Publication date: February, 2002
Writing, lettering, inking, toning: Peter Laird
Layouts, pencils: Jim Lawson
Cover painting: Michael Dooney
Production assistance: Dan Berger
Summary:
Woozy, Michelangelo wakes up in the back of an
ambulance. Paramedics are seeing to his
injuries and about to sedate him. Mikey
freaks out and rushes through the backdoors of the ambulance. As it turns out, he was in a FLYING ambulance
and suddenly finds himself falling from several hundred stories in the
air. He’s caught by the angelic winged
flying man, Raptarr, who carries him back to the flying ambulance. Michelangelo passes out and the paramedics
begin treating him.
Down in the sewer lair, Leo suggests they go look for Don
and Mike, but Raph reminds him that they can take care of themselves. Besides, they’re expecting a visit from Casey
with news regarding April’s doctor’s appointment. Leo mentions that April and Casey have been
trying to have a baby for five years, so he hopes the news is good.
Meanwhile, Mikey wakes up in a hospital bed. He’s body aches, but he figures
he needs to escape immediately. A nurse
appears on a video monitor, warning him to stay in bed. Seeing that Mike won’t cooperate, she tells
him that his belongings are in the closet and that he should check out at the
front desk before leaving. Mikey is
confused, but finds his belongings where the nurse said they’d be.
He makes his way down to the lobby and finds the waiting
room filled with superheroes, mutants, aliens and robots. A doctor (Doctor Singh) and two orderlies
approach Mikey, warning him that his injuries are too fresh for him to be out
of bed and that he needs to get back to his room. Mikey flips out and starts attacking the
orderlies, but the fight is broken up by Zippy Lad, who comes rolling up in his
wheelchair. The geriatric (going by his
real name, “Pat”), tells Doctor Singh that he knows Michelangelo and that he’ll
talk some sense into him.
Mike follows Pat back to his room while the aged
superhero fills the Turtle in on the situation.
He’s currently inside Kurtzburg Memorial Hospital, a secret facility in
New York that treats superheroes, mutants, extraterrestrials and other “unusual”
patients so that they don’t have to deal with the exposure of a normal
hospital. In fact, Pat is on the board
of directors. He was at the hospital
when the paramedics brought Mikey in and vouched for the Turtle’s status as a “good
guy”. Mikey climbs back into bed and Pat
promises to check in with him in the morning.
Down in the lair, Donatello comes rushing in with news
about the abandoned armored car he found.
Raph and Casey, getting bored just watching TV, grab their toolboxes decide
to go check it out. Leo, on the other
hand, stays behind to watch “Junkyard Wars” in peace (because that’s a
contemporary reference that won’t get dated).
They follow Don, who suggests that some robber likely
stole the car and drove it down the sewer tunnel they’re standing
in. He takes them to a flimsy wooden
wall, which he also suggests the robbers built to stash the truck. Casey muses that this all sounds very
familiar, as he vaguely remembers a news story from the ‘70s about an armored
car heist.
Inspecting the armored car, they find it loaded with
skeletons, all dressed in vintage ‘70s clothing. Donatello checks the engine and suggests all
the vehicle needs is a de-gunking and a tune-up and it should work just
fine. Don and Casey go back to the lair
to get some extra car parts, while Raph stays behind with the skeletons.
At Stainless Steve Steel's farmhouse in Northampton, Splinter sees Shadow off
as she takes her dirt bike for a spin.
She meets up with her boyfriend, Jay, and suggests they go back to her
dad’s old farmhouse, which has been abandoned for years, and start a fire in
the fireplace. Jay asks if he can
finally meet her family back at her current living place, especially the sagely
grandfather she’s always talking about.
Shadow refuses and says that her family just isn’t ready to meet Jay
yet.
Out in space, orbiting the moon, the Utroms pilot some
small ships over the facility they’d built into the satellite’s surface. The facility lifts up from the surface of the
moon as a large cylindrical craft and the Utrom’s prepare for “phase two”.
Turtle Tips:
*This story is continued from TMNT (Vol. 4) #1. The story continues in TMNT (Vol. 4) #3.
*Zippy Lad last appeared in TMNT (Vol. 1) #15.
*“Kurtzburg Memorial Hospital” is named
after Jack Kirby (his original name being Jacob Kurtzburg).
*Chronologically, Jay was first mentioned in Raphael: Bad Moon Rising #1.
Review:
The Turtles inhabiting a world already overrun with
superheroes is an idea that Eastman and Laird introduced pretty early into
their run. With Radical and the Justice
Force running around, superheroes are just a part of everyday life in the
Mirage universe. Likewise, the fact that
the Turtles can’t go one weekend without bumping into aliens or monsters or
ghosts or other mutants also illustrates just how overpopulated their world is
with “super” beings.
So when you put it into that kind of context, the
Kurtzburg Memorial Hospital makes perfect sense. There’s much more weirdness in the Mirage
universe than just the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and everybody needs some
medical attention, sometimes. In a way
it makes the Turtles seem less special, as how could normal folks find them
"unbelievable" when superheroes are a mundane part of everyday
life? But again, that’s the way it’s
almost always been in the Mirage comics, though the writers haven’t always been
consistent in exploiting such an angle.
But what the Kurtzburg Hospital really accomplishes is to
remind us, the readers, about just HOW exceptional the Mirage universe is and
just HOW full of weird-os and super-types this world is. As with the Madhattan Maulitia going apeshit
about aliens in the previous issue, the hospital hammers home the fact that not
only is this world filled with strange beings, but that people know about them
and have been living alongside them for decades. It’s important foreshadowing that will pay
off in just a few more issues when the series makes its first major plot twist.
Excellent world-building and foreshadowing though it is,
it all still relies on a lot of clumsy exposition and explaining explaining
explaining. And on the subject of the dialogue...
You’ll start to notice how “captioned” it all seems to be. Like Jim Lawson
drew the pages and then Peter Laird went in and wrote all the dialogue based on
what he was looking at. If that’s the
case, then that would make Jim Lawson “Jack Kirby” and Peter Laird “Stan Lee”. Oh, cruel irony!
Anyhow, I say the dialogue feels “captioned” because
characters say something in every single panel, even if it’s something
insultingly obvious. The characters are
awkwardly talking to themselves, narrating every move they’re making to the
audience even when the audience can clearly see what they’re doing and figure
it out on their own. Donatello has to
tell the readers that he’s opening the door to the armored car. Why did he have to tell us that? We can see him doing that just fine. That’s what the art is for.
And it DOES have that “Stan Lee” style to it, where for
whatever reason Laird doesn’t give the readers enough credit that they can
divine the context of a panel through the art, or he doesn’t give Lawson enough credit that he can express an action through his art without captioned dialogue
explaining everything to the reader.
That’s how Stan Lee wrote/captioned dialogue in his comics back in the ‘60s
and it can get exceedingly tedious.
But like I said in my last review; stylistically, nothing in this volume
is going to change, so you’re just going to have to get used to the Stan Lee
dialogue.
As for Jim Lawson’s art, I think the guy looks MUCH
better when he’s got somebody else inking and toning his stuff. But even then, some of his pencils… um…
Look at that anatomy.
Look at that FACE. What the hell
kind of creature are you even supposed to BE, Shadow?
Grade: C+ (as in, “Come on, you guys remember ‘Junkyard
Wars’, right? It was all the rage 12
years ago”.)
