Publication date: June, 1992
Story: Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird
Writing: Peter Laird and Jim Lawson
Pencils: Jim Lawson
Inks: Keith Aiken
Letters: Mary Kelleher
Cover: A.C. Farley
“Shades of Gray, Part One of Two”
Summary:
At the farmhouse, Leo, Mike and Raph get ready for their
next training exercise. Casey has been
given a 3-hour head start in nearby Springfield and the Turtles have until 1am
to find him (or else they walk home).
Don asks Splinter if he can stay behind and finish up a computer
project. Splinter gives Don permission
to stay, then asks April if she’s ready to drop the Turtles off. April finishes circling an ad in the
classifieds and grabs her purse.
April drops the Turtles off by an overpass and then
starts heading home. She doesn’t make it
far before the old pickup truck breaks down.
A man on a motorcycle stops by and asks if she needs any assistance.
Meanwhile, the Turtles discuss how they’re going to find
Casey. Raph suggests they locate his
precious Chevy and then guard it until Casey returns. The Turtles track down the Chevy in a parking
lot and keep a vigil, unaware that Casey has predicted their strategy and is
watching them in secret.
Casey tries to put some distance between himself and the
Turtles, running into the Central Street playground. He’s stopped by a trio of three teenage punks
who demand he fork over all his money.
Casey puts the hurt on them, sending two of the kids into retreat. The third attacks him with a knife and Casey
bashes him over the head with his hockey stick.
The kid goes down and doesn’t get back up. Casey checks his vitals and finds that the
boy is dead.
Suddenly, Casey is attacked from behind by the vigilante
named Nobody. Nobody happened upon the
scene in time to see Casey hovering over the dead body and presumes a
murder. Casey and Nobody got at it and
eventually Casey makes a break for it.
He loses nobody when the vigilante’s cape gets snagged on a swing set
and takes refuge in a graveyard. Casey
discards his hockey mask, enraged at himself for killing a kid. Nobody then catches up with him.
Down the street, the Turtles see the two punks running
and decide to see what’s up. They find
the dead kid in the playground as well as the broken end of Casey’s hockey
stick. They follow the trail of the
chase and enter the graveyard. Nobody
and Casey are still going at it, but Casey eventually loses the fight and
Nobody prepares to take him into custody.
The Turtles demand that Nobody set their friend loose and Nobody tells
them that Casey murdered a kid. Casey
solemnly explains that it was in self defense and was an accident. Nobody, being a cop, says that Casey will
have to answer for that in court, but Raph reminds Nobody of the time he killed
the arms dealers in the helicopter on their first team-up. Nobody reluctantly hands Casey over to them
and the Turtles promise that he’ll answer for whatever he’s guilty of.
As they exit the graveyard, Casey leaves his hockey mask
discarded on the ground.
Turtle Tips:
*This story is continued from TMNT (Vol. 1) #47. The story continues in TMNT (Vol. 1) #49.
*The Turtles last met Nobody in the untitled Nobody story
published in the 1989 Tales of the TMNT Collected Edition.
*Nobody blew up the helicopter in Tales of the TMNT (Vol.1) #2.
*The cover titles this story as “Shades of Grey” but the
title page spells it “Shades of Gray”.
The next issue uses the “Gray” spelling on both the cover and the title
page, leading me to assume that “Gray” was the intended spelling.
Review:
“Shades of Gray” is one of the most eye-opening arcs in
all of Mirage’s TMNT library, turning various action movie and superhero tropes
on their heads and challenging readers to completely reevaluate their interpretations
of certain characters.
Watching Casey take on muggers and purse-snatchers has
always been a lot of fun, as he chugs a couple brews with Raph then goes out
and wails on skulls with baseball bats and hockey sticks. It’s all pure fantasy and escapism. “Shades of Gray” briefly deposits the
characters in the real world, where a blow upside the head from a hockey stick
is more than enough to kill anybody. We’re
all so used to seeing the “action movie” physics in these comics, where a punch
to the face harmlessly knocks a foe out cold for only a few hours or a gunshot
to the shoulder is but the most minor of flesh wounds, that witnessing the actual
fallout of severe head trauma is a sobering shock. Seeing Casey at the end, his head lowered in
shame, the Turtles having to take responsibility for him… It takes the hardcore
“badass” character and turns him into a remorseful child. All he can say to defend himself is, “It was
an accident”.
In a lot of ways, “Shades of Gray” feels like the moment
when Mirage’s TMNT comic finally “grows up”.
When it began, it was a crude parody of Daredevil and X-Men which wound
up becoming its own thing. The book
embraced gratuitous and juvenile violence and glorified grim and gritty “badass”
characters, with that aspect being perhaps best encapsulated in the character
of Casey Jones. He’s a guy who drinks
all day and beats up crooks all night.
And so it went.
“Shades of Gray” looks at that lifestyle and
characterization from an adult perspective.
What are the consequences for when you bash a thug’s skull in with a
baseball bat? How effective is vigilante
justice REALLY when you’re trampling all over a crime scene and can’t offer eye
witness testimony because you have to keep your identity a secret? Is killing an arms dealer with a bazooka any
less shameful than killing a knife-wielding thug in self-defense? The second half of “Shades of Gray” delves
into these matters even deeper, particularly Casey’s hardcore drinking, and
really puts the “Outlaw Hero’s” defects under a microscope.
“Shades of Gray” also sets up some of the character arcs
prevalent during the “City at War” epic, making it a necessary prelude to that
event. Mostly, it gets the ball rolling
on April and Casey’s individual arcs, as they are also made to “grow up”
within the confines of the story. Casey
is forced in the worst possible way to realize the folly of drinking all day
and fighting all night. April, as is
merely hinted at in this issue, has the heart-breaking epiphany that her life
is being wasted, piddling around at a farmhouse in the middle of nowhere.
With “Shades of Gray”, both the plots and the characters
mature and move on. While the “fun” is
definitely behind us, now, I guess we sort of got that out of our systems with
the guest era, which consisted almost entirely of goofy stories and one-shots
with no long term consequences. “Shades
of Gray” and subsequently “City at War” are exactly what this book needed,
joyless though they may be.
Sort of like your parents kicking you out of the house
and telling you it’s time to grow up.
Grade: A (as in, “And Nobody learns an important lesson
about capes, too. He’d have learned it
sooner if he’d read Watchmen, though”.)
