Publication date: September 18, 2013
Story: Scott Tipton and David Tipton
Script: Scott Tipton, David Tipton, Kenny Byerly
Art: Dario Brizuela
Colors: Heather Breckel
Letters: Shawn Lee
Edits: Bobby Curnow
Summary:
Down in the lair, Michelangelo is inflicting a zombie
movie marathon upon his brothers. The
others get bored and go to bed, but Mikey decides to stay up all night
watching. By about 3am, however, he
starts freaking himself out and decides to go skateboarding rather than
sleep. While grinding rails in the back
alleys, Mikey sees hordes of shadowy zombies shambling through the
streets. Terrified, Mikey flees back to
the lair and tells his brothers. They
think he just imagined them, but Splinter insists they all get out of bed and
investigate (as a lesson in vigilance, of course).
Observing from the rooftops, the Turtles are shocked to
discover that Mikey was right. However,
Donatello notices that the “zombies” aren’t so much the undead as they are an
army of sleepwalkers. More than that,
they’re all carrying purloined high-tech equipment back to the Sleep Research
Institute. They scale the building and
peek in through the skylight. Inside,
they spot a group of Kraangdroids directing the sleepwalkers to build a giant
machine with the stolen equipment. The
machine, once activated, will turn every New Yorker into a “zombie” slave. The Turtles see a pair of Kraangdroids carry
a scientist off, saying that her assistance is no longer needed, and they
decide to intercede.
In a back office, the Kraang are about to execute the
scientist when the Turtles bash them to pieces.
The scientist introduces herself as Dr. Annie Sloane and says that the
Kraang forced her to build the machine.
They ask if there’s a way to stop it and she gives them a thumb drive
that can free all the zombies and then destroy the equipment.
Thumb drive in hand, the Turtles burst into the lab and
take on the Kraang. The zombies all
attack and the Turtles don’t want to hurt them, as they’re all just
mind-controlled civilians.
Unfortunately, the zombies keep getting in the way of their fight with
the Kraangdroids, severely slowing the Turtles down. Mike sees an opening and tells Donnie to toss
him the thumb drive. Donnie doesn’t want
to risk putting the thumb drive in Michelangelo’s hands, but Leo reminds him
that Mikey was right about the zombies when they wouldn’t trust him, so maybe
they should give him the benefit of the doubt.
Don tosses Mikey the thumb drive and he inserts it into the machine.
The machine begins to go haywire and all the zombies are
freed. Dr. Sloane then directs all the
people out of the building before the machine explodes. The Turtles escape just in the nick of time
as the whole thing detonates.
Down in the sewer, Leo, Don and Raph tell Splinter he was
right to send them to investigate.
Splinter corrects them, saying that the only thing he was right about
was trusting in Mikey. Speaking of
Mikey, the Turtles wonder where he’s run off to. They find him in the living room, getting
ready for a vampire movie marathon.
Turtle Tips:
*This story is continued from TMNT New Animated Adventures #2. The story continues in
TMNT New Animated Adventures #4.
*This issue was originally published with 3 variant
covers: Regular Cover by Brizuela, Cover RI by Tanya Roberts, and Cover RE
Montreal ComicCon Exclusive by Adam Archer.
Review:
Man, trying to find room for all those rambling,
redundant, ponderous Kraang dialogues must be murder on a letterer. So good on Shawn Lee for getting it all in
there without looking distracting.
Anyhow, this was a pretty simple done-in-one story, but I
was impressed to find how smoothly it flowed considering it was scripted by
three people. Usually an excess of creators
leads to a “too many cooks” situation, but the whole thing read very well and
the story held together from beginning to end.
Yeah, it suffered from some cornball clichés, but I’ll give them credit
for putting the convenient self destruct program in a USB stick instead of at
the mercy of a big red button conspicuously attached to the side of the
Doomsday Device.
This was a Mikey spotlight and like a lot of Mikey
spotlights in the cartoon shows, it suffers from trying to make an argument to
support the continued inclusion of “the comedy relief character”. You know that kind of story: Where all the useful characters shake their heads at how stupid the comedy relief character is, but
in the end the comedy relief character does good and saves the day, leaving the other characters to realize
they were wrong. Snarf had stories like
that, Slimer had stories like that, Orko had stories like that and Mikey has had plenty of stories like that.
Admittedly, this comic doesn’t do it as transparently and
avoids the worst artifact of the cliché: having the comedy relief character
cause the trouble in the first place. I
hate that. Because when they resolve the
conflict at the end, it doesn’t mean they’re a hero, it just means that they’re
moderately competent enough to clean up their own messes. But again, this story avoids that drawback,
so it earns a few bonus points in my book.
On a personal note, I don’t think you should ever have to “redeem” or "make a case for" your
comedy relief character; because if you feel compelled to do so, then you were clearly handling them wrong
from the very beginning. And why do comedy relief characters have to be blundering screw-ups, anyway? Just because a
character is funny doesn’t mean they have to be useless. I haven’t really gotten that vibe quite so
much from Nickelodeon Mikey yet, I’m just getting that opinion out there is
all.
Even though the story was fairly simple, the Tiptons and
Byerly speckle it with some funny gags and witty banter. I think it’s this approach which has made New
Animated Adventures feel so authentic in relation to the Nickelodeon
cartoon. The Nick series also uses a lot
of basic, simple, episodic stories, but spices them up with really strong humor
and characters, proving that just because something is a familiar plot cliché,
that doesn’t mean it can’t still feel fresh and fun in the execution. In regards to this issue, I got a chuckle out
of Raph tossing the Kraang aliens in the filing cabinet as well as all the zombie
movie jargon dotting everyone’s dialogue.
Everything from Donnie lecturing on the classical voodoo interpretation
of zombies (see, “White Zombie”, “The Serpent and the Rainbow”) to Raph whining
that he prefers modern running zombies (see, the “Dawn of the Dead” remake or
the faux-zombies of “28 Days Later”) to everyone sighing at how slow and easily
avoidable the shambling Romero-type Zombie is (see, er, all the Romero zombie
movies… except “Land of the Dead” and “Diary of the Dead” because those blew).
So far as stories with the moral “Mikey’s not useless, we
swear” are concerned, this was one of the better attempts and handles him
pretty well. A very basic, run of the
mill story, but the execution is what elevates the whole package.
Grade: B- (as in, “But last issue had Leo boring everyone
with a Space Heroes marathon and this issue has Mikey boring everyone with a
zombie movie marathon. Will next issue
have Donnie boring everyone with a National Geographic marathon?”)
