Publication date: September 23, 2015
Story: Mariko Tamaki
Art: Irene Koh
Colors: Brittany Peer
Letters: Chris Mowry and Shawn Lee
Edits: Bobby Curnow
Summary:
The past. As April
prepares to leave on her road trip, Leonardo stops her. He says that he felt something weird when he
first received the scroll from Splinter.
He warns her that it may not have been an accident that they came into
the scroll and there may be higher powers at work.
The present. The
Rat King leads April and Casey down a dark corridor of the thin place; a limbo
between dimensional space. Along the
way, he tells them of some of his exploits in the past, of how he made and
broke royalty through the centuries (Genghis Khan, Marie Antoinette, Richard
Nixon). They then enter into the room of
his sister, the Japanese bird-woman named Aka.
Casey is hesitant, but April insists that they speak with
her, as she feels their meeting with Aka was the entire reason they came into
the scroll in the first place. Aka looks
over the scroll and identifies the flaming Joshua tree as being symbolic of
herself. She explains that she and her
family are immortals who ruled the Earth a millennia ago and warred among
themselves. However, when humans entered
the picture, they changed the playing field and the immortal siblings adapted
their struggles by manipulating mankind for their own benefit.
Bored with all the talk, Casey tries to shake down the
Rat King for answers. Equally brash, the
Rat King transforms into a giant dragon made of rats and attacks him.
Aka freezes time so that she and April may speak
privately. She tells April that a great
change is coming, a war, but urges her not to fear it. Her immortal siblings are gathering and things are
about to become very dangerous, and when that happens, Aka says she will leave
this plane of existence. As time
resumes, the Rat King toys with Casey and tosses him around. However, time suddenly runs out and everyone vanishes in an instant.
April and Casey find themselves where they were before it
all started; Casey at the old gas station and April outside the trailer. They reconvene and hit the road in the
van. Leo calls to check in with them and
as Casey gives Leo a brief summary of their recent exploits, April unfurls the
scroll and finds one of Aka’s feathers wrapped in it. A little later, April and Casey kiss and make
up before driving directly into an ominous storm looming on the horizon.
Turtle Tips:
*This story is continued from TMNT: Casey & April #3.
*This issue was originally published with 2 variant
covers: Regular Cover by Koh, and Subscription Cover by Sophie (Ross) Campbell.
Review:
If you’re wondering why I’m so late with this
review, well, the lateness might as well substitute AS my review.
I just have no enthusiasm for this miniseries. I completely forgot to pick it up last
week, meant to get it sometime this
week, eventually decided I’d just grab it on the weekend… If I didn’t have
anything better to do. If I felt like
it.
So I bought the comic, I read it, and I just can’t muster
the energy to get mad at it for being so boring or anticlimactic. I guess one could say it’s the hallmark of a
truly underwhelming piece of work when it can’t even inspire distaste or
outrage. It’s one thing for a work to be
remembered as terrible, but it’s an even greater blow for a work to be
forgotten entirely because it’s so meaningless and dull.
80 pages altogether and I think I could summarize the whole
story in three sentences.
April and Casey drive out looking for the Pantheon. The Pantheon finds them and tells them that a
new storyline is about to begin in the ongoing TMNT series. April and Casey drive back to New York.
Maybe that’s the biggest disappointment of this
miniseries. It’s slow and doddering, but
such a pace could be forgiven if it leads to a fulfilling climax. Casey & April ultimately amounts to a
decompressed advertisement for a BETTER storyline about to unfold in the TMNT
ongoing series. “Hey guys, thanks for
buying our miniseries, but the REAL action is going to happen over in the main
book. All this was just to get us
through four months until #50 could be finished and reset the narrative.”
Everything leads up to Aka telling April (and the
audience) that the Pantheon is coming and they’re going to be the new Big Bads
after the Foot take a snooze following the “Vengeance” storyline. THAT was the payoff for this whole miniseries.
But did it tell us anything we didn’t already know? The machinations of the Rat King and Kitsune
have been ever-present in the ongoing for a while now, so we already knew that
they were building themselves up to be the new antagonists. The previous miniseries, TMNT/Ghostbusters,
even expanded the Pantheon a bit and gave us more of an idea about them. Aka’s dialogue tells us NOTHING except maybe
some metatextual bullshit about “change” (which we already knew was coming
because we’re reading the ongoing).
So hey, maybe an argument might be made that this
miniseries wasn’t about the story, it was about the character development. But WHAT character development? The relationship between April and
Casey? Over the length and breadth of
this storyline, it amounts to “sometimes they fight, but deep down they really
love each other”. Didn’t we already know
that, too?
Accompanying the lack of payoff is the lackluster
presentation in both script and art.
Tamaki’s dialogue, as I’ve pointed out before, is stilted and
awkward. There’s that “talking at each
other, not with each other” element I spoke of in the past, but there are little
things that irk me even more than such setbacks. When Casey answers Leo’s phone call, he says,
“It is good to hear your voice.” That’s
just… weird. “It is good”…? Casey sounds like a robot. Maybe the line was supposed to be, “Is it
good to hear your voice” and the letterers (both of them) messed it up. I don’t know, but it sounds clumsy.
There’s also the lazy, on-the-nose symbolism that’s been
plaguing the book since it began. The
heart-shaped rock from the first issue was bad, but the series actually ends
with April and Casey driving directly into a storm on the horizon. Look, that was clever when “Terminator” did
it in ’84, but it’s been thirty years.
The old, “There’s a storm on the horizon” bit just doesn’t hold up like
it used to. And especially when it comes
after that ponderous speech about “change” and the impending “war”, etc. These are some pretty ancient clichés that I’d
thought most writers had cast away long ago.
And then there's the Japanese bird-lady named "Aka". "Aka" is Japanese for "red". Casey refers to April as "Red". Is there supposed to be some deeper connection between Aka and April? Aka said April would be important in the changes to come and took a special interest in her, but what does the whole "red" bit have to do with anything? It's pointless, half-baked symbolism.
As for Koh, she isn’t a bad artist, but her style is listless. How could Casey fighting a dragon seem so
boring? There’s such a glut of negative space
in this series, particularly these last two issues that happen within the thin
place, that there isn’t anything to look at but the characters. Yes, there's motion to them, but when we can't see them interacting with anything, we've no sense of scale or weight, which makes even the most kinetic sequence feel static.
And, on a completely subjective level, the “manga-wannabe” aesthetic is off-putting
to me. If I wanted to see someone fumble around trying to draw “anime”, I’d browse Deviant Art or flip open a seventh grader's marble notebook, thank you.
The entire miniseries feels amateurish. It wants to be a romance story first, and I
get that, but it doesn’t actually develop April’s and Casey’s relationship in
any meaningful way. They’re pretty much
the same at the end as when they started. The characters can pretend like it's different, but "we're opposites but we love each other anyway" is not a drastic shift regardless of their labored response that tries to convince us otherwise.
There’s the whole narrative about the Pantheon, but it doesn’t tell us
anything we didn’t already know thanks to the ongoing. This whole
miniseries is a superfluous detour at best, killing time until the main book reaches #50.
I want IDW to experiment with different genres and takes
on the TMNT characters; I think that’s AWESOME.
And, of course, not all those different takes are going to hit the
mark. From my perspective, Casey &
April missed the mark by a wide margin.
That doesn’t mean IDW should double-down on “typical” Ninja Turtle
stories or anything; there’s lots of room out there for more offbeat TMNT
literature.
I’m just saying that Casey & April sucked. That’s all.
Grade: F (as in, “For what it’s worth, ‘sucked’ might be
too strong an appraisal. You could
probably skip this whole miniseries and not even know you missed it. ‘Pointless’ might be the operative adjective.”)
