Publication date: August, 1993
Script: Dan Nakrosis and Paul Castiglia
Pencils and letters: Dan Nakrosis
Colors: Barry Grossman
Managing edits: Victor Gorelick
“Lost & Found”
Summary:
In a raft somewhere out in the Pacific Ocean, the
Conservation Corps (Water Buffalo, Greenhorn, Firefly and Stonehedgehog)
recount their adventure with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and redouble
their efforts to find their missing fifth member. Suddenly, Firefly gets a telepathic message
that leads them back to Benevolence’s crashed spaceship. Investigating, they push all five buttons on
a panel and suddenly find themselves trapped in pods which whisk them
off into space.
Along the way, they’re treated to a recording of the late
Benevolence. He explains that his
homeworld, Danopaulus, was once a lush and vibrant place not unlike Earth. However, they built their entire global
economy around mining and abusing resources.
Now, they’ve destroyed their own ecology and their planet teeters on the
brink of doom. He asks that the
Conservation Corps find a way to save Danopaulus.
Arriving on Danopaulus, a hooded native greets them and
leads them to a city. He gives
Stonehedgehog a tracking device and tells him to follow it for more
answers. The Corps follows it and they’re
eventually led to… Benevolence? The
not-dead alien tells them that when Cudley the Cowlick dropped him and Oily
Bird off on Danopaulus, Cy-Droids managed to get him to a hydro-healing cocoon in
time to save his life (whilst also taking Oily someplace unknown).
He goes on to say that he attempted to rally the Congress
of Science with his findings on their planet’s pollution and his strategy to
save the environment. However, corrupt
politicians had him booted from the Congress and forced him to go underground,
collecting a group of radicals to form an eco-task force (uuggghhh).
As the Corps and Benevolence attempt to rejoin the
underground movement, they’re attacked by Cy-Droids. A quick two-page spread makes short work of
the robots and Benevolence soon meets with his colleagues. Unfortunately, they cannot proceed with his
plans until the Conservation Corps find their fifth member. Using a matter transporter tube, Water
Buffalo is sent back to Earth to scour the Pacific Ocean for their missing
teammate, using a homing device of Benevolence’s design to locate the crashed
enviro-pod.
Stonehedgehog is about to follow when suddenly their secret headquarters is invaded by a member of the Congress of Science and his Cy-Droids.
Turtle Tips:
*This story is continued from TMNT Meet the Conservation Corps #1. The story continues in
Conservation Corps #2.
*This issue also included 3 bonus pin-ups: One by Mike
Kazaleh, one by Scott Shaw! and a third by Nakrosis called “Let’s Do Lunch
with the Conservation Corps!” (which included a guide on how to recycle your
mealtime trash).
Review:
Do you think I WANTED to review this miniseries? Of course I didn’t. But a week or two ago I found all three
issues in a 50cent box at a local shop and I pretty much couldn’t put it
off anymore. I ran out of excuses and
now we’ve all got to put up with this shit.
Personally, I’m not even sure if this counts as a TMNT
comic. I always viewed the Conservation
Corps more as crossover characters like Usagi Yojimbo, not spin-off characters
like the Mighty Mutanimals. But I guess
that they technically DID originate from a comic book with the Ninja Turtles in
it, and the Turtles DO make brief silhouetted cameos in the flashback segment
of this first issue, so whatever. It’s
just three issues. Let’s get this over
with.
TMNT Meet the Conservation Corps #1 was one of the worst
TMNT comics I’ve ever read and one of the worst comics I’ve ever read
PERIOD. It was bad. This first issue of the Conservation Corps is…
not good. No, definitely not good. In fact, it’s bad. But it isn’t AS bad as TMNT Meet the
Conservation Corps, so that still counts as upward momentum. An F is an improvement over an F-, after all.
The artwork remains very amateurish, but realistically,
that’s how a LOT of Archie’s comics seemed to look like in the early ‘90s. Go back and read the first 20-something
issues of Sonic the Hedgehog to see what I mean (Disclaimer: Don’t actually go
back and read the first 20-something issues of Sonic the Hedgehog to see what I
mean).
None of the characters ever seem like they’re making eye
contact. Yes, they’re certainly
looking AT each other, or they're trying to, but the perspective and the line of
sight is so far off I’m rarely sure that the characters even exist on the same
plane of reality as one another. I think
the reason is that no one ever faces what they’re looking at. Their head is tilted to the left and their
eyes are straining to the right.
The story is also somewhat confounding, at least when
read in conjunction with the TMNT crossover special that introduced
everyone. So in that story, Benevolence
came to Earth because he knew Danopaulus was a lost cause and didn’t want Earth
to suffer the same fate. In fact, at the
end of that issue, he has Cudley bring Oily Bird to Danopaulus because he feels
that even if the monster did get loose and go on a rampage, it couldn’t do any
further damage because the planet was fucked, anyway.
But now we learn that his actual motive was to use the
Conservation Corps to save his homeworld?
So I guess it wasn’t as lost a cause as he said. So why’d he bring Oily Bird back with him,
then? Also, having him live sort of sucks
the suspense out of his noble sacrifice from the crossover special, but was
anybody REALLY invested in the drama of this narrative, anyway? Of course not.
Much of the plot is derivative of Superman’s origin,
either knowingly or not, and you aren’t going to get anything original out of
this tale. Instead, Nakrosis and
Castiglia try to dress it up with some Fourth Wall gags that are, actually,
kinda clever. Some of the time. The opening splash page where Greenhorn
accidentally reads the title backward was worth a smirk.
Grade: F (as in, “For crying out loud, you'd think a creator with a name that sounds like "Necrosis" would be able to come up with something cooler than this shit:”)
