Publication date: November, 2005
Script and art: Jim Lawson
Plot: Jim Lawson, Steve Murphy and Peter Laird
Frontispiece: Dave White
Letters: Eric Talbot
Cover: Jim Lawson and Eric Talbot
Letters page art: Diego Jourdan
“Wrong Turn”
Summary:
Frontispiece: Raphael marches through some snow-covered
ruins, unaware that giant spider legs are skittering out from a tunnel above
him. Raph thinks about how the phrase “insects
make my skin crawl” has lost all meaning, but thinks it’s worth a reevaluation
once you put the qualifier “giant” at the beginning…
Splinter’s funeral is over and Raph, Casey and Glurin
have congregated at a bar to raise a toast to the old rat. As they all gradually get more and more
inebriated (cranberry juice is apparently like booze to Utroms), Casey manages
to convince Glurin to let them test his experimental Dimensional Gridshift
Unit.
They return to the moon island and find Don trying to
keep himself busy with work. Don sees
that they’re all drunk and decides to come along on the trip to keep them
safe. Glurin calculates the safest
alternate reality, EST 14, and sends them through the portal. Immediately upon doing so, he notices
something wrong and chokes.
The Turtles and Casey arrive on a desert highway filled
with abandoned vehicles. Casey finds a
customized Jeep loaded with assault weapons as well as two motorcycles. He suggests they investigate beyond a nearby
mountain ridge and see what went down in this universe.
They’re immediately attacked by giant spiders but manage
to blow them away with the assault rifles.
They find an injured woman and try to help her. She comes to and explains that after global
warming destroyed all the farmland in America, the government tried to solve
the food shortage with the “Arthro Project”.
They lost control of the experiment, though, and the giant insects and
arachnids are the result. The woman
begins to scream and convulse and a larvae crawls out of her brain. Raph kills it and the trio moves on.
Eventually, they come upon the ruins of Las Vegas. Suddenly, all their heads throb from a
psychic attack. Don recognizes it as the
work of the insect Queen who is sending sentries to attack them. Giant flying cockroaches them swoop down, but
they’re too armored for the guns to do any good. Don and Raph escape into the sewers, but
Casey is carried off. Don says that when
the Queen psychically attacked them, he saw images of the Luxor and assumes
that’s where Casey has been taken. But
first, they need to stop by a pet store.
Later, Don and Raph make their way through the sewers
with Don using a wrench to open certain pipes along the way. They arrive at the Luxor and fight their way
up to the top floor where Casey and several other human survivors have been
sealed into a wall with insect wax. They
free the people just as the insect Queen, a giant mantis, attacks them. They all start to get woozy and Don opens his
package from the pet store: A canary.
The canary is dead, meaning the gas lines he opened have now filled the
building.
The trio escapes through the glass ceiling of the Luxor
while the last human survivor stays behind to light a match and ignite the
gas. The Turtles and Casey make it to
the ground and avoid being blow up, but they’re immediately attacked by
Sigfried and Roy’s Siberian tigers.
Before the tigers can shred them, Glurin pulls them back
through the portal. He rather embarrassedly
explains that a cockroach crawled into the Gridshift Unit and defecated on a
circuit, thereby sending the trio to an unknown destination. It took him until now to find them and bring
them back. Angry, Casey squishes the
cockroach with his thumb.
Turtle Tips:
*This story takes place immediately after Splinter’s
funeral in TMNT (Vol. 4) #11.
*Glurin was previously shown trying to cross dimensional
boundaries in TMNT (Vol. 4) #7.
*Glurin’s Dimensional Gridshift Unit will reappear in
Tales of the TMNT (Vol. 2) #52.
*The dimension the Turtles and Casey go to may not be
another dimension at all, but the future.
Tales of the TMNT (Vol. 2) #69 establishes that the world was left in
ruins by global warming and shows strange, giant monsters lurking around
everywhere.
Review:
I remember not digging this issue when it first came
out. It’s just an adventure story,
playing off a lot of tired action movie tropes and doesn’t have much substance
to it. It wants to pay homage to action
movie clichés, but they’re just a string of predictable, boring scenarios we’ve
all seen a hundred times.
Rereading it for the first time in 10 years (oh Lord, has
it really been a decade?), I find it’s still a rather boring read, but I don’t
think I dislike it as much as I did then.
The setup is more entertaining than the follow-through, with the drunken
Raph and Casey all excited about being shunted off to some perilous dimension
while a sober Don just sighs in exasperation.
I especially liked Glurin, all derp-eyed and wobbly.
Once they actually get to the insect dimension, though,
it’s just a lot of gun-firing and clichés right up to the end. There's the tragic motivating character (the woman
with the larvae in her brain), the deus ex machina solution (kill the Queen and
everything is wrapped up in a neat little package), the guy who heroically
sacrifices himself to save the others (the nameless dude who stays behind to
light the gas)... nothing particularly original. It’s all dull as a
cheese knife.
The story is worked into the continuity of the series
pretty well, though. It takes place
immediately after Splinter’s funeral with the dimensional adventure functioning
as a means for the characters to take their minds off of their grief. Glurin’s investigation into dimensional
travel was referenced early in Volume 4 and this is where it comes to a
head.
The “alternate universe” the characters travel to may not
be an alternate universe at all, but the future of their own universe. It all makes sense, with references to global
warming destroying human civilization and the presence of giant monsters
lurking around. All of those elements
were shown to be a part of the Mirage universe future and the references were
seeded throughout Tales of the TMNT Volume 2.
Really, though, I can’t believe it took three people to
come up with a plot this thin. I suppose
you can see ideas from all three creators sprinkled about: References to Laird’s
Volume 4 series, Murphy’s pissing and moaning about global warming, and Lawson’s
tiresome boner for Moto Guzzi brand crotch rockets (the bike Casey picks up and
compliments has “Moto Guzzi” emblazoned across it). But even though you can see everyone’s
fingerprint on this tale, the actual story is pretty plodding and weak.
Grade: D (as in, “Did I mention it’s basically one big
riff on ‘Aliens’? I guess that cover to
Anything Goes #5 finally came true”.)
