Publication date: October 26, 2016
Writer: Paul Allor
Artist: Damian Couceiro
Colorist: Ronda Pattison
Letterer: Shawn Lee
Editor: Bobby Curnow
Publisher: Ted Adams
"The War to Come, Part 3"
"The War to Come, Part 3"
Summary:
MAIN STORY:
Donatello wakes up in the command center as Stockman
works to activate the defense systems.
In the hallway, Raphael has had enough lip from the scorpion mutant, who
introduces herself as Zodi. He cuts her
free from her bonds and tells her to fight him.
She gets a few licks in, but Raph stabs her through the hand with his
sai and ends the fight. Michelangelo and
Leonardo try to calm him down, insisting that they’ll all need to work together
to get out. Donatello stumbles into the
hall and asks what he missed.
Outside, Knight and Winter are a little concerned about
Agent Bishop’s strategy to deal with the mutants. Bishop walks in on their conversation and
Knight confirms that backup is on the way.
On the roof, Leo, Donnie, April and Zodi put their plan
into motion. Zodi lassos one of the
floating EPF probes and gets an electric shock.
She reels it in and April places a hand on it, confirming that the
probes won’t respond to human targets.
April then runs through her plan to leap to the next roof, escape into a
nearby sewer tunnel and make her way back to Manhattan. Zodi is incredulous of her skill.
Back inside, Stockman notices EPF soldiers climbing up
the elevator shaft and dispatches Mikey and Raph to stop them. Raph leaps down the shaft and begins
clobbering the soldiers until Mikey throws him a line to get back out. Raph exits the shaft seconds before Stockman
gets the security defenses online, which close off the shaft with bars and lasers.
On the ground, the EPF spot April leaping across the
rooftops and Bishop gives the order to shoot her. Detective Lewis intervenes, tackling the
soldier and knocking his shot just enough off-target so that the bullet only
grazes April’s arm. April makes it to
the next roof and keeps moving.
Raph arrives on the roof in time to see all the
craziness going down and says he doesn’t like this plan at all. Mikey demands to know why Raph’s been so on edge lately and he explains that with all the escalating danger they’ve been facing, he’s afraid of losing his family.
Moreover, he’s afraid of being alone again. Mikey consoles him and promises that not only
will they watch out for each other, but they’ll get Alopex back, too.
Bishop, meanwhile, orders Lewis to be detained. She tells him he’s crazy to be treating this
like a war and Bishop points to the backup choppers closing in and tells her to
think again.
BACK-UP:
Story: Kevin Eastman, Bobby Curnow, Tom Waltz
Script: Tom Waltz
Layouts: Kevin Eastman
Artist: Bill Sienkiewicz
Colorist: Tomi Varga
“Inside Out, Part 3”
At the entrance of the sewer tunnel, Leonardo awaits an
attack from Koya. The attack comes from
behind, and not from Koya, but from an army of rats.
Much to Leo’s surprise, he’s being besieged by the forces of the Rat
King, who tells him that he has fallen into a Thin Place yet again.
Even worse, the Rat King has brought reinforcements in
the form of three monstrous Shredder doppelgangers: A huge hulking Shredder, a
lanky lobster-clawed Shredder, and a tiny midget Shredder. Leo leads them down the tunnel and into an
open area of the sewer. He escapes them
and leaps onto a pedestal, but a huge Oriental dragon rises from the pool of
water below. The dragon tells Leo that
he is his destiny and breathes fire at him.
Leo dives into the water and searches for a way
out.
Turtle Tips:
*Raph references the time he was alone on the streets in
TMNT (IDW) #1 and the time Donnie nearly died in TMNT (IDW) #44.
*Mikey mentions that Alopex is missing. She disappeared in TMNT (IDW) #60.
*Leo last encountered the Rat King in the Thin Place in
TMNT (IDW) #36.
*The monstrous Shredder doppelgangers are homages to the
Mutant Shredder Clones that originally appeared in TMNT (Vol. 1) #20.
*This issue was originally published with 3 variant
covers: Regular Cover by Freddie Williams II, Cover RI by Ryan Lee, and
Subscription Cover by Damian Couceiro.
Review:
Hey, Zodi’s finally had her name revealed in the actual
comic. Took em long enough.
Her sarcastic and matter-of-fact response to just about
every predicament so far has made her an amusing villain to deal with. She’s very smug, but she also isn’t infallible
or untouchable. Raph gets the best of
her in their fight and she gets a solid zap from that probe, too. She certainly takes it on the chin a lot. But regardless of whatever injury is
inflicted upon her, she always responds with a wry comment or just shrugs it
off like it doesn’t matter. It’s very
endearing.
April gets to shine in this issue and she’s been a
strong player through this opening TMNT Universe arc. Her pragmatic attempts at infiltration,
subterfuge and ultimately knowing when to cut and run takes me back to how she
was portrayed in her Micro-Series issue some years back. We haven’t gotten to see enough of THAT April
in the intervening years and I’m happy to see the portrayal make a comeback.
The bit where she confidently asserts “I’m April O’Neil”
to Zodi was done with just the right balance of emphasis and corniness, too. Much like how Casey has been recovering in
the pages of the TMNT ongoing during the “Chasing Phantoms” arc, April’s
getting back on her feet quite nicely in this storyline. They’re major players in the TMNT mythology,
so it’s about time they were allowed to pull their weight again.
There’s a surprising amount of continuity dropping in
this installment, with Raph’s heartfelt speech about loneliness (which Zodi
appropriately gags to) referencing many of the hardships he and his brothers
have endured since things began. He’s
right in that they’ve been experiencing a lot of relentless momentum in the
issues leading up to this arc, especially if you consider that they’re also
just coming off of the Bebop & Rocksteady miniseries, so his exhausted,
frustrated breakdown has some justification in-context.
Mikey soothing his spirits by promising to get Alopex
back was maybe a little out of left field, though. If there’s supposed to be some great romance
or infatuation between Raph and Alopex going on, I think I must have slept
through it. They haven’t spent nearly
enough page-time together to warrant the kind of passion and concern IDW is
trying to get at least Raph to express.
Action-wise, this was a relatively adrenalin-fueled
issue. We got a meaningless boxing match
between Raph and Zodi (addressed as meaningless by the cast, so it’s cool), a
pretty sweet wire-fu fight in the elevator shaft, and some tension when April
nearly takes a bullet while crossing rooftops.
Couceiro’s layouts are aces in this issue and I think he
deserves some props for his sense of spatial awareness. It’s one of those things you don’t notice when
it’s done well, because it’s so intuitive, but I never feel disoriented during
any of his action sequences; none of that “What room are they in? Where are they now?” stuff. Everything flows so well, you always have a
natural sense of where the characters are, where they’re going, how they got
there, and so on. It may not sound like
a big whoop, but trust me, when an artist is bad at it YOU NOTICE.
As for the backup, we’re getting even more villain
cameos, this time from some bad guys who haven’t even appeared in the IDW continuity
yet. While it’s kind of a drag that the
Mutant Shredder Clones have been relegated to hallucination territory, it was
cool to see them even in this limited capacity. Was that big red Oriental dragon supposed to
be Hothead/Warrior Dragon? I dunno. Probably not, but maybe. There’s been a lot of fanwank in this backup
strip so far.
