This is my first Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles comic so I don’t know if Turtles in Time slots into some ongoing storyline but they jump straight into the time-travelling with no backstory whatsoever. First page - the Turtles are in dinosaur times! Why? There’s a woman called Renet who’s got a time-travel wand. Who’s she? Shut up, dude, that’s not important - the Turtles are fighting!
And that’s basically the whole book. The Turtles jump from prehistoric times to feudal Japan (referencing the third Turtles movie, which is also where the time-travel wand gets its design from, I think), to pirate-times, to dystopian future. It’s never clear why they’re time-travelling or why they had to go to these specific times, but maybe I’m missing the point of Turtles comics - maybe the readership simply don’t care and just want to see their heroes do ninja-stuff in different settings?
It seems that in the comics, Splinter is a human who mutated into a rat, rather than a rat who mutated into a larger rat who could talk and do martial arts. But then I didn’t really get all those references to “mom” and “dad” when the Turtles were in feudal Japan - just how old is Splinter?! Or Shredder for that matter - the dude pops up centuries apart and doesn’t seem to age! Unless Shredder and Splinter are titles rather than people? I have no clue.
Each issue is drawn by a separate artist, so sometimes the Turtles kinda look facially like girls, or monsters, and sometimes they look totally unmemorable. I didn’t love any of the art styles though and none really stood out as exceptional.
I can’t say Turtles in Time is a bad comic but it just wasn’t for me. The writing and characterisations are fine, the art is ok, and maybe if you’re a bigger fan of the characters you’ll get more out of it. But Turtles in Time didn’t make me want to seek out more Turtles comics anytime soon.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Turtles in Time
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