Publication date: February, 1994
Story: Bob Burden
Pencils and Inks: Neil Vokes
Letters: Mary Kelleher
Colors: Eric Vincent
Cover: Jim Lawson and Steve Lavigne
“Land of Green Fire: Part Four”
Summary:
Mr. Furious dukes it out with the alien werewolf only for
the beast to back off once it sees his Free Masonry ring. Being a Mason itself, the werewolf runs
away. The Mysterymen, the Turtles and
Col. Blade eventually catch back up and ask Mr. Furious what the deal with the
werewolf is.
Back at the Flying Wing, the Spleen, Bondoman and Mystic
Hand are under siege from the spectral figures.
The spirits are blasting beams of ice at them, encasing the jet. The Mysterymen flee into the jungle with the
specters close behind.
At the ruins, the werewolf is desperately trying to
communicate with the team via dance, but they can’t interpret him. Don, Leo, Screwball and the flame-creature
Sykes show up. After a brief bit of
exposition, Sykes has a chat with the werewolf in its native language. The werewolf then devours Sykes and
collapses. Star Shark comes down from
his lookout post and tells everyone that the Flying Wing is under attack. Leaving the werewolf behind, the Turtles and
the Mysterymen return to camp.
They reach the Flying Wing, but have no idea what
happened. The werewolf then catches up
with them and explains everything… in English!
He says his name is Chontre Mac and he’s an alien from a planet that
exists within the center of the Sun. He
says that there are a diverse number of races from that planet and all have the
ability to absorb the minds of those they devour (hence how he was able to
learn English by eating the flame-creature that ate Sykes). Chontre says that long ago, his people came
down to Earth to set up a colony and built this great city. However, civil war erupted and most of
his people retreated back to the Sun.
Chontre was chosen to sink the city deep into the Earth so that its
technology and culture could be preserved, putting himself in cryogenic stasis
so he could keep watch.
Chontre is happy to be awake again and, seeing that there
are no more warring Sun people on Earth, feels that now is the time to share
the technology of the lost city with humanity.
Suddenly, Mystic Hand’s disembodied hands float over and motion everyone
into the jungle. They find Mystic Hand
and Bondoman frozen in cryogenic ice (which Chontre assures them will defrost
to no ill effect in a day or two). The
Spleen, who fainted, wakes up and describes the ice-blasting specters. Chontre says that the specters are the
Eikers, the faction who incited the civil war.
When the city was unearthed, it sent a signal into space. Responding to it, the Eikers traveled down from the Sun to regain
the lost technology and invade the Earth.
The electromagnetic beam that has been shutting off all technology on
Earth was a homing beam from their mother ship.
Chontre explains that the only way to stop the invasion is to re-sink
the city so the Eikers have nothing to home in on.
Screwball then calls down from his lookout post that the
Eikers are coming. Chontre says that
they’re an early scout patrol. He urges
the Mysterymen and the Turtles to lead the aliens to the nearby river where the
additional humidity will react with their freezing powers and force them to
take tangible form. The plan works and
with the Eikers finally solid, Col. Blade is able to kill them all with
machinegun fire.
Chontre leads Col. Blade, the Professor and Mr. Furious
back into the main hub of the ruined city where they found him in
cryo-sleep. Chontre mans the controls to
re-sink the city, telling the others to leave so they don’t become trapped, too. The controls malfunction and Chontre laments
that the only way to re-sink the city now is for two individuals to man separate emergency controls simultaneously. The
Professor volunteers to stay behind, jumping at the chance to go into suspended
animation and awaken centuries from now in a brave new world.
Blade and Furious escape the building just as it and the
rest of the city sink back into the Earth.
Everyone’s electronics begin working again, proving that the Eikers have
lost the signal and retreated from their invasion. Col. Blade gives a salute, praising the selfless
sacrifice of the Professor.
Turtle Tips:
*This story is continued from TMNT/Flaming Carrot Crossover #3.
*The Turtles will meet Flaming Carrot again (or appear in
the same crowd as him, anyway) in Savage Dragon #41.
Review:
When it comes to Burden’s style of writing, it’s
always a mystery as to what will be important to the plot and what is just a dumb
throwaway joke. Last issue, they made a
big deal about Screwball’s pet shoelace Sherman surviving the fire-creature
attack, but Sherman never appears again.
The Zeke’s mentions that the protoplasmic goop left behind by the
extinguished fire-creatures smelled like Corn Flakes… an aside which proved to
be foreshadowing once we learned that the fire-creatures were fused with the
I-Team and the Zeke’s was in fact smelling what the I-Team had eaten before
they in turn were eaten by the fire-creatures.
And in this issue, Mr. Furious and Chontre both share Free Masonry
rings, which ends their battle as soon as it starts, but no further value is
ever attributed to that connection.
It’s… just a mess.
I guess you could say it “keeps you on your toes”, as you never know
which random asides will pay off in the end and which will go nowhere, but more often than not it all
just amounts to a bunch of pointless references and droll gags. I’m guessing the Free Masons were supposed to
have been descended from the Sun people’s lost civilization? That seems the likeliest explanation, but the
connection is never solidified and considering all the other random bullshit
going on in this miniseries, it could just as easily have been another stupid
attempt at silly humor (like Chontre trying to communicate via dance).
The miniseries never knows what tone it wants to strike
and it becomes really difficult to invest in anything. When the characters are capable of
cartoonishly pulling lemonade stands out of thin air, it’s hard to take any
suspense in the action seriously because the surrounding scenes are so silly and
absurd. The ending wants us to feel the
drama of the Professor’s sacrifice, but how can we when, again, everything else
has been so goofy and self-aware? It’s a
tone deaf comic in terms of mood.
I’ll bring it up again, but I just don’t see why this
miniseries begged to include the Ninja Turtles at all. By this concluding chapter, they’ve become
nothing more than crowd-filling bodies.
They contribute nothing to the resolution and scarcely offer any
dialogue (or, at least, any dialogue that sounds unique to them). For the umpteenth time, I’ll repeat that the
Turtles could have been substituted by any other four members of the Mysterymen
and it wouldn’t have changed this comic one little bit. Hell, the cast was already bloated so much
that you could remove the Turtles entirely and it would make no
difference. They are entirely
superfluous to everything going on around them and are more like baggage than
characters.
To be frank, Mirage’s offshoot material released to
supplement their various ongoings were never very strong; lots of goofy oneshot
Specials and the occasional miniseries for the Hell of it. Turtle Soup and Plastron Café are probably
the only limited series that are worth a look, and being anthologies, even
those are dicey in their content. This
Flaming Carrot crossover is just another in that long tradition of “why did
they even bother?” Burden doesn’t make
the most of his opportunity to work with the Turtles and the whole thing just
leaves me feeling cold. Vokes’s artwork
is the only positive angle to this entire endeavor, but even he can’t salvage
it.
Grade: F (as in, “Flaming Carrot… such a dull, lifeless, uninteresting
character, Hollywood didn’t even include him in the movie based on his own
fucking comics”.)
