Originally published in: Turtle Soup (Vol. 2) #1
Publication date: November, 1991
Story and art: Michael Dooney
Lettering: Mary Kelleher
Colors: Steve Lavigne
“Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Attack!!! Part 1”
Summary:
In Florence, Massachusetts, the Turtles are arguing over
where to stop for dinner. Michelangelo
suggests pizza, but Leonardo vetoes the idea, as pizza makes him gag.
Elsewhere, in a different dimension and in the future, a
short, grey alien-like guy named Henry is working in his lab. The doorbell rings and he’s greeted by the
lovely Betti Clane. She says she’s been
assigned by the Random Dating Council to be his blind date for the
evening. This is all news to Henry, but
he decides to show her around the lab, anyway.
He says that he’s training to become a Temporal Dimensional Analyst and
is currently working on building his own time travel gauntlet. Curious, Betti presses a button on the
gauntlet and both she and Henry vanish.
They arrive in Florence, right in the midst of the Ninja
Turtles. Thinking the Turtles to be
monsters, Betti begs Henry to get them back home. Unsure of how to use the gauntlet precisely,
Henry presses some buttons and accidentally unleashes a number of dinosaurs.
The Turtles discard their disguises and attack the
dinosaurs. Leo tells Henry to send the
dinos back, although he isn’t quite sure how…
Turtle Tips:
*The story continues in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
Attack!!! Part 2.
*The Turtles are all clad in their disguises from TMNT (Vol. 1) #14.
Review:
I love the anachronistic dinosaurs of my youth. You know, back when they didn’t all have
feathers, the velociraptor wasn’t the size of a chicken, the T-rex stood
lumbering and erect with its tail dragging on the ground and the brontosaurus… er, existed.
Stupid advances in paleontology have ruined all the best
dinosaurs. As far as I’m concerned, all
study of dinosaurs should have ended with that Fred Savage movie.
Anyway, Dooney draws a really lovely story, but that’s
come to be expected. One detail I dug
was when the dinosaurs are brought through the portal, their skeletons are
partially visible as they materialize.
Just one of the little extra flourishes that puts Dooney’s work at the
top of the heap.
In my head, I like to think that Henry comes from the
same time and place within Null Space as Renet and that a “Temporal Dimensional
Analyst” is just one more field overseen by Lord Simultaneous. But that’s just my own head-canon.
Anyway, at 6 pages per chapter, “Turtles Attack!!!” runs
really fast. Even when you squish em all
together, the (lovely) two-page spreads and serial-required cliffhangers eat up
space. Regardless, it’s a fun multi-parter
that serves no other purpose than to show us the Turtles fighting weird enemies
as rendered by Michael Dooney. And that’s
OK.
Grade: G (as in, “Government-mandated blind dating sounds
like too bleak and dystopian a future even for George Orwell”.)
