On the first season of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2012)

It's ironic that the most effort to distinguish the four Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles from one another is always put into the media where it is least needed. In their black-and-white comic, the characters were only differentiated by the weapons they were holding or wearing and in the dialogue. Even when they did appear in color—as on the covers, or the First colorized collections—they all wore identical red bandana masks. It wasn't until they made the jump to animation—when each spoke with a different voice, and it was thus abundantly clear who was who—that they started wearing their own color-coded masks and, in that first 1987 cartoon series, accessories and belts bearing their initials.

The current Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles animated series, the characters' third, goes farther still. In addition to the differently-colored masks, the Turtles no longer look like identical quadruplets. Donatello is much taller and thinner than the others, has brown eyes and a gap in his teeth. Leonardo has blue eyes, and seems to be "standard issue" in design. Raphael has green eyes, is slightly shorter than Leonardo, and slightly thicker; he also bears a jagged scar on the front of his shell. And, finally, Michelangelo (his name here spelled identically to that of his namesake), has blue eyes, is significantly shorter than all of his brothers and even has freckles (2013's feature film went farther still; keeping the same basic proportions of the four in relation to one another seen in this show, but positively festooning them in a thick layer of accessories).

Even if they were completely naked, weaponless and silent, it shouldn't prove too difficult for any viewer to pick out which Turtle was which once they've seen a few episodes.

This series, which launched in 2012 and is currently on its third season, marks the characters' first time on television in 3D computer animation...although that was the style of their fourth (and best) feature film, 2007's TMNT (Well, it's all 3D computer animation save for occasional forays into more traditional 2D animation or images, as in flashback sequences and sequences taken from show-within-the-show Space Heroes, a Star Trek by way of Sealab 2020 from which Leonardo takes tips on leadership).

While the general aesthetic does share quite a bit in common with the 2007 film, the Turtles are quite markedly different in appearance, all rounder and buliker; more turtle and less lizard. The biggest innovation to their design may be in their toes, though. Rather than having just two big toes and an elongated heel that can look like a third and opposing toe, they have flatter, more tortoise-like feet, with three distinguishable toes right where one would expect a toe to be. They are very stylized in design, and very different than all of their previous forebearerss in multi-media; even thinking of all of the many artists to draw the characters over the decades, I'm hard-pressed to think of one whose version of the Turtles closely matches those of these Turtles.

As for the commonalities with the previous 3D, CGI TMNT adventure, the series similarly presents a now-fantasy, playground version of New York City, all rooftops, fire escapes and alleyways. Every rooftop they seem to land on has either a peaked glass skylight, a water tower, a billboard or, incongruously enough, a TV antenna—some have all four. It's a remarkably empty city, too, which of course saves money—less characters means less animation, and the human characters are, as is always the case with 3D computer animation, the least convincing in appearance (although this is somewhat explained by the fact that almost every scene that takes place in the city is at night and either in a remote location—the top of a building, a warehouse, the docks—or a shady part of town).

The theme song (and its accompanying opening sequence), which "samples" the 1987 theme drilled into the heads of a generation, tells the basic set-up: Four turtles, mutated by mysterious ooze, trained to be ninjas by their master Splinter, a mutant rat. It similarly defines each character in the same basic way as the original theme (Previously "Donatello did machines," whereas now "Donatello is a fellow, has a way with machines," for example; "Raphael is cool but rude" vs. "Raphael has the most attitude on the team.")

That mysterious ooze is here an alien mutagen brought to Earth by a race of vaguely brain-shaped, tentacled aliens who move around in the stomach's of humanoid robots (as in the original comics), and Splinter was a human being and ninja named Hamato Yoshi who was mutated into a rat man (as in the original cartoon; in the comics, Splinter was Yoshi's pet rat).

One notable innovation of this series is the emphasis it puts on the "Teenage" part of "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles;" moreso than any previous incarnation of the characters in any media, this series treats them as teenagers. All four of them have a level of immaturity and teen angst generally absent from any other versions (although, I suppose, the argument could be made the original cartoon series and first three films depicted them as the 1990s, media understanding of "teenage," meaning simply that they spoke in catch-phrase lingo and liked extreme sports, pizza and "partying" in the abstract).

Physically, this is denoted by their awkwardness when not ninja-ing, particularly in things like Donatello's gangly form or Michelangelo's awaiting-a-growth-spurt size and even the way the haven't seemed to have grown into their hands and feet, like the way puppies often don't quite fit their paws). Additionally, they are all significantly smaller than their adopted father Splinter, who towers above them in size and posture.

In terms of drama, this immaturity is evidenced in Raphael's temper, which ranges from irritated and bullying of the others to out-and-out outbursts of anger almost on par with that seen in Eastman and Laird's 1985 Raphael #1 "micro-series") and Michelangelo's entire personality (as with the last two feature films, Mikey becomes the repository for everything silly and goofy about the franchise and, most amusingly here, he is generally portrayed as pretty damn dumb, made fun of by his whole family, up to and including Splinter—there's a pretty neat scene where Leonardo asks Splinter why he made him the leader, and Splinter says he chose him at random, and that it could have been any of his brothers. Except Michelangelo).

Additionally, Donatello sports an immediate and completely doomed crush on April, and Leonardo a similarly doomed crush on Karai. Both of the human females are here also teenagers, something which took some getting used to, but ultimately makes sense; if April is portrayed as a peer of the Turtles, it stands to reason she should be their age (As I noted, they are generally called Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, but are everywhere else portrayed more like adult Mutant Nunja Turtles). Like all of the humans in the series, April never, ever changes her clothes, and looks less convincingly animated than the mutants—I think it's the hair as much as the herky-jerky movements that makes the human beings seem like possessed dolls—but she trains with Splinter and gets her own weapon (a fan, maybe the girliest of all possible martial arts weapons), but has a more active and participatory role than she usually does in TMNT stories in any media.

The other great innovation of the show is just how damn action-packed it is. While TMNT is probably the only film—or cartoon—to previously contain much in the way of martial arts action (and that mainly in its teaser trailer and a spectacular pre-climax fight between Leonardo and Raphael), every episode of this series is full of martial arts battles and ninja-ing: Rooftop-running parkour scenes (the Turtles all run like ninja all the time too, which is cool), training against each other and the seemingly invincible Splinter, fighting mutants, Foot ninja and, most often in this series, alien robots. While the Turtles in this series have clearly visible eye-balls when their masks are on, their eyeballs disappear, and their eyes go pure white when they're in action.

The amped-up action includes pretty great sound-effects—their weapons sound like they're made of metal and wood—and I suppose it's worth noting that Donatello has a blade concealed in his bo staff, and Michelangelo's nunchucks can transform into a...damn, I'm not as into ninjas as I was as a teenager. One of those things that's like a hand-held scythe, but with a long chain with a wait at the end...? It makes both more versatile, and for an interesting allusion to other weapons Michelangelo has wielded over the decades.

Well, there's the action, and then there's the comedy. The show is actually very funny, but in a truly all-ages way. The comedy is almost always in the form of organic, character-driven comedy. Some comes in the form of Teen Titans Go!-like, anime-inspired, visually exaggerated portrayals of emotion or weird call-backs to previous media (The ringtones on their cell-phones, called tPhones instead of iPhones, are the 1987 theme song), but most of it is an honestly engaging, character-driven humor.

The storyline for the first season is a pretty great remix of a reboot. Almost immediately after finally prevailing upon Splinter to let them leave the sewers, the Turtles encounter The Kraang, who bear the name of a villain originated in the 1987 cartoon show (albeit with an extra "a" in the middle) and his evil alignment and home dimension of Dimension X, but are more like the benevolent Utrom aliens from the original Mirage comics in all other respects. That is, they are brain-and-tentacled aliens that ride around in the stomach cavity of android robot disguises. Their completed disguises are of identical men in black suits, but there are a few other forms, one of which is a simple metal skeleton, and another of which is the metal frame covered in a blue, gelatinous, transparent flesh (Whenever a suit is destroyed, they wake up, scream and scamper off...never to be followed by the Turtles, which was a little frustrating at first).

The Kraang share a hive-mind, and thus talk in the third-person in a weird, halted version of English that recalls old-school men in black lore (while also being funny, particularly as the episodes pile up and variations get greater).

They are attempting to invade and conquer Earth, terraforming it into a place they can comfortably live. This plot takes plenty of permutations, but begins with the kidnapping of various scientists, including Kirby O'Neil, April's father (which is how the Turtles meet her, and how she comes to live with them for most of this first season; his first name is the first of a couple of nods toward Jack Kirby, a huge influence on Eastman and Laird).

Between the two-part season opener "Rise of The Turtles" and the two-part conclusion "The Showdown," the Turtles meet various characters from the comics, the cartoons and more still that are original to this show, including their usual archenemies, The Foot Clan. The Foot ninja are here the black-clad versions of the bug-eyed ninja of the comics (and the 2007 TMNT film). The Shredder, an imposing figure with a badly burned face hidden behind his mask, leaves most of the action to his lieutenants, only fighting the Turtles once early after his first appearance, and then later at season's climax when he fights Splinter.

These lieutenants are Bradford, a celebrity karate teacher who is essentially Chuck Norris; Xever, a butterfly knife wielding New York criminal who fights capoeira style; and Shredder's own daughter Karai (She's designed here with some serious eye make-up and two-tone hair; to completely spoil one of the major, ongoing conflicts of the series—so stop reading here if you care—she's actually Yoshi/Splinter's thought-dead daughter Miya, who Oroku Saki/The Shredder kidnapped and raised as his own to hate and kill Yoshi...pretty Shakespearean planning on Shredder's part, huh?). The first two get mutated fairly quickly; the former into a gigantic dog-man who has one arm much larger than the others and weird, Doomsday-like spikes and the latter into a fish-man who can only locomote on land thanks to robot legs. Michelangelo, who insists on naming all their villains—similar to the way Johnny Storm insisted on naming all of the Fantastic Four's villains in their one good cartoon) calls them Dogpound and Fishface, respectively.

Other familiar character that appear?

•The Purple Dragons The generic street gang the Turtles fight in the opening scene of the very first issue of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles appear here, and play a minor but recurring role. They are three Asian-American dudes in matching black and purple outfits that look like what the blonde asshole kid from The Karate Kid might design for a gang uniform. Petty street criminals, they appear whenever petty street criminals are called for.

•Baxter Stockman The Turtles' second name villain after The Shredder in the comics, appearing as he does in TMNT #2, Stockman is here portrayed similarly to how he was in the original Mirage Comics, as opposed to the original cartoon (where he was a mutant fly) or IDW's rebooted (wherein he played a fairly major role). He's a bad guy and a robotics expert, but something of a joke to the Turtles (who can never really remember his name) and his later allies in the Foot (Bradford refers to him only as "Stinkman"), although access to Kraang technology makes him an occasional threat. He's designed like his Mirage inspiration, save for bigger hair and a not-terribly-menacing pink sweater.

•The Mousers One of those instances in which Stockman becomes particularly menacing is when he invents his Mousers, who appear just as they did in the comics. They take to 3D animation quite well, and they're given a fairly menacing echolocation function, which allows them to vocalize mechanical growls and roars like little steel raptors from Jurassic Park.

•Leatherhead The Ryan Brown-created mutant alligator introduced in 1988's Tales of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles #6, Leatherhead appears much closer to his original comics form than the version that was part of the original cartoon series. He's still been mutated by exposure to the same sort of mutagen ooze that made the turtles, and he still began his life as a pet baby alligator. As in the Mirage comics, he's spent much of his life with the aliens to whom the ooze belonged, but The Kraang being evil, he's now at odds with them, and his life with them hasn't been a pleasant one. Given an almost Jekyll/Hyde like personality, he is prone to go bestial and attempt to destroy the Turtles at a moment's notice, although in general he's their ally, and fights with them against The Kraang (seemingly sacrificing his life at one point). Michelangelo befriends him, and is usually able to calm him by rubbing him (as with real alligators). The animators do a great job on Leatherhead, who is one of the biggest characters to appear in the series, actually incorporating alligator moves like spinning in to his fighting style.

•Metalhead There are actually two Metalheads in TMNT lore, having little in common aside from their name. The original, created by Peter Laird and Jim Lawson, appeared in 1988's TMNT #15 (the superhero issue), and was a member of the team Justice Force; he had the Marvel's Medusa-like power to control his own hair and use it as a weapon. He was also a robot. The other, more popular Metalhead is a robot turtle introduced in the original cartoon series and accompanying toy line. This Metalhead is also a robot turtle, but he has a stature similar to that of the Justice Force member (that is, he's really small).

Donatello creates him from salvaged parts of Kraang technology, and remote controls him with what looks like a Nintendo control pad. The part where the Turtles cartoons generally lose me is when they snap my suspension of disbelief with the sewer-dwelling mutants' arsenal of high-tech weaponry, including multiple vehicles, all apparently hand-built by a turtle-man with no formal education (and, in the original cartoon series, before the invention of the Internet!). The Turtles gradually accumulate gadgets and vehicles in this series too, but it does two things to make disbelief suspension a little easier: First, Donatello gets his hands on various bit of super high-tech alien hardware (Metalhead is reverse-engineered from a robot from space, not simply built from scratch, for example), and, secondly, everything has a home-made, junkyard aesthetic. Their equivalent of "The Party Wagon," for example, is an abandoned subway car with monster truck wheels; one of the seats in it is a hair-dryer chair like those found in old-school salons).

•The Rat King The original "Rat King" was a deranged man who thought he was various monsters, and first appeared in 1988's Tales of The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles in a story written and drawn by Jim Lawson, entitled "I, Monster" (This series uses that title for the episode in which The Rat King appears). Lawson's version named himself Rat King by the end of the story, and later appeared enigmatically in the "City At War" storyline (and, more enigmatically still in volume 4 of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles). The original cartoon treated him as a villain able to control rats, keeping his design from the comics. This Rat King is a mutated scientist given the power to control rats with his mind. His design is dramatically different. He wears a long black coat, a wide-brimmed black hat and a blindfold (he now sees through the eyes of rats), and his skin and teeth are shriveled and decayed, giving him a corpse-like, somewhat vampiric appearance.

Otherwise, almost all of the threats are all original ones, including a Lewis Black-voiced mutant named Spider Bytez, a monkey man, a mutant newt with space-age weaponry called "The Newtralizer" who really seems like he must have come from the Archie Comics (but didn't!), a mutated cockroach with a Terminator-inspired single-mindedness and general portrayal.

Next to Donatello's elongated design, the one aspect of the show that took me the longest to get used to was probably the vocal work. And that wasn't because there was anything wrong with it, mind you, it was just that the performers were so familiar to me from other cartoons. Specifically, Michelangelo and Donatello.

The former is played by Greg Cipes, who also voices Beast Boy in Teen Titans Go!, the last TV show I binge-watched on DVD like this, and he gives both characters identical voices. And given how similar the two characters are in terms of personality, it took an especially long time to get used to (Disconertingly, Michelangelo has a habit of shouting "Booyakasha," appropriated from Sacha Baron Cohen's Ali G character and replacing old cartoon battle cry "Cowabunga," the root word of which seems to be "Booyah!", which is of course Beast Boy's pal Cyborg's catch phrase).

As for the latter, he's voiced by Rob Paulsen, who played Yacko on Animaniacs (and, according to IMDb, shares a birthday with me); his voice here is deeper, but it still sounds like Yacko to the extent it took me a few episodes to forget about it. I imagine more frequent cartoon/TV watchers than myself might have had a similar (or more difficult) experience acclimating to April being voiced by Mae Whitman, who, I may be mistaken, but am fairly certain, plays 87% of all animated female characters.

I was a little surprised to see movie stars Jason Biggs and Sean Astin playing Leonardo and Raphael respectively; neither of whose voices I recognized, but, after I read the credits, I could see it (and by "see it" I, of course, mean "hear it"). Other familiar (to me) voices include Clancy Brown as Dogpound (Kevin Michael Richardson voices The Shredder, and his voice is even deeper, scarier and more sonorous than Brown's, so there's no fear of the henchman out-voicing the archenemy), Phil Lamarr as Baxter Stockman, Kelly Hu as Karai, Jeffrey Combs as The Rat King, and Gilbert Godfried and Roseanne Barr as Kraang Sub-Prime and Kraang Prime, respectively. Oh, and Danny Trejo played Newtralizer, but I had no idea of that until I looked it up.

When Viacom/Nickelodeon acquired the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles a few years back, I was pretty worried. (Well, as worried as one could be about the ownership of fictional characters, anyway; I was reasonably certain the sale wouldn't mean that Viacom employees would confiscate my issues of Turtles comics or anything). The 2013 live-cation film, which was brain-punishingly terrible, showed that I was right to worry, and while the IDW comics haven't been anyhwere near the neighborhood of as bad as that film, they have been overall disappointing (And seem more disappointing still after watching this and seeing things like how much cooler this show's version of a teenaged Casey Jones, introduced in the second season, is compared to the IDW comics' teenaged Casey Jones).

So I'm glad that this TV show turned out as well as it did (and while I'm only about halfway through season 2, that seems to be just as good if not better). If nothing else, it proves that good things can come from Viacom/Nickelodeon's ownership of the Turtles...hell, the opening credits even end with a nice homage to Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird's cover for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles #1, which I don't recall seeing in any other adaptations, save Turtles Forever (The next season includes more Eastman/Laird Easter Eggs than this one did, and even has Eastman voicing what has to be the single most bizarre character in TMNT history).

Meanwhile...

I don't know if you've heard anything at all about it or not, but did you know that Marvel is publishing a new Star Wars comic? It's true! Since Disney bought Marvel, a comics publisher, and then they bought Star Wars, the source material for thousands of pages of comic books over the last 40 years, Mickey Mouse/The Frozen Head of Walt Disney/Whoever's In Charge decided to start having Marvel publish Star Wars comics.

When I first heard this news, I remember my first reaction: "So, I wonder which artist Marvel will get to draw Brian Michael Bendis' Star Wars comics...?" I was actually quite surprised that Bendis isn't writing the book, or either of the two spin-offs announced so far, as he seems to get first pass at Marvel's various franchises, crossover storylines and potentially lucrative licensing projects (Halo, Castle. I was more surprised still at just how good the first issue turned out. I'm not a huge fan of Cassaday's work, and didn't care for some of his likenesses to the human actors in this issue, but otherwise it was A-OK comics making (In contrast, Brian Wood and Carlos D'Anda's Star Wars #1 wasn't as well-written, but better-drawn; it also suffered from splitting the team up at the get-go, whereas this fairly full first issue had the core cast of the first film all on a mission together, and even dropped Darth Vader into the mix by climax).

For my thoughts on the issue, you can read my review at Robot 6. I haven't read many reviews by others yet, but I imagine they will be generally positive (I tend to be one of the harsher critics who writes about mainstream comics on the Internet regularly). One that I did read was Dylan Todd's at Comics Alliance, in which he linked to his review of the Wood/D'Anda Star Wars #1 from a few years ago in the process of re-stating a point about how the sound effects in this book, and that book, and Star Wars comics in general tend to be disappointing.

He writes in his review of "Dark Horse’s attempt at (pretty much) this same series":

My biggest complaint with trying to do Star Wars in comic form is the fact that the films use sound as a huge storytelling tool, with two main characters — Artoo and Chewbacca — communicating entirely through sound effects, and another — Threepio — with a heavily affected and processed voice. Michael Heisler’s work here is fine, but when you think of the latest Simon Roy issue of Prophet, with weird glyphs that stand in for alien speech, or the way James Stokoe nailed Godzilla’s screech in the first issue of his Half-Century War miniseries, you can’t help but wonder if that extra lettering effort would pay off here.

That's a pretty excellent point, really. The new Star Wars comic is pretty weird about sound effects in general, using them only to denote the sound R2-D2's taser arm makes, and not the sound of, say, a lightsaber turning on or off or being swung, or blasters firing or striking things. Maybe Marvel shoulda sat Doug Monench down with a DVD of A New Hope and had him translate everything into comic book sound effects for them...? (I really liked the way Jeffrey Brown handled Wookie hand-writing in his Jedi Academy books, for whatever that's worth).

Also of interest on the Star Wars comics beat, I thought, was this bit on The Beat, wherein Heidi MacDonald notes that there are 89 "confirmed" variant covers for Star Wars #1, which is a ludicrously high number (It's a 30-page comic, so there are three covers for each page...?). I was a little annoyed by the $5 price tag, and if Marvel sold a million copies, then it would seem like that earns them $5 million bucks on it...but, then, you have to subtract the cost of the production (paying everyone who contributed, printing the things) and marketing them. And while I'm sure not all 89 of those variant covers are original works by different artists—some are probably black-and-white variants, or blank variants—that still increases he number of people you have to pay to draw covers for you. Is it all worth while? I guess it must be.

Of course, because of the fucked-up way the comics market works, it's not like Marvel sold a million copies of a $4.99 comic to customers. Instead, they sold a million copies to retailers, who will then attempt to sell those million copies to their customers, and they may or may not succeed, and thus may or may not end up with thousands of issues of Star Wars #1 in the back room, where they keep their first issues of Brigade and Warriors of Plasm.

Finally, I thought this was an interesting observation from Tom Spurgeon:

they're experiencing big sales on the new wave of Marvel Star Wars comics, which makes me think that they're really getting in their own way a bit long-term on the superhero comics. The Star Wars license and the Marvel superheroes license shouldn't be that far apart in terms of comic book market penetration.

I suppose the vast gulf in sales between Star Wars #1 and Avengers #Whatever has more to do with all the variants and marketing and selling strategies than anything else, but yeah, you can look at that in one of two ways. The success of the selling of Star Wars #1 is all smoke and mirrors that can't last very long, and the way Marvel handles the rest of its line is more realistic/less-crazy pants, or they are doing a really shitty job on marketing and selling everything that's not Star Wars.

I had one other review of a comic book appear in a place that was not here this week, and that was a review of Orphan Blade for Good Comics For Kids; you can read that here. It's an original graphic novel written by the late M. Nicholas Almand and drawn by Jake Myler, representing some very interesting world-building behind and beneath it's manga-inspired story of warriors with magical weapons.

Review: Tales of The TMNT #15

When I first saw the cover for Tales of The TMNT #15 (#13 and #14 represent another hole in my collection, if you're wondering), I assumed the story inside must be somehow related to the story from 1990's Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles #30, in which Casey Jones and the Turtles journey to an alternate dimension populated entirely by car racing lunatics who look much like the guy on the cover of this issue (That issue, by the way, was by Rick Veitch, making his return to the title after his three-issue, 1989 story arc, "The River").

That proved not to be the case, as editor Steve Murphy notes in his introduction. That character is "demon hot-rodder Von Clutch," and the headless lady riding shotgun is his girlfriend, Darlin'. They are apparently characters created by Laird and some Mirage co-horts for their "intellectual property development company" Funatix!, Inc.

Okay.

So this issue's credits include a plot by Murphy, Eric Talbot, Jim Lawson and Peter Laird, a script by Murphy, pencils by Lawson and inks by Talbot. The frontspiece is by Fernando Pinto, and features a fairly generic but dynamic image of Michaelangelo diving face-first into a hail of ninja weapons. The narration boxes all concern cars, and, as with the last issue we covered, it doesn't really "work" by the rules the creators have already established for themselves. After all, it's Michaelangelo who narrates the introductory page, saying "...Let me tell you a story.." But when it comes time for the actual story being told, the one that fills up the issue, Casey and April's adopted daughter Shadow is once again the narrator. And, as with the several previous Shadow-centric stories, that narration comes in the form of her journal entries.

She and Casey are taking his meticulously restored and cared for '57 Chevy Bel Aire way out west to where Casey spread Shadow's mother's ashes (in the "City At War" storyline that closed out the original 1984-1993 volume of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles). Michaelanglo, wearing the perfect disguise of a trench coat and hat, is riding along in the backseat.

As they're driving along, Shadow is reading about highway apparitions in an issue of The Fortean Times, and there's a neat bit where Casey harumphs Fortenalia in general, using old man words like hooey and malarkey. Given Casey's life experiences, you think he'd be a bit more open-minded.

"I don't think walkin' talkin' five-foot tall mutant turtles are allowed to be skeptics," Michaelangelo says when Shadow asks him what he thinks, and Casey eventually narrows his skepticism down a little: "I just don't believe in ghosts is all."

Before long, he'll have little choice but to believe, as he runs headlong into a specter the locals at a roadside diner tried to warn him of: Von Clutch, the guy on the cover, who drag-races hapless victims for their souls.

Casey, Shadow and Michaelangelo find themselves racing Von Clutch and Darlin' for their souls, but Shadow has a secret weapon: She found a human skull not far from the side of the road when they made a pit stop, and tosses it to Darlin'. Turns out her intuition was right; it was her skull, and its absence was what was tying her and Von Clutch to this world.

Her head reattached to her body, they ascend to heaven, releasing the souls of all the others Von Clutch has beaten in the past.

As our heroes ride off, one more ghost appears—that of Shadow's mother Gabby.

This is really the best kind of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles story, even if this particular installment is particularly light on Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles—Michaelangelo basically just riding along on Casey and Shadow's adventure. That is, the kind where something random and weird happens to our heroes, putting them in a conflict they can meet and defeat, generally in the space of an issue.

Casey and Michaelangelo are definitely out of their element here, with neither of them getting to raise a weapon, or even do any kind of fighting at all, and Casey appearing mask-less throughout. But the issue does give Lawson ample opportunity to draw cars, engines and motorcycles, things that are apparently among his passions. And the desert landscape makes for a refreshing change of pace from the normal urban (New York) or rural (Northampton) environments most Turtle adventures are set in.

This issue also has a back-up story, a six-pager by Murphy and Lawson once again starring Utrom scientist Professor Obligado.

Entitled "Apocalypse Vow," there's not really much to it at all, although I guess it's part of a series of stories (the introduction says it's a sequel to the story from the previous issue, and it ends with a "To Be Continued...")

The last few pages are sort of interesting, in that they are action scenes involving gunplay and martial arts, but the hero and his enemies are all Utrom aliens...meaning they are all fleshy, basketabll-sized creatures with little tentacles.

Review: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Vol. 6: City Fall Part 1

One often frustrating aspect of IDW's Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles comics is co-creator Keven Eastman's heavy involvement in the series, which he has earned co-plotting credits for since its launch, and has always provided covers for (and sometimes even breakdowns for the interior art). Sure, he's only one voice in the mix—one of several writers contributing to the plots or stories–but his presence is important, an unspoken but powerfully communicated endorsement of everything going on in IDW's series. And that series has featured a dramatic reinvention of the characters and their story (the most dramatic reinvention in comics, outside of Archie Comics' based-on-the-cartoon comics series Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Adventures).

As puzzling as some of the creative choices might seem to readers, and as poor as particular aspects of particular issues might seem here or there, Eastman seems cool with it. And these characters are all his creations—well, co-creations, anyway—so whether he owns and controls them anymore or not (not; they're Viacom's now), if he's okay with whatever IDW's doing in any given comic, well, who are we to get too bent out of shape?

That said, I've been pretty uncomfortable with a lot of aspects of the reboot, perhaps most particularly on its reliance for the original animated adaptation as a source of inspiration...hell, it's prime source of inspiration. Other aspects of the reboot, like Splinter, the Turtles and Shredder all being reincarnated ninjas from feudal Japan, for example, and Casey Jones being a teenager whose abusive father is the Purple Dragon gangleader, well...I'm still struggling to get used to that stuff.

This particular volume collects four issues of IDW's TMNT ongoing series (#21-#24), but the title story doesn't begin until the second of those issues, #22. Before that comes Eastman's heaviest contribution to the series so far, #21. Eastman not only co-plots it with two others (Bobby Curnow, who is also the series' editor, and Tom Waltz, who scripts each issue), he also provides all of the interior artwork.

That is, of course, a treat. I've liked Eastman's art, and been a fan of it, for as long as I've liked comic books, and while he's refined that style over the years, it hasn't evolved into something new and unrecognizable, nor has it dulled at all. The word "gritty" is overused when discussing action comics, which usually use it to describe the tone of the stories, but the word really applies to Eastman's artwork—full with little flecks of ink and bits of crosshatching, theirs a texture to the work. It's easy to imagine running ones hands over the original pages and feeling the patches and bumps of ink, or holding the original page up and finding it heavier than it should be.

In addition to always enjoying Eastman's visual contributions to IDW's TMNT comics, I also find them amusing. Eastman draws the characters in his own style, the way he's always drawn them, regardless of their new designs. His ninja turtles are all identical, they're all pupil-less, and they wear the same kneepads and elbow-pads they've been wearing since the late '80s, while the IDW artists distinguish the characters pretty widely, and have their arms, legs, hands and feet wrapped like those of fighters, rather than wearing any kind of pads.

Eastman's Splinter still looks like a pupil-ess, shaggy little werewolf, while the other artists draw him taller, with shorter hair, and with a shorter snout and a long goatee and fu manchu mustache. Eastman's Casey looks like he's always looked—that is, a grown-up—rather than a teenager, and his Shredder looks like his Shredder, not IDW's.

I suppose it makes sense that Eastman would just draw his characters how he wants, just as it makes sense that Curnow and/or IDW would let him do as he pleased to keep him happy. In the first volume of Turtles, when Eastman and Laird were both drawing and, later, when they would be joined by their studio-mates, their designs and depictions of the characters changed rather dramatically, and, eventually, different artists would be drawing disconnected stories on an almost issue by issue basis.

Here, however, it's somewhat jarring, as unlike the original Mirage TMNT series, IDW's series has told one big, long, serial story; groups of issues sometimes have individual names and form story arcs, but they all bleed into one another, with no conflict ever being resolved so much as being continued.

That all-Eastman issue is a bit of a tour de force for the artist, as a good 17 of its 22 pages consist of nothing more than fighting. And Eastman manages to pack a lot of action into so relatively few pages, a more remarkable feat still when one considers it contains two single-page splashes and a single two-page splash. How does he accomplish it? With panels; lots and lots of little panels.

Several pages have more than 12 panels on them, allowing the characters to really fight, as in trading blows and so forth. Despite the fact that so much of American super-comics and action genre comics tend to revolve around fighting, there's generally precious little actual action in them; here, at least, there is.

The plot of the story is thin, but then, it's really just a showcase for Eastman. The title characters are on a rooftop and about to head home for the night when they are suddenly attacked by a mysterious robed and hooded figure in a clown face mask, a figure with unnaturally bent legs, suggesting he's not human under that mask.

The character repeatedly attacks, defeats the Turtles and then retreats; each time employing a different combat style, which he rather irritatingly lectures them about while doing so.

At the end, he removes his mask to reveal...

...it was Splinter all along. Nevermind how he concealed his tail, changed his voice and learned to trash-talk as he did, how did he manage to smoosh that big-ass snout flat under a face-mask made for humans?

The last few pages finally move the mega-plot forward a bit, as they are set in Japan, where The Shredder, his grandaughter Karai and The Foot unearth a casket, within which lies a perfectly preserved, glowing woman in a kimono, a ceremonial fox mask by her side. Shredder calls her "Kitsune," and she'll prove an important character moving forward.

After that issue, artist Mateus Santolouco shows up and "City Fall" proper begins...or, I should say, continues. The first page of the storyline opens with The Shredder and Kitsune back in New York, discussing a group called "The Savate," who dress like Naurto characters and are lead by a brash young man called Victor. They are apparently a rival martial arts gang in NYC who oppose The Foot Clan, and an asterisk helpfully instructs us to "See TMNT Annual #1." That comic was never collected in trade paperback, which kinda/sorta defeats the purpose of trade collections, really. (Similarly, the recently-released Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Turtles In Time collection does not include TMNT Annual 2014, which kicked off the storyline; I reviewed that book briefly here).

So it looks like a gang war is shaping up, and it's to be waged between The Foot and The Savate, with the Turtles and company caught in the middle. But before it comes to that, The Shredder has a reeaallly complicated plan to pull off.

He has Karai and The Foot capture Casey Jones and Raphael but then let Raph escape and summon Splinter and his brothers to help him rescue Casey. April drops the guys off at "the docks," where Shredder meets Karai and Alopex (the fox mutant introduced in IDW's Raphael #1) and then shoves a bladed-gauntlet into Casey's stomach, horribly wounding him. This draws the Turtles out, everyone fights and they try to retreat and get Casey to safety...and, during the melee, Shredder and company capture their true target: Leonardo (Why not just capture him in the first place? I do not know).

They the Foot turn Leonardo over to Kitsune for mystical brainwashing, which leads to a string of guest-artists including Dan Duncan, Ross Campbell, Andy Kuhn, Ben Bates and Eastman himself again, each drawing a two-page spread of a fantasy sequence set inside Leo's brain. Campbell, for example, draws a bunch of Foot Ninja pursuing a mask-less Leo, the ninja spontaneously mutating into hairless, desiccated rat men before a big, scary version of Splinter throws him off a rooftop, only to be rescued by Shredder. Eastman draws Splinter siccing the reanimaed corpses of the other three turtles on Leo, and again Shredder saves him.

Meanwhile, April and Casey's friend Angel, an on-again, off-again member of the Purple Dragons, watch over him at the hospital, and mutant Old Hob and huge mutant turtle Slash offer Splinter and the Turtles their assistance in finding The Foot Clan. They do find The Foot, but they also find the newly brain-washed Leonardo, now decked out in a black bandanna, with black fabric wrapped around his limbs, and sporting a bit of armor and a Shredder-like gauntlet. The guest artist-drawn flashback sequences have flipped Leo's loyalties from Splinter to The Shredder.

Everyone fights, and it ends in a draw. Both sides return to their corners, and The Shredder retains Leonardo, who is now in his thrall.

This volume marks the beginning of Santolouco's stint as regular-ish artist on the series. Unlike the previous artists on IDW's TMNT comic—Dan Duncan drew the first three volumes, Andy Kuhn the foruth and Ben Bates the fifth—Santolouco redesigns the individual Turltes to make them look more distinct from one another, and he leans pretty hard towards the designs of the current, 2012-launched television cartoon (perhaps by directive, rather than choice).

So now Donatello is a head taller than Raphael and Leonardo, and somewhat lankier; he even has a gap in his teeth. Michaelangelo is almost a head shorter than Raph and Leo, and his bandanna is noticeably shorter than those of his brothers, leaving hardly any "tail" flowing behind his head; they all have much rounder heads now, and resemble compromises between the designs of the TV show and Duncan and company's earlier Turtles.

He draws them well, and draws all of the other characters well as too—I'm not fond of some of the designs, like that of Slash or The Savate, but he inherited those—but it's a pretty jarring change from what came before.

**********************

Despite the unfortunate tendency to not collect important parts of the stories just because they get published outside of the main title, the trades really are the best way to read IDW's TMNT comic. After all, if you read the issues serially, you'd only be able to get one cover, and thus miss out on Eastman's often quite awesome covers, or the many awesome variant covers from great, usually unexpected artists.

Like, for example, have you ever wondered what Dean Haspiel's Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles might look like? Wonder no more!

There's definitely something weird going on with the way he draws their shells at the crotch.

Or hey, remember how great those first issues of the the latest volume of Marvel's Moon Knight series were? Did you find yourself wondering what artist Declan Shalvey's Shredder and The Foot Clan might look like? Behold!

I feel like there may be some sort of Foot Clan/Declan joke to be made, but I can't quite find it.

Proof that Batman is the greatest of all possible subject matter for comics (a particularly poorly-written review of Seo Kim's Cat Person)

In the above comic strip, cartoonist Seo Kim's cartoon avatar sits at her drawing board, trying to decide what to draw. She then has a glorious epiphany: She can make comics about ANYTHING.

She then fills the strip's fourth panel with her conception of the "ANYTHING" of potential comics subject matter, and, if you study that crowded panel full of wild imagery, you'll note that Batman appears not once, not twice but three times (Somehow pooping without taking his bat-suit off while a cat perches atop his head, hugging a cat, and crying).

In Cat Person, Kim's 2014 Koyama Press-published collection of cartoons, we see that as often as he might appear in that particular strip, Batman isn't really Kim's muse. She has a few different muses, one of whom is her big, fluffy cat Jimmy, another is her boyfriend Eddie.

Jimmy stars alongside cartoon Kim in the first 20-page section, "Jimmy & Me," a collection of cat comics that range from observational strips of the real but weird behavior of cats (of which the one on page seven is probably my favorite) to absurdist gags, like one where Kim and Jimmy run headfirst into one another and transform into a powerful composite human/cat creature.

Despite the title of the book, Kim does not stay on the subject of cats. Which might be too bad; hasn't she seen how well those Jeffrey Brown cat books have done in book stores? People live comics and they love cats! You can't go wrong with cat comics!

In "Eddie & Me," she tells slice-of-life stories about her boyfriend Eddie. Boyfriends aren't generally as funny as cats, but there are a few strips in here that are kinda funny, and some of them also feature her cat Jimmy and Jimmy's cat Bubble, so there's that. If Kim hadn't let us get to know here in the first section, and "Just Me" and "Just Me II", the two chapters that immediately precede "Eddie & Me," they might have seemed a little dire, but she does, so there's a bit of humor in just seeing this weird, quirky person we've spent some time with—a person we've seen vomit out of her mouth and, on one occasion her mouth and eyes at the sight of public displays of affection—in a relationship of her own.

Those middle sections tend to focus on Kim's life as a cartoonist, colorfully imaginative scenarios that should prove easy to relate to for anyone who's tried to do any form of creative work or work from home before (I particularly liked one where her bed chases her down like some sort of adorable monster and engulfs her, forcing her to sleep). Many of these focus on her relationship with social media and the problems a smart phone with Internet access can cause, others simply deal with Oreos and bus-riding.

The final section of the book is simply entitled "Misc.," and features cartoons devoid of Kim, Jimmy or Eddie (Actually, Kim's in a couple of them, but not as the star). These tend to be more traditional gag cartoons (a trio of beets share a bed, droplets of weat on their agonized looking, anthropomorphic faces, while one blows its nose, the caption reading "Sick Beets") and weird-ass drawings (a beaver and a moose making out) and funny animal strips.

Collections of cartoons like this can be really hard to review. So maybe I should just quit trying to review Cat Person. Instead, let me just say this: Seo Kim's Cat Person was a pretty funny book, full of pretty funny cartoons. I read it and liked it. I thought it was funny, and I like the way Kim draws stuff; I like the way her lines look on paper, and the expressions she draws on characters, and the way that one pigeon told her to calm her shit.

You should read it, because maybe you'll like it too.

Review: Star Wars Omnibus: Early Victories

With the return of the Star Wars license to Marvel and the publisher's first new series set to start in the immediate future—not to mention a filmic reboot coming to theaters near us in about a year's time—I've been racing to read all of the Dark Horse Star Wars comics I can before they disappear.

Marvel's notoriously bad at keeping collections of comics in print, so even if they decide to and/or are able to republish collections of the decades worth of superior Dark Horse comics, there's little guarantee that they will do it in a sensible fashion, or keep those books in print. So I've been availing myself of Ohio's libraries to read Star Wars trades and ominbi as collected and published by Dark Horse, before they fall apart and crumble to dust.

This particular 350-page collection includes stories set in the relatively early era of the fictional Star Wars Expanded Universe timeline, chronicling events that took place shortly after "The Battle of Yavin" (i.e. the climax of the original film), which the Star Wars chronologers apparently use similarly to the way that historians used to use the birth of Christ: This is set so many years before the Battle of Yavin, this so many after the Battle of Yavin, and so on.

These stories are also early in terms of Dark Horse's publication history; they are all products of the first seven years or so of Dark Horse's acquisition of the license, the contents were all published between 1995 and 1999, and they look and even feel rather old school. Perhaps it is merely a byproduct of coming before the second film trilogy, in which the official, popular version of the Star Wars universe expanded so greatly, paired with the publisher's reliance or more classical, style-chasing adverse artwork and the coloring process of the mid-to-late 1990s, but these comics read an awful lot like the Dark Horse collections of the original Marvel Comics...only better-written, better-drawn and featuring far more sophisticated storytelling.

The omnibus contains five distinct comics stories of various lengths, one of which is actually a four-part, 1995 adaptation of a prose novel, and plenty of work from some big-name creators, like Dave Gibbons, June Brigman, Chris Sprouse and Bret Blevins.

Let's take 'em one at a time.

First up is Vader's Quest, a four-issue, 1999 miniseries illustrated (and lettered) by Dave Gibbons and written by Darko Macan. Despite the title, the stars of the book are really Luke Skywalker and a washed-up rebel X-Wing pilot named Jal Te Gniev. Vader, of course, appears throughout, and, as for his quest, it is to find Skywalker, the young pilot who destroyed the Death Star at the end of the first Star Wars movie.

This story seems to be set almost directly after the events of that film, as the main characters are all dealing with its fall-out (Luke even puts his white moisture-farming outfit from Tatooine back on). While Vader goes in pursuit of Skywalker, before even bothering to check in with The Emperor, Luke finds himself the unexpected hero of the Rebellion and naively trying to do good with his new notoriety.

Jal, a seasoned veteran pilot, had to sit out the Battle of Yavin in the sickbay, with measles (Yeah, their galaxy still has measles, apparently. There were a lot of anti-vaxxers a long time ago). Seeing all the glory being showered upon Skywalker for his lucky shot in his very first mission, Jal turns to drink in frustration.

As punishment for a dumb accident involving his fighter and the space garage door, Jal gets semi-grounded and semi-exiled to a planet where he's supposed to be recruiting for the Rebellion, but instead just bellies up to that planet's bar and starts anti-recuriting. Meanwhile, Luke goes on a diplomatic mission to a planet that Gibbons designs to look like something out of old Buck Rogers or Flash Gordon strips, where the native population looks completely human, save for little dog-like snouts, slightly pointier ears than humans and four-fingered hands.

They have a neat-looking beast of burden there, which looks like a gigantic shell-less tortoise, making a perpetually slightly bored and rather pissed-off face:

I don't know what that thing is—I'm sure there's a Wookiepedia entry on it, and probably a few short stories in an anthology comic somewhere starring it—but I like it.

Both Luke and Jal make some pretty big mistakes during the course of their adventures, but both make up for them before the story's end, Curious George style. One of them gives his life atoning, however, while the other survives. Can you guess which of them lives and which of them dies?

The climax involves a showdown of sorts with Darth Vader, but it's more of a face-off than the usual light saber duel. There's a neat scene of the princess of the dog people totally emasculating Darth Vader...

...which may be even better than the scene where a local dog person throws a bottle at a Stormtrooper and calls Darth Vader "Darfader."

Okay, actually, that second scene is probably better. It's hard to beat a local drunk finding the courage to stand up against the Dark Lord of the Sith, slurring his name into "Darfader."

Gibbons' art is, it will come as no surprise, pretty great. His line is clean and smooth, and he draws all the expected vehicles and items and characters in a way that they are instantly recognizable, but also his own. I particularly like his frozen-faced Darth Vader. When he doesn't have his towering stature, theme music, wheezing and scary voice going on—that is, when he's in a comic and not in a film—the villain loses a lot of his edge, but Gibbons helps give him an unsettling creepiness simply by the way he draws and frames his stiff, immobile, frozen face and his towering, black, stiff form.

There's another character who appears in this that I suppose plays a part somewhere later in some other Star Wars story, as she gets a relatively great deal of panel-time, but there's little resolution to her story. She's a badly burned and wounded humanoid who uses a gun-toting, many-armed droid as a sort of full-body prosthetic.

I don't know who she is exactly, what her deal is, where she's coming from or where she's going, but I like the design of the that droid a whole lot. Props to whoever came up with it (and, if not Gibbons, then to Gibbons for drawing the hell out of it).

The next story is from a 1995 miniseries, River of Chaos, written by Louise Simonson, penciled by June Brigman and inked by Roy Richardson. Seeing the amazing quality of Brigman's work—which is every bit as clean, smooth and classical in construction as that of Gibbons, but slightly less stiff and featuring a more dynamic sense of emotion and action in many of the panels—I was really quite surprised that I had never heard of her before. Well, I've heard of her before, but just her name; before reading this I don't think I ever read anything she had drawn before. Looking at her bibliography, I see she co-created Power Pack with Simonson, but her comics work seems to have been relatively sporadic and low in volume. That's a little on the perplexing side, given how damn good she is, but it sounds like she's been kept busy teaching and doing plenty of illustration and comics work outside of the comic book industry proper, like drawing the Brenda Starr comic strip for over 15 years.

The only character from the Star Wars films to really appear in "River of Chaos" is Princess Leia, and while she plays a pretty big role in the proceedings, she's not one of the stars of the story. That role is filled by a pair of star-crossed lovers.

The male half of the couple is Ranulf Trommer, the handsome son of an imperial admiral and an excellent pilot. Leia herself admires his skill as he's blowing the shit out of an underwater rebel base even after the rest of his squad is decimated and his tie fighter is badly damaged. Aftewards, a Grand Moff (I don't know why exactly, but that is my favorite phrase in the Star Wars universe) gives Ranulf an assignment he's not terribly comfortable with: He's nominally being sent to a planet with a strong rebel presence in order to serve as aide to the military governor there, but he's also meant to spy on that governor, as the Moff thinks he's up to no good (and he is!).

The female half is Mora, a beautiful, red-haired human girl who was adopted as a baby by one of the H'drachi, diminutive sentients that look vaguely like a race of Joe Camels and who make their home on the planet Ranulf is being sent to. Their elders have a weird ability to read the time stream, an ability magnified when the elders all work together, and they have used what insight their visions have provided them to basically sit out the Empire/Rebellion conflict, even as it rages around them.

Mora's adopted father is an outlier, and the other little camel people don't like the fact that he's adopted a human and raised her as one of them. Thus their not really succeeding when it comes to reading the river of time (hence the title).

Ranulf, posing as a merchant, quickly gets swept up in the events on the planet, finding himself sympathizing with Mora and the rebels. Simonson presents Raulf, and his father, are presented at first as conflicted "good German"-style characters, whose morality is in conflict with their sense of duty. Both loyal officers of a military family that used to serve the Old Republic and just continued serving, even after it became corrupted at the top, they fight for the Empire because they've always done so, but aren't really down with the whole "evil" part of this particular evil empire.

Ranulf's own moral dillema is made somewhat easier on this particular planet, given that the Empire itself is unhappy with the way its being run by its imperial governor.

There's a lot of well-executed action in this story—particularly when the governor brings in a horned bountyhunter with wrist-rockets and pre-cognition abilities, and enough drama about the true loyalties of Ranulf and a few other characters new to the conflict that the story has twists and turns, rather than being a straighforward march from Point A to Point B.

It also offers a nice portrait of Leia as leader, here completely divorced from her normal male co-stars and funny sidekicks, and it has both the speeder bikes from Return of the Jedi, one of my favorite vehicles from when I was a little kid, and the AT-ATs from Empire, which I fucking love. (I believe my first reaction to hearing there was going to be a new Episode VII movie was something along the lines of, "Oh good, maybe they can have AT-ATs in a city in this one...").

Next up is Splinter of The Mind's Eye, writer Terry Austin's 1995 adaptation of Alan Dean Foster's 1978 prose novel (the very first "Expanded Universe" book!), drawn by Chris Sprouse with Austin inking his work (Damn, Gibbons, Brigman and Sprouse make for a great 1-2-3 combination of pencil artists; all have a style that is similar enough that their work looks "right" together, in addition to the fact that they are all, you know, excellent artists). Sprouse seems to go to greater pains to make the designs of his characters more closely resemble those of the actors who portrayed them in the movie, and of the three stories in this collection, this one seems to most closely resemble the Star Wars universe as seen in the films, with apparently less latitude for designing creatures and cultures (The fact that this comic story feels like one closer to the Star Wars universe of the first Star Wars films may have something to do with the fact that the source novel was originally conceived of a potential sequel to the first film, if what we'd later call Episode IV wasn't a big commercial hit, and they had to go for a low-budget follow-up).

Despite the fact that the comic is based on a novel, the plot is pretty straighforward—much more so than that of the story it follows, actually.

Luke, Leia, C-3PO and R2-D2 are taking two ships to some sort of rebel conference, when damage to Leia's ship forces them to attempt to land on a planet along the way...ultmiately, crashland, due to some sort of lightning-based security system or weird storm on the planet. You know how interplanetary travel is.

Once on the ground, they quickly discover that there's actually an Imperial mining operation going on here, and they do their best to blend in, stealing black mining uniforms and heading to a cantina.

This leads to one of my favorite parts of the story, as Leia frets that the waiter might suspect that she and Luke are not really Imperial miners after all:

Maybe Leia—the senator, princess, wanted leader of the Rebel Alliance and probably the Empire's Public Enemy Number One—should have changed her distinctive hair-do as part of her disguise? I'm pretty sure she's the only person in the whole galaxy rocking that particular look.

Someone does suspect them, but it's not the Empire, it's an old woman in Jedi-esque robes named Halla, who claims to be a master of The Force and to have recognized Luke's Force sensitivity. She tries to enlist their help in tracking down an ancient treasure called the Kaiburr Crystal, which increases the Force abilities of whoever holds it to immeasurable proportions. To prove her story, she carries a splinter of it (Hey, like in the title!), which is enough for Luke to feel the crystal's power.

Before the trio can go in search of the crystal, however, Luke and Leia get involved in a brawl with some other miners, and they're all taken to the local Imperial jail. With Halla's help they break out, in company of two creatures that are essentially just huge Wookies with wild boar's heads, and they go about meeting the challenges of the quest: Fighting a giant worm monster and then a giant lizard monster, traveling through underground tunnels, being attacked by some kind of invisible amoeba creature, running afoul of and then befriending the planet's natives and eventually coming into conflict with a Darth Vader-lead contingent of Stormtroopers (Leia, who plays an awfully active role int his story compared to that of the movies, almost ices Vader, putting a blaster-hole in his cape).

They finally come to The Temple of Pomojema, which is apparently Basic for "Cthulhu":

And then who should stride in but Darth Motherfuckin' Vader, ready for a rematch.

Leia takes up Luke's lightsaber to battle the Dark Lord while Luke's incapacitated, and it doesn't go so great for the Princess.

They have kittens in the Star Wars-iverse...?

Vader lands like four blows to her, but he's apparently concentrating on merely cutting off her clothes, as each swipe seems to do nothing more than take a small chunk out of her mining uniform.

Leia eventually tags out and Luke comes in swinging; it's a pretty thrilling fight, really, far better than the old man sword fight Vader and Obi Wan had in the first movie, and Luke acquits himself much better here than he would in the next movie.

Vader even makes a ball of Force lightning to throw at Luke, and Luke bounces it back at him like it was a dodgeball.

At the climax of the fight, Luke straight-up chops Darth Vader's sword-arm off while Vader's punching him with his other arm.

And then Vader does pretty much the most bad-ass thing anyone has ever done in a sword fight.

He plants his foot on his own severed arm and pulls the lightsaber out of his dismembered fist using his other hand to continue the fight!

That moment of extreme bad-assedness is immediately erased by his next action, however, which is to then trip over his own severed hand...

D'oh!

...and fall into a deep pit, screaming NOOOOOO like he hasn't had to since he heard that Natalie Portman died of sadness.

If that's not the most dramatic single page of a comic book story ever, I can't imagine what is.

That proves to be the climax of the entire omnibus too, as the collection more-or-less peters out with two more one-shot comics, Shadow Stalker and Tales From Mos Eisley.

The former was a 1997 comic written by Ryder Windham and drawn by Nick Choles, and starring a guy named Jix.

Jix is a human with long hair he wears in a pony tail and a vest he wears over his bare torso. An extremely capable agent able to take down as many has a half-dozen stormtroopers at a time with his bare hands, he’s introduced in a six-page sequence demonstrating his capability by beating down the stormtroopers sent to summon him to Darth Vader’s castle, and then infiltrating it, getting all the way to that little cubicle thing Vader uses to get dressed in or whatever.

After Vader levitates and Force-chokes Jix for awhile, he sends him on a dangerous mission. Apparently he does this sort of thing for Vader a lot? I got the sense this was not the first Jix story, but I didn’t want to look him up on Wookiepedia, as if I look up every new character I encounter in one of these comics on Wookiepedia, I many never finish reviewing a single Star Wars trade.

So he goes on a mission involving Imperial governors and look-a-like droids. His arrival on the planet is pretty neat, as he smuggles himself there inside one of the bigger, goofier looking droids—basically a large refrigerator with legs—and then stuffs a guy he beats up into it.

He also fights a giant, fire-breathing salamander snake (Is it weird that at least half of the stories in this collection involve the protagonists fighting giant burrowing worm monsters of some kind?).

This story, while engaging enough, does seem a little out of place in this particular omnibus, as it doesn’t really qualify as a victory for anyone other than maybe Vader, even if it is set “early” in the Star Wars timeline. It’s followed by a comic that similarly doesn’t seem to fit, at least not in terms of showing a rebel victory early in the Alliance/Empire conflict.

This one, originally published in as Star Wars: Tales of Mos Eisely, is written by Bruce Jones and drawn by Bret Blevins, a stylist whose presence in the fictional Star Wars universe is quite welcome—even if he’s not getting to draw much in the way of touchstone characters here.

Divided into three short stories, it’s essentially just a group of unrelated pieces in which one patron of the hive of scum and villainy relates a dramatic experience to another.

These are all rather old-school stories, sci-fi versions of the old horror or crime stories that used to make up so many anthologies between various superhero booms in the industry.

In the first, a man hired to operate a lighthouse for the benefit of the Empire discovers himself besieged by bizarre and horrifying monsters that take alluring forms.

In the second, one that doesn’t really feel like it belongs in the Star Wars universe (which is actually a rather stiflingly small place), a 90-year-old man strides into Mos Eisley to tell about his 71-year-long cargo run. His ship lost it’s hyperdrive abilities in an accident, so rather than being able to just jump from planet to planet like Star Wars ships usually do, he’s forced to simply get from Point A to Point B by flying in a strightline…which takes a lifetime.

He comes down with the second-worst case of space madness I’ve ever seen, falls in love with a droid on the ship and, on the last page, reveals a hell of a stinger ending, worthy of an old EC Comic.

In the third tale, another white bearded old-timer—who probably looks a little too much like the protagonist of the previous story, even if Blevins takes some pains to differentiate them by a few decades worth of age—tells a strange story involving an alien egg and time travel in an attempt to con a younger man out of a drink.

And that’s that. The second-to-last page includes “A Word about the Omnibus Collections,” which says:

Dark Horse Comics’ Star Wars Omnibus collections were created as a way to showcase novel-length stories or series, and to provide homes for “orphaned” series, single-issue stories, and short stories, which would otherwise never be collected, or which might fall out of print.

I’m assuming the presence of those last two entries in this book can be explained by that little mission statement; perhaps there just wasn’t anywhere else to put them.

Although I’m a little surprised there aren’t more Tales of Mos Eisely; none of those three short stories even feature any of the popular—or at least name—characters seen in the cantina scene of Star Wars. Like, I wouldn’t mind knowing what the deal was with Walrus Man, Hammerhead, Greedo and the other action figures I used to play with as a child.

Meanwhile, at Robot 6...

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