Publication date: April 17, 2013
Script: Joshua Williamson
Art: Mike Henderson
Colors: Ian Herring
Letters: Shawn Lee
Editor: Bobby Curnow
Summary:
On Burnow Island, a Rock Soldier is informed by a guard
of the dead Utrom left behind after a female ninja broke in and emptied the
ooze from its pod. The Rock Soldier
interrupts Krang (who is recuperating from his recent battle on Neutrino), much
to the General’s fury. Krang is further
infuriated by the news of the stolen ooze.
The Rock Soldier attempts to help Krang into his robot body without
being ordered to and Krang slaps his hands away. Krang ponders to himself that the Rock
Soldier thinks of him as weak and needs to be reminded of his place…
Many years ago.
Krang is a spoiled, bloated sack of tentacles sitting in his palace on
Utrominon, barking orders at servants.
His father, General Quanin, enters his chamber and looks upon his son’s dependency
with disgust. Krang asks if he can
attend his father’s upcoming war council and Quanin denies him the privilege,
as he considers his son to be worthless.
At the council, Quanin learns that the cyborg Traxus, an old enemy
of his, has taken control of a prison complex on the hostile world of
Morbus. Quanin decides that a commando
team of Utroms will perform a sneak attack from the swamps and take Traxus by
surprise. Krang, listening in on the
council, decides to stow away on the drop ship and prove his worth in battle.
The drop ship lands on Morbus , but as the Utrom commandos
disembark, their Commander steps on a landmine and sets off an ambush plotted
by Traxus, who had anticipated Quanin’s strategy. All the Utrom commandos are killed in the
ambush save Krang, who slinks away after his robot body is destroyed.
Knowing that Morbus is a toxic hellhole, Krang struggles
at first to survive in the wild, being preyed upon by a giant lizard as well as
other assorted creatures. However, as
the days pass, he grows stronger and discovers he has a knack for survival and
utter brutality. Eventually, he
determines that he is ready to conquer and rule. Taming one of the giant, killer lizards, he
launches a direct assault on Traxus’s prison stronghold.
Krang rides straight into Traxus’s chamber and demands
that Traxus surrender or die. Traxus’s
right hand men, Tragg and Granitor, offer to take Krang down for him, but
Traxus wishes to squash Quanin’s son by himself. Krang has the lizard spit acid into Traxus’s
eyes. Krang then leaps from the lizard’s
back, wraps his tentacles around Traxus’s neck and proceeds to stab him to
death with a crude spear. Observing this
display of strength, Tragg and Granitor offer Krang their allegiance, as it is
the way of their people to bow to any higher authority that usurps command through sheer strength. With Traxus dead and Tragg and Granitor at
his side, Krang recruits or kills all the remaining prisoners and conquers
Morbus.
Later, Quanin arrives and see’s Krang’s success for
himself. Not only has Krang conquered the planet, but he has transformed Traxus's cyborg corpse into his new robot body. Quanin addresses Krang as his
son and Krang finally has the satisfaction of having earned the respect he so
craved.
Back in the present, Krang snaps out of his
flashback. The Rock Soldier bows his
head, apologizes for trying to help Krang without being ordered and says he’s
willing to accept any punishment. Krang
tells the Rock Soldier not to be afraid and asks him politely to help him into
his robot body. As soon as he bends
down, however, Krang attacks and kills him with nothing but his tentacles. Slinking across the floor, Krang pities any
who would look upon him and assume him feeble and helpless.
Turtle Tips:
*This issue takes place after TMNT (IDW) #20.
*Karai killed the sleeping Utrom and stole the ooze from its
pod in TMNT (IDW) #19.
*Krang’s robot body was damaged in TMNT (IDW) #20.
*Morbus was originally introduced in Archie’s TMNT Adventures #13 as the planet Krang was banished to after his defeat.
*This issue was originally published with 4 variant
covers: Regular cover by Tyler Walpole, Cover RI by Henderson and Herring,
Cover RE for Dynamic Forces by Henderson, and Cover RE Jetpack exclusive by
Kevin Eastman.
Review:
Krang: A character I love, though I really don’t know
why.
Well, that’s not true; I know exactly why I like
Krang. Sure, he was a comedy relief oaf
in a silly bald muscle-man suit that talked like Catherine Hepburn, but it was
his back story that intrigued me above all else. In the old Fred Wolf cartoon, he was a
warlord out to conquer entire dimensions (not just planets, not just a
universe, but DIMENSIONS) and, when finally captured, was deemed so dangerous
that he had to have his brain removed from his body to dilute his potential
menace. And even after being reduced to
a singular organ and banished to another world without any resources, he STILL
managed to stage a comeback and become a
threat once again (well, “threat” might be a debatable description, but you get
the idea).
All the pieces for a truly great villain were there, but
the sappy comedy nature of the old Fred Wolf TMNT cartoon meant that the
writers could never really use those pieces to their fullest potential. Even the Archie TMNT Adventures comic, which
routinely dabbled in heavier storylines, wound up squandering Krang as a
character by removing him from the series in its early years.
So when Krang was first introduced into the IDW TMNT
universe way back in TMNT (IDW) #1, I had a pretty good feeling that we’d
finally be getting a Krang that lived up to the basic potential of his back
story. And yep, Krang’s been pretty
great so far. But now being an Utrom
instead of a disembodied brain, and having never been banished from Dimension X, he needed an update
to that back story.
This first installment in the TMNT Villain Microseries
doesn’t disappoint, as it begs the question “is Krang still a threat outside
his robot body”? That query is basically
the heart of this story, as we learn that Krang is no pathetic slimeball even
when separated from his weapons and technology.
In a way, IDW’s Krang feels like a fusion of the original
Krang and the 4Kids Utrom Shredder named Ch’rell. One of the things
I liked so much about Ch’Rell’s portrayal in the 4Kids cartoon was that even
when removed from his Shredder body, he lost none of his confidence or capacity
for fucking shit up. The first thing he
did in “Secret Origins, part 3” after exiting his body was to attack Raph and
nearly suffocate him. In “Turtles
Forever”, once revived by the Fred Wolf Shredder and Krang, he proceeded to
jack them up until they were finally able to knock him out (with some effort). Whereas the original Krang was routinely portrayed
as helpless and pitiable without his
robot body, Ch’rell was deadly with or without it. So in many respects, Ch’rell was an important
stepping stone in the evolution of Krang as a character.
What amused me most about this script is that author
Joshua Williamson basically took Green Arrow’s origin but recast the part with
Krang. If you aren’t familiar with Green
Arrow, he was a millionaire playboy named Oliver Queen who was a spoiled and
helpless piece of uppercrust trash. Then
he got stranded on an uncharted island and had to learn to survive and grow
strong. Or, at least, that used to be
his origin. I dunno what his deal is in
the “New 52” or whatever DC is calling their half-assed rebooted universe. But anyway, whereas Green Arrow used his
newly developed survival skills to help others, Krang instead uses them to
conquer and destroy. Because he’s a
villain, you know.
In that regard, Krang’s origin may be a story outline you’ve
experienced before. Whether it was in
the form of Green Arrow or not, “spoiled jerk learns to survive and rely on
himself after being stranded in an inhospitable wasteland” isn’t a very new
scenario. Still, Williamson casts Krang
in the role well and on a metatextual level it illustrates an evolution from
the whiney, helpless Krang of the Fred Wolf cartoon, to the ruthless,
threatening Ch’rell-like Krang of the IDW series. And as a bonus, we get the origins for Tragg
and Granitor, too (though does IDW’s insistence on spelling it “Tragg” instead
of “Traag” bother anybody else? No? Okay, sorry I even mentioned it).
Not to sell Williamson short, but I get the impression
that writing this story was the comparatively “easy part”. The “hard part”, making a pink ball of
tentacles look like a threatening monster of the wild, fell on artist Mike
Henderson. I’ll admit that when Krang
first starts to go feral and attack wild animals with tiny wooden spears, I
couldn’t help but smirk. I mean, c’mon. I’m only human, here. And yet, the more I saw of Krang strangling
his prey and relentlessly stabbing them with pointy sticks and leaping down
from the treetops with a look of killer instinct on his face… the more I
started to buy it.
Okay, it’s like this… have you ever seen the old B-movie “Fiend
Without a Face”? Of course you haven’t. But basically, the movie is about tentacled alien
brains from another dimension that come to Earth and start killing people. They start out as invisible, but even after
being revealed in all their unconvincing stop-motion glory, they still proceed
to kill people with the same effectiveness.
They do so by leaping down from a vantage point, wrapping their
tentacles around their victim’s neck so that they can’t be loosened or removed
and then stick a proboscis into the person’s brainstem, liquefying their grey
matter and sucking it out like a milkshake.
So yeah, after seeing “Fiend Without a Face”, I could buy a tentacled
brain being able to kill things 10 times its size.
…Or “Alien”. It’s
like the facehuggers from “Alien”.
There. Why didn’t I just say that
to begin with? “Fiend Without a Face”…
the Hell was I thinking…
Anyway, to get back on topic, the art is good and
Henderson deserves some extra consideration for making a bodiless Krang look
like a genuine threat and selling the idea that he could kill vicious predators
with nothing but a pointy stick. Even
Ch’rell’s stints outside of his Shredder body in 4Kids were played for humor,
regardless of his effectiveness against his enemies. As an epilogue to the “Krang War” story arc,
where artist Ben Bates drew Krang looking a bit cartoony and funny (though I
enjoyed his take, don’t get me wrong), Henderson’s psycho Krang serves as a
sobering reminder that the Utrom General is NOT comedy relief and very much a
deadly foe.
Grade: B (as in, “But I had to go back and change this snide little grading gimmick text because I originally thought the scar-faced Utrom Commander was Ch'rell but it turns out he wasn't so HAHAHA JOKE'S ON ME”.)
