Publication date: November 13 – December 10, 2014
Script: Landry Walker
Art: Bob Molesworth
Colours: Jason Cardy and Kat Nciholson
Colour assist: James Stayte
Letters: Alex Foot
“Strength in Numbers”
Summary:
On a rooftop, the Turtles meet up with Pigeon Pete to
receive some intel on a Kraang operation. In exchange for bread, Pete tells them that
he saw a massive Kraang gathering, but he can’t remember if it was at the docks,
the playground, the oil refinery or the train station.
Leo splits the team up and sends them to scout each
location, though they all have reservations about being outnumbered if they’re
the one who winds up at the right place.
Surprisingly, all the locations turn out to be Kraang bases with the
exception of the one Leo went to (the refinery). The other Turtles get captured and Leo blames
himself.
With April and Casey on a school fieldtrip, Leo has no allies and goes rummaging through the lair for a weapon of some kind. Splinter tells him that as a leader, he doesn’t
need weapons; what he needs is a team.
Leo thinks about who he can call on in this most desperate hour.
Sadly, the only allies he can scrounge up are Pigeon
Pete, Kirby O’Neil and Ice Cream Kitty.
They trace the tPhone signal to the Kraang base and put Leo’s plan into
motion. Pete distracts the guards while
Kirby uses his tech know-how to crack the code on the entrance. Leo infiltrates the base and uses Ice Cream
Kitty’s gooeyness to short out the control panel keeping his brothers behind
bars.
Pete then pops up behind Leo, hoping he has more
bread. This leads the Kraang straight to
them and the Turtles have to fight their way to the wormhole generator that the
evil aliens were building. The generator
is connected to similar devices at all the other locations, but the only way to
put them all offline is to cut four conduit cables simultaneously. Using teamwork, the Turtles cut the cables
and then escape before the facility explodes.
Later, Leo thanks his “B-Team” for all their help. Kirby decides to go home where its safe, Pete
flies away in his never-ending search for bread and Ice Cream Kitty goes to
sleep in her cooler. Mikey tries to
deliver a stirring speech about the power of inner strength, only to
accidentally mention bread which gets him tackled by Pete.
Turtle Tips:
*This story is continued from TMNT Magazine (Panini) #20. The story continues in TMNT Magazine (Panini) #22.
*Leo mentions that Pete has brought them reliable intel
on the Kraang before. He did so in his
first appearance in the season 1 episode “The Gauntlet”.
*Since Kirby O’Neil is normal and New York hasn't been overrun yet, this story has to take place between the season 2 episodes “The Lonely Mutation
of Baxter Stockman” and “The Invasion, Part 1”.
Review:
I love stories like this; the “substitute” team of heroes
cobbled together from the odds-and-ends characters circling the bottom of the
barrel. It’s a formulaic plot, sure, but
one that doesn’t get trotted out as much as other formulaic plots (“the
shrinking episode”), so I’m not so sick of it.
And it almost always makes for good comedy. Transformers Animated did a great one, as I
recall.
Anyhow, this is another of those stories that would have
benefitted from being longer, but the nature of Panini’s TMNT Magazine has to
cut it down to just 12 pages. As such, each member of the “B-Team” only gets to perform one vital service in the rescue of the “A-Team”
before promptly disbanding.
Writer Landry Walker puts together a very motley
assortment of familiar faces, but the fun is seeing how he finds a niche for
them to fill. It’s sort of like a Rube
Goldberg device that you have to assemble yourself; someone throws a bunch of
random items in front of you and tells you to figure out how to string them
into a functional soil-tiller or something.
So Pete distracts the guards not just because he’s weird,
but because they recognize him as one of their escaped experiments. Kirby is the only one smart enough to operate
Don’s decoding equipment and his familiarity with Kraang prisons doesn’t hurt,
either. And Ice Cream Kitty’s very
specific temperature and fluid viscosity is exactly right to gunk up the
control panel.
It was a fun script and one I’d liked to have seen fill a
longer comic.
Grade: B+ (as in, “But how the fuck does Pete FLY
exactly?”)
