gives him a black bandanna mask and a huge spiked mace. They set out to fight crime together, but Spike tells Raph he prefers the name "Slash." While Slash looks more like Tokka from the live-action film Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: Secret of The Ooze, the name is, of course, that of a villain from the original cartoon series, who later appeared in both the Archie comics and the current IDW line. In one of the most interesting bits of casting the show has had to date, they enlisted Corey Feldman—who voiced Donatello in the first films—to play Slash. He appears in a few episodes.

Dogpound, the Foot Clan lieutenant who was basically just Chuck Norris until he was mutated into a giant dog-man, gets "double-mutated" this season, becoming Rahzar (the name of the other evil mutant in Secret of The Ooze). It's a much cooler, scarier design; referred to at one point as a "zombie wolf." Baxter Stockman also gets dosed, mutating into a fly—as he was upon his first appearance in the original cartoon series—although here he's much creepier-looking, and the debt the original cartoon iteration owes to the sci-fi films The Fly are much more obvious.

Rat King, The Newtralizer, Metalhead and Leatherhead all make return appearances for at least one episode a piece, and new characters include Tiger Claw,a tiger man with a jet pack and laser guns that The Shredder recruits in Japan to oversee Dogpound/Rahzar and Fishface, and an Anton Zeck, a master thief with a weird, Tron-esque suit that allows him to stick to walls, turn invisible, throw his laser mohawk like a weapon and other applications. Zeck is voiced by J.B. Smoove, who has the character frequently make Michael Jackson-like noises.

This season also has some of the weirder, more noteworthy episodes, including two that are simply extended riffs on particular films. The first is actually the second episode of the series, "Invasion of The Squirrelanoids!," an Alien/s homage. Some squirrels get into one of the lost canisters of mutagen, and do a kid-friendly version of Alien reproduction: Forcibly climbing into the mouths and down the throats of their victims, gestating in their stomachs and then causing them to them up. A few seconds later, they grow—off-camera—into huge monsters which, here, look just like H.R. Giger's aliens, save with big bushy tails and a few other little squirrel features.

Later, "A Chinatown Ghost Story" has the Turtle-version of Big Trouble In Little China, with James Hong, who played Lo Pan in Big Trouble, voicing the Lo Pan-like Ho Chan character.

The other extended pop culture homage/parody/riff in this season is doled out in smaller doses throughout the entire series, as Michelangelo finds a crate of VHS tapes of an old anime series that's a mixture of Voltron and Battle of The Planets/G-Force (and similar shows). This takes the place of Space Heroes form the first season, as the guys watch episodes of the show and continually find eerie similarities between their own lives and the events of the show. Donatello ultimately takes inspiration from it while they prepare for the imminent invasion of New York City by The Kraang. He constructs a giant robot that requires a whole team to pilot in order to take on Kraang-Prime's giant robot body.

On Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Vol. 2

The comics industry of 1993, it goes without saying, was a much different one than that of 2014. In fact, it was likely almost as different from today's as it was from 1984's, which is the industry that Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird launched their Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles comic series into, coming up with a surprise hit that had myriad, unpredictable consequences, not the least of which was making that unlikely collection of nouns into a household name.

Looking back from the year 2014, it's difficult to tell, or even guess or theorize as to what exactly went wrong with Eastman, Laird and their Mirage Studios' second volume of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, a full-color series that launched in the wake of the 13-part "City At War" storyline that brought the first volume, which ran for 63 issues over almost a decade, to a close.

Sure, it had new #1 issue (generally thought of as a good thing, even to this day), and yes, it was now in full color for the first time ever (Certain Turtles specials and reprint projects aside). The logo was new-ish, but it was the same one that had been adorning Mirage's TMNT book since "City At War" kicked off with the fiftieth issue. The creative team hadn't really changed at all since "City At War"; Jim Lawson was still drawing and writing it (Eastman and Laird were apparently overseeing he storyline closely, but didn't get writing credits). Jason Tumjin Minor was still inking it, when other Mirage regulars like Eric Talbot weren't.

Heck, "City" cover artist A.C. Farley even provided the first cover, although after that cover duties were taken over by Peter Laird and Kevin Eastman, who would really be the ideal artists to draw covers for a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles comic, no?

And, like the last year or so of the first volume (and the fourth volume, that would follow almost a decade later, in 2001), there weren't really discrete story arcs with beginnings, middle and ends, but rather,t he storyline just kept going on in an old-school, truly serial fashion.

So why did the second volume of Eastman and Laird's TMNT last only 13 issues, the same length as "City At War"...?

I have no idea, and I wonder if it might not have had more to do with external forces than any particular rejection of the book by the comics market of 1993-1995, or any sort of creative exhaustion of the concept.

Reading it all at once for the first time though, I can tell you that it was not very good. Of the three Mirage-produced volumes of the series, it is probably the weakest, but I'm guessing it was something more akin to external forces that cut the series short, based on the fact that Lawson really seemed to be setting up future directions for the characters, as the four title characters were starting to go their own ways, even finding new places to live, before they were quite quickly brought back together to resolve all of the dangling plotlines in a rather abrupt fashion.

The series begins more-or-less where the last ended. Donatello, who broke his leg in the climactic fight with the Foot Clan in "City At War," is living in a cave in rural Massachusetts with Splinter. The other three Turtles are living in New York City, in the basement of the new apartment building owned by April and Casey, who are living together as a couple and raising Shadow, the baby Casey adopted from his dead lover Gabrielle, as their own.

This first issue—the one with the striking, wraparound Farley painting of the Turtles racing through a dimly-lit sewer for a cover—is entitled "Memories of the Future," and serves as a sort of dreamy preview of the series, consisting almost entirely of scenes of the cast between disturbing visions and dreams, some of which presage events to come in the following 12 issues, some of which ultimately go nowhere—perhaps because plans changed, or perhaps because the book ended earlier than intended.

Splinter dreams of himself bloody and beaten at the feet of one of the Turtles, whose right hand is stained in blood. When he and Donatello meditate on it further, Don sees himself in Japan in the future, but he can't imagine why he was there; "To bury me," Splinter tells him.

Casey dreams of a big, monstrous verson of himself in a black hockey mask; a sort of Casey Jones-specific grim reaper.

April has a nightmare of her old, evil boss Baxter Stockman rescuing her from marauding Mousers.

Raphael is running around the sewers, where he encounters a giant rat. Leonardo is strapped to a table, a blue (Blue? I always thought they were orange) Triceraton and an alien injecting him with a shot. And Michalengelo? He was watches TV.

Though the creative team doesn't change too significantly throughout the rest of the series—Talbot will occasionally ink, colorist Eric Vincent will occasionally get assistance from "Altered Earth,"—this is for whatever reason the best-looking book of the volume. Perhaps it owes to the fact that there was the greatest lead-time, given even the apparently always-fast Lawson time to linger over the pages longer than usual, or perhaps it owes simply to the fact that story and plot are almost incidental to the issue, making for a greater emphasis on visuals.

For whatever reason, the story of the second volume begins in earnest in the next issue.

The Turtles start to go their own ways, with Raphael deciding to move out (he finds a nice abandoned storage attic atop a cathedral, but never actually gets to move in), Leonardo returning to the sewer lair (where he has an adventure of his own featuring a gigantic, monstrous, almost Gamera-sized snapping turtle and a fish-creature akin to those from TMNT #28 and/or the syndicated newspaper comic strip. Michelangelo, for his part, plans to stay in the basement apartment, close to Shadow.

The main villain of this volume is the mad robotocist and Mouser inventor Baxter Stockman, not seen since the first handful of issues of volume one (The current IDW series, and the cartoon shows, made much greater use of the character). He has apparently been held all this time at a secret Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency facility, where he built himself an incredibly powerful robot body...and then cut his own brain out and installed it into the body. From there, he headed towards New York City, to finally get his revenge on April and the Turtles.

Federal agents and a mysterious bald guy are, understandably, interested.

Stockman's revenge on April involves jabbing her with a syringe full of...something (it would take ten years for that to resolve itself in Vol. 4), but the battle with the Turtles is a bit more traditional, involving guns and rockets on rooftops.

The three Turtles are eventually joined in the battle by Donatello and their Massachusetts vigilante friend Nobody (now sporting a very '90s costume, one which replaces the cape with a bunch of pouches and makes him look more like an off-model Snake Eyes than a logo-less or branding-free Moon Knight or Batman type vigilante).

The good guys win, and Stockman's robot body (and the human brain inside it) are eventually completely destroyed, but not before Stockman can hurl Raph off a rooftop.

He survives, but ends up being taken by...someone.

The final few issues of the series deal with the Turtles and their friends—Nobody, Casey, and a mysterious bald psychic fellow who is able to deus ex machina them the location of Raph—arriving in the Nevada desert to infiltrate the DARPA facility and free him.

It turns out Raphael's being kept with a veritable menagerie of various aliens, including an off-model Aliens alien and a Triceraton (orange again). Despite the number of ninjas in the group, their entrance is very loud generates a great deal of attention, meaning they will have to try and fight their way out. Making matters worse, the Triceraton proves somewhat treacherous, and he has a ship full of allies not too far away, ones who would rather attack Earth in a kamikaze, world-ending fashion than admit defeat.

So what begins as an action-packed infiltration scene eventually transforms into a save-the-world type scenario.

Suffice it to say, nobody dies—well, Nobody dies, but nobody other than Nobody dies—the world is saved, and their new psychic friend even manages to put everyone back together with little memory of what actually happened. In the final scene, Leonardo awakes as if from a dream, and Casey has no memory of what just occurred. (I think it worth noting here too that the interior art really rallies in the last few issues, when Lawson begins inking his own work, and a great deal of detail returns to the pencil art that wasn't there in some of the previous issues).

I had mentioned that the book wasn't very good, but what, precisely, was wrong with it? Well, the little editorial-like introductions to the issues often signed by Peter Laird, and what commentary I've read from he and Eastman elsewhere indicated that with "City At War" and this volume they wanted to reassert control over the lives and stories of their characters, as the book had become more-or-less an anthology title for much of what occurred between #12 and #47 of the original series, with different creators offering wildly different takes and tones, some of which clearly didn't fit within anything resembling a greater continuity (Michael Zulli's three-issue arc, for example), even if they were awesome comics.

It's true, of course, but then, even when Eastman and Laird were doing pretty much everything themselves on the title, in the first dozen issues or so, it didn't exactly read like an ongoing storyline with a long-term plot or consistent direction. The characters were introduced, their origin told, they met their archenemy and killed him—end issue #1. The next few issues, they met a human friend in April, fought some robots, the end. They went into outer-space for a few issues. They travelled back in time—or to another comic book's universe—to meet and fight alongside Dave Sim's Cerebus the Aardvark, for one issue.

The series, from the beginning, was one that occurred more-or-less in fits and starts, with little in the way of issue-to-issue continuity. I think Rick Veitch's three-issue "The River" run was about as long as any storyline Eastman and Laird produced before "City At War." The Turtles characters, at least in the Mirage books, seemed to be a group of character that, collectively or individually (remember, key points of their history—the introduction of Casey Jones, the return of the Foot Clan and "The Shredder"—occurred in single-issue "micro-series) had weird stuff happen to them, quite often at something approaching random.

That's what made "City At War" seem so unusual and, I suppose, Volume Two so strange. It's another 13-part story arc, featuring characters that only quite rarely had story arcs, and almost never of that length, rather full of call-backs to earlier continuity which, again, isn't something that was too often encountered in Turtles comics.

Could that have been what went wrong? I don't know. Read all at once like this, the plot holds together fairly well, despite the few paths suggested and abandoned, but I imagine it was incredibly frustrating when read on its original monthly—or bi-monthly, I suppose—schedule, when the free-form, punctuation-free, endless narrative would likely seem to meander quite a bit (particularly at a time in comics when, if "writing for the trade" hadn't yet emerged as an everywhere-you-look phenomenon, at the very least story arcs were the dominant form of serial comics storytelling. Also,t hat weird first issue where nothing really happened that wasn't a dream likely didn't help get anyone too excited about issue #2, two months hence).

Personally, I enjoyed the plotting just fine (this time around), but there was little-to-no character development, which seemed rather strange given the big events in the characters' lives, like the four brothers being separated for the first time, or April and one-time practically insane vigilante Casey Jones being in a relationship with one another and trying to raise an orphaned child. Perhaps it's silly to want more out of a comic book called Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, but I felt like the plot and sophistication of the comics-making might have grown as I grew, but the storytelling hadn't...certainly not enough to justify scrapping the book Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles had become before "City" in an attempt to recapture a book it never really was, whether that was what it's original creators intended it to be or not.

I additionally found it a little weird that Splinter never reappears after the first issue, April has almost nothing at all to do for the entirety of the series and Casey goes mask-less and bat-less throughout, even when fighting, as in one instance where he attacks some federal agents...

and in the assault on DARPA plot that fills the last few issues, wherein he spend the entire time brainwashed into thinking he's Arnold Schwarzenegger.

"I planted a suggestion in Casey's brain that he was the world's best assault team leader," the mysterious bald psychic man says, by way of explaining some of Casey's action heroics.

I don't think color helped much, although I did appreciate the look of it in the first and final issues (Color on Lawson art is, I realized, something I've very, very rarely seen). The color on the covers tends to look pretty sickly though, which I think may have been more a result of the coloring technology of the time period than any sort of misapplication. Comics coloring was moving in leaps and bounds at that time period, and a lot of ugly-looking comics resulted. I like Laird's art, I like Eastman's art, I like the way their collaborative art looks, but a lot of these covers are pretty terrible-looking.

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Most of the issues contain back-up stories of varying degrees of quality. The first of these is "I.M.P." It's a three-part story by Eric Talbot and Lawson about a little black cat with white "socks" of fur trying to escape a high-security facility and doing so, despite all the guns fired at it.

A much longer one is the seven-part "Bog: Swamp Demon" by writer Ryan Brown and artists Matt Roach, which features a Swamp Thing/Man-Thing/Heap-like swamp creature, albeit one with a decidedly more supernatural and demonic twist. The Bernie Wrightson-like art features a "star" who looks more-or-less like your standard muck man from the neck down, but has a horrifying skull-like visage (atop of his head is actually see white skull peeking up out of the dark green skin), and a crown of gnarled branches emanating from its head.

The writing and art are very reminiscent of 1970s horror comics from superhero publishers, as Bog deals with his own tragic origin, fighting a human serial killer that isn't actually human, and plenty of other monsters and demons, including Satan himself.

The story is a little hard to follow, and not helped any by the fact that its chapters are printed out of order. The coloring shifts from dark and muddy at the beginning, to sharp and clear at the end, making it a lot easier to appreciate Roach's artwork.

I was tempted to devote a whole blog post to Bog, if only to provide more swamp monster content for comics retailer, blogger and muck-encrusted mockery of a man enthusiast Mike Sterling, but it sounds like he may be pretty busy in the near future.

Review: Casey Jones: North By Downeast

Introduced by creators Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird in 1985's Raphael one-shot (which you can read in its entirety here, Casey Jones would become one of the central characters in the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, joining the core cast of the title characters, Splinter and April on a more-or-less permanent basis from 1986's TMNT #10 on, as well as appearing in all of the cartoons (albeit just briefly in the first and most influential series), and as many of the feature films as The Shredder did (each were in three of the five films). Despite Casey's role as a sort of unofficial, human fifth Turtle, he didn't earn a comic book with his name in the title until 1994's two-part miniseries Casey Jones: North By Downeast (That same year he'd also share a title with his best friend among the Turtles in Casey Jones and Raphael, an ill-starred miniseries that Mirage only published a single issue of).

The story that fills the pages of Casey Jones actually wasn't originally intended for a miniseries. Rather, the "North By Downeast" story started out being serialized short chapter by chapter in the short-lived Mirage Studios anthology Plastron Cafe. Never finished there, Casey Jones reprinted those chapters and finished off the storyline in a set of two comics, produced in full color (the shorts in Plastron were, of course, in black-and-white, color still being fairly new to the world of the Turtles, even at that late date in the publisher's history).

Read today, Casey Jones is probably more noteworthy for who made it, rather than whose name is in the title: Character co-creator Kevin Eastman provided the story and inks, but Rick Veitch scripted, penciled and even lettered the story (Usual TMNT letterer Steve Lavigne provided the colors, and John Totleben the covers). Veitch, probably still best-known for his BratPack and Swamp Thing, despite some compelling and under-appreciated work since (including Cant' Get No and Army @ Love for Vertigo), was here making a return trip to the world of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, having previously produced the three-part storyline "The River" (TMNT #24-#26) and the weird-ass one-off TMNT #30.

If any publisher ever decides to collect TMNT comics by creator, Veitch has certainly produced enough of it to fill a good-sized trade paperback and, significantly, most of it is very good; "The River" being one of the better non-Eastman and Laird stories that wasn't a wild departure.

The pacing in "North By Downeast," as well as its set-up, betrays its origins as short strips spread across issues of an anthology. It opens cinematically, on a dark and stormy night, the first few pages of panels taking us from an establishing shot of the New York City, following the rain into a gutter, down a drainpipe, into an open manhole, and into the sewer. Casey is sneaking into the Turtles' den, and letting in enough water to short out their electricity.

He strikes a match, and begins to tell the Turtles a story...one of a solo adventure of his as random and wild as any of the Turtles' more outlandish adventures.

Veitch takes Eastman and Laird's original conception of Casey as a street vigilante who fights crime with baseball bats, hockey sticks and other blunt sporting equipment he keeps in the beat-up golf-bag slung over his shoulder to the extreme, even if it's a logical, even more realistic extreme. His Casey wears not only a hocky mask, but also hockey gloves, knee and shin pads, a cup and what appears to be either hockey or football pads (I'm no sports fan) as body armor. His bag is stuffed full of the usual sporting equipment, as well as a ski pole (for stabbing), a crowbar a saw and other useful items.

The first issue is mostly set-up, as our hero prowls the rooftops, looking for crimes to fight while occasionally watching strangers' television sets by peering in their windows, when he discovers a particularly weird crime: Crackheads stealing a tank of lobsters.

He intervenes, and soon finds himself fighting something...wrong, people that aren't quite people. He catches a cinderblock to the head, and finds himself stripped of his sporting equipment and ejected from a huge, nautilus-shaped ship of some kind.

He's rescued by a sexy fisherwoman, wearing a bikini under a slicker and hat and chomping on a corncob pipe, Popeye-style, who tells him a weird tale of lobster men from Venus, a lobster God king, a special lobster—The Royal Roe—which will allow the lobster men to regain their original form if they present it to their monstrous emperor.

In the second issue, all of the ish he learns about hits the fan, as he fashions himself a new mask and armor out of the discarded shells of some of the giant lobster men and, arming himself with an axe and a...boat thing...

...he wades into the alien lobster guys' ritual to raise an Ebirah-sized lobster. The crazy plot, which reads like a modern take on something Robert E. Howard might have pounded out over the course of a weekend, is met with crazy imagery by Veitch, as Casey's opponents shift forms mid-fight, and in an effort to reclaim his hockey mask (and save the world), he faces a lobster wearing it over his lobster face.

Eastman and Veitch give their story an old-school pulp twist ending (or, an old-school pulp-inspired old-school horror comic twist ending), with Casey leaving the Turtles as abruptly as he joined them, and leaving the story's ending—and veracity—somewhat ambiguous. Save for some evidence he leaves behind.

It's a pretty ludicrous story, start to finish, but Veitch and Eastman sure do work well together, and, visually, this is probably the best Casey Jones has ever looked, or ever would look again.

Friday Night Fights: Casey Jones at the bat

He sure does, Casey. He sure does.

But don't just take our word for it. Ask Bahlactus.



(Stargirl panel from All Star Comics 80-Page Giant #1, drawn by David Ross and Andrew Hennessy and published by DC Comics. Badly scanned images of Casey Jones baseball-batting his way through Foot Clan ninjas to kick The Shredder in the breadbasket from 1987's Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles #10 by Kevin Eastman, Peter Laird, Michael Dooney and Steve Lavinge and published by Mirage.)