Publication date: June, 2005
Plot: Churchy La Femme and Pepe Le Pew (Steve Murphy and
Peter Laird)
Words: Murphy
Breakdowns: Jim Lawson
Pencils/inks/tones: Dario Brizuela
Letters: Eric Talbot
Frontispiece: D’Israeli
Cover: Brizuela and Talbot
Letters page header: Kieron Dwyer
“Paris Nocturne”
Summary:
Frontispiece: The Turtles are crawling out of a storm
drain in Paris. It’s raining cats and
dogs and Raph is miserable. He says that
the mission they’re on is serious, but he doesn’t expect it to be as nasty as
his FIRST visit to Paris…
April, 2002.
Shadow is flying over the Pacific with her honors French class for their
annual class trip to Paris. She laments
that she has to spend such an exciting vacation with a bunch of conformist
nerds who all dress from the Gap and aren’t cool ninja rebels like her, BUT she
is glad that she gets to go alone this year.
Little does Shadow know, Raphael has stowed away in the cargo hold to
secretly keep an eye on her.
After arriving in Paris, Shadow tours the city with her
classmates, all the while pretending to be friends with them and putting on the
dumb American tourist act because “blending in” is part of her ninja
training. Meanwhile, Raphael trails her
through the city’s conveniently labeled sewers.
Down there, Raph feels like a shadowy form is following him.
At the Notre Dame cathedral, Shadow finally ditches all
the conformist Gap kids and goes exploring on her own. She finds the catacombs on Place
Denfert-Rochereau and checks them out.
In the darkness she’s met by a local named Jean-Louis, a polite and
handsome young man, though all Shadow cares about is his lame haircut. Jean-Louis warns her that her uncle is in
grave danger and should have never come to France. Shadow is weirded out by this and leaves.
Having gotten lost in the sewer thanks to several dead
ends, Raph surfaces into an alley. He’s
met by a tall, shadowy figure wielding a pair of meat cleavers. The figure knocks him over the head with the
handle and disappears. As Raph comes to,
he’s accosted by the police, who mistake him for “the Beast”. They shoot Raph in the shoulder, but he
escapes.
Shadow returns to her hotel room and finds Raph waiting
for her. After some explaining, Shadow
tends to his bullet wound while Raph reads the evening edition of the local
paper… and sees his photo identified as the Beast. Raph passes out and when he wakes up the next
evening, he checks the latest paper. He learns
that two more teenage girls were killed by the Beast last night. He also finds a note from Shadow saying that
she’s going back to the catacombs to talk to Jean-Louis. Fearing for her safety, Raph heads out,
though he’s spotted by cops who give chase.
In the catacombs, Shadow demands answers from Jean-Louis,
though he tries to warn her that now SHE is in danger as well as her
uncle. Suddenly, a wall connecting to
the sewer explodes and out pops the Beast: Two men, one carrying the other on
his shoulders, wielding meat cleavers.
They chase Shadow, but Raph shows up in time to fight the Beast. The Beast knocks him senseless with the
handles of the cleavers, but before they can chop Raph up, Jean-Louis distracts
them. Then the cops arrive and shoot
them in the back. Shadow and Raph sneak
out through the sewer, not even having the time to thank Jean-Louis.
At the farmhouse in Northampton, Raph comes to see Shadow
with tidings from Donatello. Apparently,
after hearing the story, Don decided to research the catacombs and found an old
newspaper from 1870. In it is a photo of
Jean-Louis, taken shortly before he was murdered in the catacombs. Shadows quietly thanks the boy for watching
over her and her uncle.
Turtle Tips:
*This story takes place during the six month time gap in
TMNT (Vol. 4) #5.
*As this story takes place in April of 2002, that means
it occurs very shortly after Tales of the TMNT (Vol. 2) #18, which took
place in March of 2002.
*Shadow was forced to move to Northampton after the
events of Tales of the TMNT (Vol. 2) #7.
*This issue also featured an interview with Dario
Brizuela.
Review:
From the letters page of Tales of the TMNT (Vol. 2) #10,
the words of Steve Murphy: “My opinion on fashion and style is this, though: I
think the way most Americans dress is horrible; casual, sloppy, call it what
you will, it’s generally pretty gross.
While not a slave to fashion I do think we should all have a precision
about presentation. It’s more civilized.”
Alright, let’s talk about the difference between “characters”
and “mouthpieces”. A character is a
fully formed fictional individual with their own unique attitudes and opinions
which breath into them the illusion of reality.
A mouthpiece is a shallow conduit for the attitudes and opinions of the
writer, who is incapable of separating themselves from the persona they’re
crafting and prefer to use these artificial individuals as a means to legitimize
their personal agendas.
More often than not, Steve Murphy writes mouthpieces, NOT
characters. And the Shadow who appears
in this story is one of those cases.
Murphy had a habit of using the opening editorial and
letters page of Tales of the TMNT as his own personal blog to talk about
politics, activism or just whatever was getting his goat that day. One of the irritations he enjoyed admonishing that nebulous entity known as "Americans" about were the way they dressed.
He felt that Americans dressed like slobs or like conformists and
detested the fashion-illiterate people of the United States.
So guess what Shadow’s opinions on American fashion are?
Now, I don’t really care one way or the other if Steve
Murphy thinks I dress like a slob. If
some shallow, scrutinizing know-it-all from New England thinks my t-shirt and
jeans are a travesty, it’s no denim off my Levis. No, the problem I’m trying to articulate here
is that Murphy puts his personal opinions BEFORE the development and voice of
the characters. When Shadow talks in
this issue, it isn’t Shadow’s voice… its Steve Murphy’s. Because Shadow in this issue is not a
character, she’s a mouthpiece.
Perhaps if Murphy had never used the letters page and
opening editorial to preach his disgust with American fashion, I’d have never
known that Shadow’s and his opinions miraculously aligned and the concern wouldn’t
be apparent. But the fact remains that
he did, making it evident that Shadow’s seemingly random rants about the Gap,
American conformism, geeks who don’t know how to dress themselves and the
genetic superiority of Europeans in regards to designer clothing lines… Those
are the words of Steve Murphy, not Shadow Jones. And when you’re reading a story and all you
can hear is the writer’s voice, not the character’s, it takes you right the
fuck out of the experience.
But let’s feign ignorance and try to look at the story
without the knowledge that Shadow is just parroting Murphy’s opinions. Shadow is positively incorrigible in this
story and she learns no lesson and receives no humbling comeuppance to take the edge off her earlier behavior. The issue opens with her going on for page
after page about how disgusting Americans are.
As she tours the streets of Paris with her classmates, who are all being
nice to her and think of her as a friend, her inner monologue continues to chastise
and scrutinize them as being geeks and losers and unworthy of her camaraderie. She takes pride in the fact that she’s only
pretending to be their chum as an exercise in ninja disguise and gleefully
abandons them at the first opportunity, because she is just a fucking terrible
person.
Where it gets worse is that, like I said, it isn’t framed
that way; for you to think she’s an awful piece of crap. Her “friends” don’t come to her rescue, her
supposedly superior fashion sense isn’t revealed to be out of date and square,
she is never once called out for any of the terrible things she says or
does. She gets in trouble for going it
alone, but that has little to do with the way she was behaving or the people
she was abusing earlier.
And the reason is because her opinions expressed at the
beginning of the story were Steve Murphy’s opinions, so therefore she was
justified in her behavior and everything she said and did was “right”.
Whoops! I know I
said I would try to separate the writer from the character, but that’s a lot
harder than I thought it would be considering the character IS the writer in
this instance.
But that’s what really brings “Paris Nocturne” down. The vague plot summary about Shadow going to
Paris, meeting ghosts and getting attacked by a weird serial killer called the
Beast… that all sounds pretty cool. But
the writer, so utterly incapable of missing an opportunity to express his
personal opinions about every little fucking thing, ruins the entire outline by
vicariously expressing those opinions through the mouths of the
characters.
And as far as Shadow goes, she never acts like this in
any story by any other writer. Thanks to
the hard date at the beginning, we know “Paris Nocturne” takes place during the
time skip in Volume 4. But read Shadow
in all those Volume 4 stories surrounding this one. She is not an incorrigible elitist in any of
those adventures. Read other teen Shadow
stories by other writers. She’s perhaps
stubborn and a little bratty, but she isn’t like this.
It’s so bad that in Tales of the TMNT (Vol. 2) #69, an
adult Shadow looks back on her behavior in these stories and apologizes. But she isn’t apologizing for herself, she’s
apologizing for Steve Murphy.
Grade: D (as in, “Do the French even like Ninja Turtles or do they just read Tintin comics?”)
