Publication date: August, 1994
Story and pencils: Jim Lawson
Inks: Eric Talbot
Letters: Mary Kelleher
Colors: Eric Vincent
Cover: Peter Laird and Kevin Eastman
“Killer on the Loose”
Summary:
Baxter Stockman (in his robot body) arrives in New York
City. He guns down a man in a phone
booth and grabs the telephone directory from him. Looking it over, he finds what he’s looking
for and thinks to himself that he’ll finally have his revenge.
At the apartment, Leo, Mike and Raph are playing video
games. April bids Casey and Shadow
goodbye as she heads down to the grocery store.
She gets in the Chevy and pulls out onto the street. Baxter immediately bursts out of the sewers,
tosses the Chevy onto one side and pulls April through the door. He then extends a needle from his index
finger and stabs her in the chest with it.
He drops her and crawls back into the sewers, telling April that her
suffering has only just begun.
Casey sees the commotion from the apartment window and
runs out to help April. Leo stays behind
with Shadow as Mike and Raph use the basement sewer entrance to keep tabs on
the situation from below the streets.
Up above, April tells her story to a police officer who
has no choice to believe her once eye witnesses start saying they also saw a
giant robot. Suddenly, two feds (Agent
Friskas and Agent Lowell) appear and tell the officer that they’re seizing
command of the investigation. They start
grilling April for details, but Casey tells them to get lost and helps April
back to the apartment. Friskas tells
Lowell that he wants April staked out 24/7 as well as given a full background
check, as he wants to know why Baxter went straight for her.
Down in the sewer, Raph and Mikey follow a trail of
hydraulic fluid. They think the robot
might be one of the Foot’s, but that would be in breach of their truce with
Karai. The trail ends at a cave-in,
completely blocking the tunnel. Raph
mutters to himself that he wants to know exactly what they’re up against. On the other side of the cave-in, Baxter
stomps away with one of his laser barrels smoking, overhearing Raph’s
muttering.
Turtle Tips:
*This story is continued from TMNT (Vol. 2) #5. The story continues in TMNT (Vol. 2) #7.
*April had a premonition about her encounter with Baxter
Stockman in TMNT (Vol. 2) #1. What
exactly he did when he stabbed April will not be revealed until TMNT (Vol. 4) #6.
*Raph and Mikey mention battling the Foot robots, which
happened in TMNT (Vol. 1) #52. They also
mention their truce with Karai, which happened in TMNT (Vol. 1) #61.
*This issue also came with a bonus story, “Bog, part 1 of
4” by Ryan Brown, Matt Roach, Dave Vance, Gen Purdum and Altered Earth Arts.
Review:
Alright, now we’re getting somewhere!
I like to break Volume 2 up into four story arcs: the
Turtles adjusting to their lives after “City at War”, the battle with the
fish-woman and the giant turtle, the showdown with Baxter
Stockman and the invasion of the DARPA facility. Of course, these arcs don’t all occur independently
from each other. Baxter’s big comeback
was foreshadowed back in the first issue and he’s been making his way toward
New York in every issue since. Still,
the focus of each issue can be broken up into four arcs and we are now on the
third.
The return of Baxter Stockman was a surprise when I first read through the
Mirage series, as I honestly thought he was just a one-off villain in this
universe (if the Shredder only appears in four issues, what chance does
Stockman have?). I wonder if the choice
to revive him had anything to do with his popularity in the children’s TMNT
media, like the Fred Wolf cartoon, the Playmates toyline or the Konami video
games? During the years he was long
forgotten within the Mirage books, his Caucasian counterpart was making
frequent appearances as a recurring foe in all the other media.
Well, whatever facilitated the decision to bring him back in
Mirage, I’m rather glad it happened. If
you go back and read my review for TMNT (Vol. 1) #2, I come down really, really
hard on Baxter. Fact of the matter is,
in that one issue, he is NOT a good villain.
His motivations are shallow, his scheme is generic, his dialogue is
straight out of a Saturday morning cartoon… he’s just lame. But every character deserves a second chance
and Lawson has turned a boring and forgettable foe into an ominous, lingering
threat. After five issues of build-up,
Baxter finally connects with the main characters and he doesn’t waste any time
getting down to business.
My favorite Stockman-related moment in this issue isn’t
even when he stabs April with the needle (which will prove to be a loooooong
simmering plot thread not to be addressed for almost ten years). It’s the scene at the beginning, when he
brutally guns down the guy in the phone booth.
It’s gratuitous gore and violence, completely senseless, but what makes
it work is that Baxter comments on his behavior afterward. He realizes that his action was stupid and
excessive, but comes to the realization that he just doesn’t care. Baxter then concludes that his new robot body
has reduced his humanity and his
conscience and rather than feel a sense of loss, he regards it as an unexpected
bonus of his “upgrade”.
A lesser writer would have just had Baxter gun down the
bystander and leave it at that, trying to use the violence and the brutality as
shorthand for “Baxter’s a REAL threat now!”
But Lawson takes time to let the character reflect on his actions and
contemplate what they mean and why he did them.
While the end result is more or less the same (“Holy shit, Baxter’s
killing people and he just don’t care!”), we’re given an introspective
reasoning behind it so that it doesn’t come across as using violence as
shorthand for “seriousness”.
Anyway, if Volume 2 has been too slow for your tastes
thus far, it picks up its pace with this issue and doesn’t slow down until the
very end. In fact, I’d say it doesn’t
slow down PERIOD; it hits “The End” at 100 miles per hour (but we’ll talk about
that when we get there).
Grade: B (as in, “But jeez, do April’s lips look stupid
on that cover or what?”)
