TMNT Adventures Vol. 9
IDW
Cover By: Steve Lavigne
Collection Edits By: Justin Eisinger and Alonzo Simon
Collection Design By: Gilberto Lazcano
The ninja turtles started off as ninja warriors who fought and even killed the Foot Ninjas. Then they had a T.V. show where they were campy and fun loving pizza heads. This collection takes the skateboard shredding-catchphrase spouting turtles and delivers them back into the Archie comics series. During the series run, there was a great contribution that came from the Mutanimals series that saw the allies of the turtles as focus points. I love seeing all the different allies of the turtles as they fight semi-generic skeleton warriors. This volume does not take place in the streets of New York, nor does it take place in the sewers under it, but it does take place on the moon!
The ninja turtles were a colorful group of heroes, in the sense of their personalities and the bandanas they wear. Also colorful and equally strange are the allies the turtles keep and the enemies they fight. It is expected to have the colors to catch the eye and draw you in, but once drawn in, this story had another level to share with us; the four horsemen. What started out as a normal fight with evil, turned into a fight with the timeless evils of Famine, Pestilence, War and Death. From a casual reader standpoint, this volume had the basics that might have gone overlooked, but taking a deeper look and reading into the meaning of the fights, the trials and tribulations that the turtles and their friends go through as they fight the physical embodiment of these evils as well as the interpretations of the four horsemen of the apocalypse.
After reading about how the turtles will help stop these timeless evils, we are gifted an additional comic in the volume, and that is one of the first Turtles in Time adventures, all the way back to 1492. I am not sure how or why the turtles are lost at sea, but they crash land on an island that seems to have turned the clock back to when explorers sailed the globe to claim and discover new lands (and to enslave and take advantage of the natives). This issue was a standalone in the volume, but it still had the same multi-view enjoyment; basic reading or open to interpretation. From a turtle fan stand point, I loved reading about how they took on the challenges of Famine, War, Pestilence and Death, just as much as I loved reading about the turtles and their time displacement or at least the mirage (pun intended) of it.