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Teenage
Mutant Ninja Turtles
A Better Mousetrap
2/JUL/2003
Publisher: Dreamwave Productions
Writer: Peter David
Pencils: Lesean
Inks: Erik Sander
Colors: Rob Ruffolo, Shaun Curtis & Kenny Li
Letters: Matt Moylan
Price: $2.95 US/R35.00 SA
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One of my fondest childhood memories was one which included a bunch
of mutated turtles and their teacher named Splinter,
who indecently was also an animal, in this case a rat. Ok so that’s
a pretty twisted picture and probably gives away far too much about
myself. Due to me being a bit of a fanboy I couldn’t give
up the chance of grabbing the latest re-incarnation of the TMNT
and giving it a try.
April O’Neal is going through a crisis of
identity and along the way she tells the story of a crazy scientist
who has built an army of mechanical rat hunting robots called Mousers.
Enter the Turtles, who must save April from the evil munching machines.
Looking to my shelf of comics I found two collected editions
of TMNT by Mirage Studios from the 80’s by the original
team of Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird.
Paging through these classics in preparation for this new series
I suddenly realised that these new creators have a lot of work to
do if they are to match the original and dynamic series of stories.
On to today’s Turtles then, the first issue was a good one
with a chock-a-block story from start to finish that was both fun
and entertaining. This second issue just didn’t seem to be
able to retain the good start that it had to build on. Peter
David tries to focus on the internal mental struggles of
April O’Neal and this just fails dismally and burdens this
otherwise fun book with a droll, slow moving story focus.
The thing TMNT does well is lots of action and classically funny
one-liners, which are the positives of this issue, but why even
try for anything deeper? , it just doesn’t seem to fit the
mood.
The art is nice, with a great hip-hop/graffiti based animated
style of pencilling by Lesean and some
really good digitally painted backgrounds bringing a very polished
overall visual feel to this comic.
Not a great issue due to the somewhat dull and confusing storyline.
This book has taken a step backwards after a promising first issue
so let’s hope it improves again in the third.
Score
5/10
Reviewed By:Iain Duncan
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Comic Reviews
