Publication date: May 4, 2014 (physical), May 9, 2014
(online)
Writing, lettering, toning: Peter Laird
Layouts, penciling: Jim Lawson
Inking: Eric Talbot, Steve Lavigne (credited in letters
page)
Cover painting: Michael Dooney
Production assistance: Dan Berger
Summary:
On the Utrom moon island, Glurin and the mutated Raphael are in the gym, discussing Michelangelo’s disappearance. After their workout, Glurin promises to
continue using the Utrom resources to look for Mikey, while Raph decides to
head back to the lair and see if Donatello can’t come up with something.
On Route 91, April is almost through Connecticut and will
be arriving in Northampton soon. She’s
ecstatic about seeing Casey again.
In New York, Casey and Karai have finished having lunch
together and Karai is giving him a lift home.
Casey still wants to know what happened after he passed out at her
place, but Karai refuses to share the details.
She suggests that perhaps he should use this experience as a lesson
against excessive drinking.
Down in the lair, Raph can’t find Donnie so he follows
Don’s scent down an obscure tunnel.
In the Battle Nexus, Leonardo, Oroku Yoshi, Jorut and E’ro’chk
are getting a ride back to the living quarters. Along the way, Oroku Yoshi
explains that the Warriors of Perfect Virtue (called the Virtuous, for short)
are a race who view gender as a sin and thus bioengineered themselves to reproduce
asexually. They are fanatical in their
religious devotion and have been amassing armies to conquer other worlds and
spread their creed. They also despise magic
and sorcery. At one point, Yoshi saved a
mage from three of the Virtuous, killing two of them and chopping the hand
off the other. For this, he has been
hounded by them ever since.
As the group breaks up to head to their quarters, Yoshi
receives a hailbat message from a mysterious individual living in the Alarana
district who wishes to remain nameless.
The individual requests that Yoshi bring Leonardo to him in the morning.
On the Styracodon planet of Maklar Votis, Michelangelo is
busy using his new weapons to slaughter more Styracodon soldiers. Evidently, this is the fourth Styracodon
planet the Triceratons have conquered since beginning their campaign. Captain T’Zirk compliments Mikey on his
technique and brings him good news: The prison world where he and Azokk were
held captive, Nurgostu, is next in line.
Mikey is thrilled, as he desperately wants revenge against the Regenta.
Down in the sewers, Raphael sniffs his way into Donatello’s
secret lab. There, he finds Donatello
(shrunken and piloting his robot body) performing experiments on what looks
like the corpse of Splinter floating in a tube.
Raphael loses it and begins savagely attacking Donatello for defiling
their Master’s body, ripping Don’s robot body to pieces. Working himself into a frenzy trying to catch
the miniscule Donatello, Raph begins to feel woozy. Suddenly, he starts to de-mutate and
collapses onto the floor.
Later, Raph wakes up, back in his old Ninja Turtle form
and lashed to the floor. Don suggests
that the flood of adrenaline caused his body to burn off the “vampire” toxins,
thus restoring him to normal. The ropes,
however, are to keep him under control until Donnie can explain what’s going
on.
Don says that during Splinter’s funeral, he took a DNA
sample from his body. When Raph became
mutated by the fake vampires, he decided to use Splinter’s DNA to clone a
mindless body. The mutated blood in the
cadaver would help him find a cure for Raph’s predicament (or so he
thought). However, as he studied the
clone and compared its DNA with older samples of Splinter’s DNA (taken during an incident involving doppelgangers), Donatello came
to a startling conclusion: The Splinter who died was NOT the real Splinter.
Turtle Tips:
*This story is continued from TMNT (Vol. 4) #31. As of now, this is the last issue of TMNT
Volume 4.
*CHET ALERT: “Chet’s Toys” appears on Page 7. “Chet” was an Easter egg the Mirage crew
often threw into their comics because… they just liked the name!
*Donatello took the DNA sample from Splinter’s body in
TMNT (Vol. 4) #11.
*Donatello mentions a battle against doppelgangers. An editor’s note refers
to this as an Untold Tale of the TMNT, so we don’t know anything else about
that adventure.
*This issue was not released direct to market. A free version was made available online via
Peter’s Laird’s TMNT blog. A physical
copy was published, limited to 1000 copies, and sold via the Mirage Comics
website.
*This issue also featured a blank sketch page and a bonus
retrospective on the original Mirage offices in Sharon, Connecticut.
Review:
Well, here we are.
Seven years of blood, sweat, tears and other miscellaneous fluids and I’m
finally done. I’ve summarized, annotated and reviewed every
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles comic published by Mirage.
Now I can finally die.
So this is where we leave things off in the Mirage
universe. There are, of course, various stories set in the future of this timeline, but so far as the contemporary
narrative is concerned, this is the termination point. Will Laird continue Volume 4? Will we get any answers? A conclusion?
I dunno. But it
took almost five years just to get this issue, so I wouldn’t hold my breath if
I were you.
To go through the arcs one at a time, let’s start with
Gameraph’s. It looks like Raphael’s
mutated monster days are over and I’m left wondering just what the heck was the
point of it all? What narrative purpose
did it serve? How did Raphael grow and
learn and change from the experience?
What did it accomplish?
Fact of the matter is, the whole Gameraph arc amounted to
absolutely nothing. Raph turned into a
monster and lumbered around for fifteen or sixteen issues and then
unceremoniously returned to normal. It
only seemed to happen so that he’d have something to DO, even if it led
nowhere. Is Raph somehow a more humbled
individual with a better handle on his rage, now that he’s seen his inner
ugliness manifest on the outside and had to endure the consequences? Nah.
April, Casey and Karai seem to be on target for an “awkward”
moment. Karai is dropping Casey off at
his place just as April is returning home.
Karai asks to use his “facilities” while she’s there, too. So, who wants to bet that just as April
returns home and she and Casey have a heartfelt reunion, Karai steps out of the
bathroom and April’s all “What’s SHE doing here!?” ...?
Hmm, maybe Laird doesn’t have to write another issue; the
plots seem to telegraph themselves pretty intuitively.
Then there’s Leo, Oroku Yoshi, the Virtuous and what
appears to be Splinter… maybe even the REAL Splinter? I’ll save my Splinter talk for a moment, but
as for Leo, he’s putting together some of the details about the Virtuous and
their assault on the Foot Clan. From
what we’ve seen, it appears that the Foot have been trying to publish a book of
spells and the Virtuous, in both their zeal to conquer other worlds and to
eliminate all sorcery, have begun waging war on the Foot Clan.
Is that really it?
A flimsy “world domination” scheme?
I’ve got to believe there’s more to it than that. We still don’t know what was up with Karai’s “odd”
behavior, as Leo described it. Is she
under some sort of control? Is that why
she’s messing with Casey? Does it have
anything to do with anything?
I guess these plots aren’t telegraphing themselves as
much as I suggested they were.
Mikey is going bonkers up in space, slaughtering
Styracodons left and right, conquering planets and loving the hell out of
it. I want to think that there’s
something else to it, like maybe he’s being manipulated emotionally by the
Triceratons to use his skills as a weapon, because Mikey is just a pure psychopath
at this point. If there isn't some contrivance to explain his blood-thirsty lunacy, then it's just way out of character.
And that brings us to Donatello. With his robot body destroyed, hopefully that
means he’ll be getting back to his normal size sometime soon (if we get any
further installments). I’m glad to see
that in this “final” issue of the series, we got at least ONE solid (or
somewhat solid) answer to a lingering mystery: What Donatello took from
Splinter’s body during the funeral. It
leads into yet another mystery, sure, but something is better than nothing.
The big bombshell is that the Splinter who died and was
cremated was not the real Splinter. We’re
being led to believe that the Splinter in the Battle Nexus is the real one,
then (though it could play out differently).
I don’t want to jump ahead of myself, but I also don’t
want to wait another five years to talk about it, so I’ll just say that I’m
really not big on the idea that Splinter is still alive and his death was just
a fake-out. That’s some straight up
Marvel/DC comic book storytelling; the meaningless death done for shock value
and then undone a little while later. I
hate that sort of thing and I’d hoped TMNT was better than that.
Laird also drops an “Untold Tale of the TMNT” reference
in there, which at this point I find utterly baffling. He produces maybe 3 issues of TMNT a decade
and he’s dropping references to stories from the past that will be revealed at
a later date? Man, it’ll be a miracle if
Volume 4 ever sees completion, much less a bunch of Tales bonus stories.
If it makes anybody feel any better, Jim Lawson did post
this pin-up online earlier this year. He
calls it the “last scene of Volume 4”, albeit with the qualifier that it may
wind up being a “what if” scenario since Volume 4 is still incomplete and things could change. Be that as it may, this is probably as near
to closure as we’re going to get:
Take your time and let everything in that pin-up sink in. Them's some ugly babies.
Anyway, I’m now all out of Mirage comics to review. I’ve got some odds and ends left, like a
bunch of UK comics, and the IDW series is still ongoing, of course. But with Archie, Image and now Mirage out of
the way, most of my work here is done. I
guess I’ll focus primarily on the cartoons and movies from here on out.
Quite frankly, I never thought I’d make it this far.
