Review – Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2012) – Episode 1 : Rise of the Turtles
My favorite cartoon when I was a kid was the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. I had all the toys, I had VHS tapes of the show out the wazoo and I enrolled in a martial arts class at age six just because I wanted to be a ninja. My sensei made me do fifty pushups for taking too long in the bathroom once. I didn’t stay in the class long. That didn’t discourage me from watching the cartoons and playing with the action figures though. Nothing could put the kibosh on that.
I never read the comics of TMNT at any point until around 2006 when I was able to get my hands on some of the reprinted oversize editions that went back and colorized some of the original stories. I knew there were differences between the version I had grown up with and the original source material, but I never really had any idea of that until I got those books. Even then it was only a miniscule sampling of the original Turtle stories and I didn’t get to really delve into that world until around 2010 when IDW started reprinting those issues in omnibus style trade paperbacks. I really enjoyed reading those books and I think that it gave me an appreciation for h0w there can be several interpretations of the same property and have it work out for the better.
The 2012 volume of the TMNT animated franchise seems to be a melding of the ideas from the early nineties cartoon and the one that hit air back in the early 2000s. The show does not attempt to downplay the humorous elements of the franchise and yet at the same time it appears that they will be eschewing the original series’ tendencies for the villains to be downright laughable. The threats to the heroes will feel realistic and the heroes’ response will be utterly sardonic. The melding of tone works well in the hour long first episode which introduces us to the turtles, Splinter, a now teenaged April O’Neil and a race of alien brains known as the Krang. The first series had Krang as a singular character, displaced from his homeworld. This time around they seem to be going with the hive-mind idea and some of the dialog that comes as a result is hilarious. Going back to the humor I mentioned, the show has a handle on it and knows when to use it.
The element that most will find polarizing will be the animation style. It is 3D but there is a somewhat overlaid 2D style, that at times feels heavily manga inspired, that will put off some viewers. I think those who get caught up on the style would do well to look at what else it is doing that works in its favor. I know plenty of people who had a problem with the animation style of something like Teen Titans, and while the anime styling lost that show a number of fans, most would argue that it was easily on par with the rest of the DCAU at the time, regardless of how it was drawn. The stories they told and the voice acting on display made me a fan and I was one of the people initially turned off by the design style. Here, the voice acting is equally good. Rob Paulsen takes over as Donatello and feels right at home. Sean Astin is our new Raphael and he does it well. Greg Cipes, who voiced Beast Boy in Teen Titans, gives Michelangelo a different spin than I was expecting but does a great job nonetheless. Jason Biggs as Leonardo takes some getting used to, as the characterization is different than previous incarnations in a number of ways. That said, it works for the style they have chosen.
I think that this has a lot to offer for fans of the old show and is a great introduction to the kid-friendly aspect of the series for younger viewers. I’m not ashamed to admit I have the new action figures posed on top of my iMac right now. This could be a great show if hard-nosed fans don’t give it too much grief. I personally can’t wait for the next episode.
And now, in a shameless ploy for hits. I present sexy pictures of the adult actress and sexy nerd icon April O’Neil, because I know what people like:
If you are of mature age and want to see more of Ms. O’Neil, check her out on twitter @Undeux.
Weekly Comic Reviews
I know these are becoming completely random and in no way weekly but I feel compelled to write them when I get a chance. Hopefully someone will make a choice based on my recommendation and validate the miniscule bit of effort I put into updating this site every so often. There were plenty of books to choose from this week, so let’s get to it.
AVENGERS X-SANCTION (MARVEL COMICS) # 1
Oh Jeph Loeb, we meet again. This time he managed not to make my eyeballs bleed with rage, so let’s chalk that up as a win. I was fully expecting Red Hulk to sodomize Cable or something equally batshit insane to happen. I know that he doesn’t have the same leeway with the 616 characters that he did when he wrote Ultimatum but I still can’t get that out of the back of my mind when I pick up one of his books.
This issue seemed a little light for the first issue of a major event comic, but that having been said it is the sort of style folks have come to associate with Loeb following his Hulk run, which had a similar sort of pacing and tone. The McGuiness art certainly doesn’t help to distance the two. I feel like this is going to ultimately be an utterly disposable piece of event overload but seeing how it’s only going to be four issues long I can’t complain too much. Fear Itself seemed to last forever so a quick little mini-event might be refreshing in the end. I can’t say. Maybe I’ve just been bludgeoned by Marvel’s books so effectively that my brain has turned to mush and I’ll just buy whatever they tell me to.
Me am Marvel Zombie. Take my money. *sigh*
DOCTOR WHO (IDW) # 12
There really isn’t much to say about this particular issue other than it features the art talents of Mr. Paul Grist of Jack Staff fame and the result is a charming almost entirely dialog free story featuring the eleventh Doctor making the Christmas rounds with Santa in the Tardis. It’s cute, it’s breezy and I enjoyed the heck out of it. If you’re a Who fan it’ll probably hit you right where it needs to. I would recommend it to anyone looking for something as a stocking stuffer for younger kids looking to get into comics or sci-fi. It’s just plain nice.
I really don’t know what else I can say about the book. It’s a little on the light side but that is just part of the charm. I hope you’ll give it a try.
THE RAY (DC COMICS) # 1
I was going to pass this one up. I won’t lie, it didn’t seem like anything that begged to be read. That seems to run counter to my usual feelings about the Palimiotti/Gray writing team but there was a feeling of generic blandness to it in the previews I had come across and so I had planned to let this one pass me by. But the thing is, I DO know that Palmiotti and Gray rarely turn in merely passable work and I owed it to myself to read the book because if nothing else it filled a niche that the new DC lineup seemed to have missed out on. I’m certainly glad I did for a myriad of reasons. First and foremost, the writing team has given us a hero who is aware of hero tropes in a way that makes for quite a refreshing read. The inner voice of this new character doesn’t seem like any other hero on the stands. There is a uniqueness to him that I have to applaud, especially considering that I was afraid the title would exemplify the polar opposite. Some of that has to be due to the fact that he’s not another anglo-saxon hero living in a major metropolis. Here we get a Korean-American dating a Hindu woman who works as a lifeguard while living with his hippie flower-power parents who has his powers thrust upon him and deals with it in a way that seems utterly realistic and runs organically with the rest of the narrative.
The art by Jamal Igle is quite good, as it usually is, and readers should find themselves pleasantly surprised by how good this book is. It really does come out of left field and shatter expectations. Please go give this one a shot. It will send a message to DC that these types of stories still have an audience. People on the ‘net beg for books like these and yet the numbers never seem to add up. Hopefully this time around we can mark one in the win column for b-list heroes with stellar writing.
SACRIFICE # 1
Sam Humphries is something of an indy darling right now. His previous one-shot “Our Love is Real” made a real splash earlier this year and he’s following it up with a self-published book that has been garnering the same level of buzz. The book tells the story of a young man with some psychological issues (for lack of a better term) finding himself in the ancient Aztec world and caught up in the middle of a power dispute over the proper religious teachings that the Aztec people should follow. He also doesn’t want them to wind up getting slaughtered by the incoming Spanish, so he’s got that going for him.
The book is a complex and interesting read. I admit that I had to read it twice to get the flow of information down, but seeing how the version I read was digital and I don’t have a whole lot of experience reading in that format there may have been a bit of a learning curve element to it.
I would advise giving it a shot. This may be your chance to see the breakthrough work of an artist poised to really break out in 2012. I get a similar vibe from what I got off of Fraction during Casanova here and if that’s any indication of things to come Humphries is going to wind up on top sooner rather than later.
****************************************************************
That’s it for this week. Hopefully you will find something to enjoy there. I should have a review of Sherlock Holmes : Game of Shadows for you as well this weekend. That should be exciting.
