Originally published in: TMNT Amazing Adventures #11
Publication date: June 29, 2016
Story and art: Matthew K. Manning and Jerry Gaylord
Ink assist: Penelope Gaylord
Colors: Heather Breckel
Letters: Shawn Lee
Edits: Bobby Curnow
Publisher: Ted Adams
"A Day in the Life"
Summary:
Mikey's Day: He wakes up, eats breakfast, plays video games with Ice Cream Kitty, gets trashed by Rocksteady, goes home, goes to bed.
Leo's Day: He wakes up, meditates, practices, hears a news report that mutants have stolen the priceless Bay diamond and orders his brothers to investigate, saves Mikey from Rocksteady, goes home and meditates before bed.
Casey's Day: He sleeps through class all day, helps Leo save Mikey from Rocksteady, goes home and sleeps through his homework.
Donnie's Day: He wakes up, has his alarm busted by Raphael's sai, eats breakfast, trashes Bebop before he can make off with the diamond, goes home and does some reading before bed, gets his lamp busted by Raphael's sai.
Raph's Day: He wakes up and throws his sai at Donnie's alarm, grumbles through breakfast, plays video games with Mikey (displacing Ice Cream Kitty), gets the drop on Bebop and Rocksteady before they can make off with the Bay diamond, compliments Donnie on trashing Bebop (though Donnie hasn't forgotten his alarm), goes home and busts Donnie's lamp so he can get to sleep.
Bebop's Day: He wakes up from Rocksteady's snoring and can't think of anything to do (despite a TV news report about the diamond exhibit), cruises around town with no idea what to do (despite radio advertisements for the diamond exhibit), sees a newspaper advertising an exhibit of the Bay diamond and gets an idea, gets trashed by the Turtles when the and Rocksteady try to swipe it and runs away.
Ice Cream Kitty's day: She wakes up and tries to play video games only to have Mikey and the Turtles hog the tv, goes out into the city and finds Bebop and Rocksteady, throws a newspaper in their faces with an advertisement for the Bay diamond exhibit, waits for the Turtles to leave, spends all day playing video games while they're gone, goes back to the freezer and goes to bed.
Turtle Tips:
*The series continues in TMNT Amazing Adventures #12.
Review:
Right now I'm cooking a pot of chili and the timer's going off and I need to take it off the burner, but I'm all like, "Oh this is just a back-up short, I can write the summary and review for it in like ten seconds." Well SHIT. Now I gotta take my chili off the stove and let it get cold because this back-up was a hell of a lot more complicated than I thought it would be at face value.
It's a fun exercise in interconnected storylines, showing us bits and pieces of everyone's day, but not necessarily in chronological sequence. So you learn a little more with each segment and get context to situations that didn't seem all that interesting a page ago. And it all ends with the reveal that Ice Cream Kitty was the true mastermind of the TMNT universe. Or at least she was in this story.
"A Day in the Life" is a very fun back-up that does ten-times more work than you'd expect it to. The art is rather snappy, if maybe a little overboard on the "shocked anime eyes" facial expressions, and it stands out as one of the better shorts this comic has released.
Come to think of it, while not all the back-ups are anything to write home about, many of them have been very innovative in a gimmicky sort of way. They might actually be the real highlight of the TMNT Amazing Adventures run, more so than the A-stories.
