Image Or Mirage?

[DonatelloTMNT23]

Which is better...my opinion would be mirage...but I haven't read either...just saw pictures...help a brother out here!

[TMNT_4ever]

Mirage is infinitely better than the Image stuff, especially if you want to connect to the characters on a personal level.

The Image book wasn't horrible, but it doesn' hold a candle to the Eastman & Laird TMNT.

[Aztec General]

Mirage, wow that was an easy one.

Unless you love seeing the Turtles get mutilated every issue.... lol

[Dontebell]

mirage made great comic of ninja turtles. but image no they suck making the turtles look ugly and having a female shredder that not right :tthumbsd: :tthumbsd: two thumbs down for image :evil:

[heretic888]

Well, if you compare the current Mirage siries (volume 4), I feel that the characters' personalities (the turtles, that is) themselves were better expressed and more fleshed out in the Image series.

However, the overall plot of the Image series (post-issue 5, that is) is far inferior to the current Mirage series.

[xZAOx]

i really thought they did a good job at image (yes, ive said this before hehe). now, the mirage stuff that fits into the continuity, yes, it definately beats the mirage stuff, except volume 4 in my opinion. i thought image had good character development, and each character was definately different and kept to his personality throughout. the whole point of the mutilations was to get the turtles to face different experiences, and see how they would react to these sort of "extreme" conditions that they had never faced before, and i think they did a damn good job of it.

donny being a cyborg was lame tho, haha. i woulda been fine with it if it didnt turn him into a "god turtle", and if he coulda made the armor make him look like a turtle hehe.

the new series is just...so...slow...and boring...i really hope it picks up!

[heretic888]

like i said, pete is writing great plotlines but the character depiction is kinda lame.....

[tank222]

Mirage is definatly better. Unless you want to see a turtles that has nothing to do with any other turtles stuff. Image was incredibly stupid. I like the comic, it's moving slow but it probaly wouldnt seem so slow if it was monthly.

[GK Punk]

Mirage, wow that was an easy one.

Unless you love seeing the Turtles get mutilated every issue.... lol

Yeah I never Understood that, People getting hands chopped off, it was just not right.

[Karpo_007]

Well it's not part of the official continium, So people shouldn't be upset about it anymore...

[xZAOx]

Image was incredibly stupid.

thats quite a bit "over the top", wouldnt you say? =P

[Dinny]

Image was incredibly stupid.

thats quite a bit "over the top", wouldnt you say? =P

Image was OK but the stories got a bit farfetchd. So definately Mirage.

[J Legault]

I have Issue 3 of Image I think.

and I also wounder why bother to change Don and Raphel

How leo and Mickey become so lucky.

Well at least there's some better plot at Mirage the place where they do TMNT Right.

[azure turtle]

Leo was definitely luckier than Don 'n Raph, but he still had his hand bitten off by that mutant. :eek:

[Straight-Edge]

So having one's face scarred is somehow more damaging than losing half of one's ability to manipulate?

Leo lost a *hand*! He's a swordsman, and he only has one hand! That's way worse than Raph's simple loss of depth perception. And he didn't look like he was any worse for it later on.

If you're looking at Image as a continuity, then you have to assume the old Mirage series are the backstory for it, same as Vol 4.

Neither Vol 3 nor 4 would exist if it werent for Vols 1 and 2, so the first two have to be removed from the comparison, cuz Vol 3 wasn't a start, it was a continuation of quality stories that already existed.

The only true comparison between Image and Mirage is between Vols 3 and 4. And in the comparison, I thoroughly enjoyed Image, and am only passingly interested in Vol 4. Vol 1 laid the ground work, got a little muddled, but ended with City at War (the pinnacle of TMNT storytelling). Vol 2 upped the ante by going to color, and pushing the danger to a higher level (April in peril, and the Triceratons attacking).

Image took the stories even further, putting the turtles, their family, their friends, and everything else in jeopardy through *character-driven stories*. Shadow's abduction was a result of Casey's life during City At War, not some random kidnapping... the plot resulted from the actions of Casey, Gabby, and her husband. The Turtles left New York to find Splinter, not *just* because they needed to Crossover with Dragon, or Knightwatchman.

Vol 4 has gone nowhere. The Utrom arrive... no story. Instead we get a plot about how April is infected as a result of Vol 2's encounter with Baxterbot. Splinter and the Justice League spend two issues interrogating Shadow's boyfriend (don't ask how she's acting/looking nearly 16 when the timeline has advanced only ten years since the first issue of Vol 1), then they just erase it from his memory. The whole plot was obviosuly just a way to familiarize the audience with these characters... why not just have a flashback story? And while Petey boy spent so much time reintroducing these peripheral characters, he spent no such time reexplaining Shadow, the living situation, or even the origin of the turtles... Its all over the place, really. I mean, I'm sure it'll make more sense when this arc concludes at Issue #10, but the dialogue isn't very punchy (or really funny at all, actually), and the characters aren't really well defined... There's ten years of murky backstory that I couldnt really care about... Something's gotta pop soon, or I'm gonna wind up dropping the book.

Image vs Mirage
Turtles with their shells in dissarray vs Turtles with tattoos on their carapaces.
April and Casey with money troubles (and a baby) vs April and Casey having relationship stress and lifetreatening nanoprobes
Splinter missing and ultra-mutated vs geezer-ing it up in the country with Steve and MetalHead.
Superhero friends that are are Cool outside the Turtle stories vs Superheroes we can't even identify (from Issues #3 and 4).
Enemies like Pimiko, the Mob, Lady Shredder, that Foot medicine man, Dragonlord, the Triceratons... vs a Foot guy that sounds like he was named by George Lucas...

Ok, I'm shutting up now... I like the new book's more dramatic pace, and its nice to see old favories like Honeycutt and Lou, but between the art (even though Lawson has been doing the Mirage in-continuity at since Vol 1 #19), and the lack of character development, I'm wishing they'd have picked up ten years after the Image story (so the backstory to this could be how the turtles were un-deformed: a storyline Lawson and the gang were cooking up anyway before the book was cancelled).

[Karpo_007]

Well I for one don't thin there was any sense in transforming Splinter into a giant bat. It doesn't fit the TMNT universe at all... Of course Image did evrything in it's own way.

[Straight-Edge]

>>Well I for one don't thin there was any sense in transforming Splinter into a giant bat. It doesn't fit the TMNT universe at all... >>

As a writer, I can see it from the other point of view. Splinter's been yaking on and on since day one about him beign gone, and the turtles having to fend for themselves. So how do you accomplish that without killing the poor rat, or kidnaping him *yet again*. And if you just sit him upstate, where the turtles know he's safe, there's no drama to them missing him. So they put him into a body that had mobility and mystery, and completely fudged up his sound mind... they did everythign *but* kill him, because that's what Splinter needed.. an interesting (and action-packed, cuz I'll admit, this is Image) way to take Splinter out of the Turtles' lives.

If you're going to take the mythos "one step further" (and how much further can you take it when you've already got him mind-f***ed and demoralized by the Rat King in City At War?), you've gotta do somethign unique. I think it was very much in keeping with the TMNT Universe. It was never meant to be permanent... it was a plot device... and in the Image series, most plot devices were character driven... true surprise, not cheap surprise like lots of other comics.

[Karpo_007]

Still it wouldn't fit Mirage TMNT. Well wheater or not you like the changes in Image is a matter opinion, and it seems at the end Laird didn't.

[Tinselcat]

*marches about chanting* mirage, mirage, mirage, mirage...

[Nate]

I would say that I actually prefer Image to Mirage. I have not yet read any of volume 4, or 2, and I've not read all of 1, but I still feel confident in my preference. The Image series is so grity, and real; the disfigurments of the TMNT was a mere change of pace making them more defined entities. I didn't agree with all of the series (Bat splinter) but I certainly didn't like all isues of Vol. 1 either (Howarth, Martin books) I think that they should be held as seperate, equal universes, as I see them. Don't get me wrong though, I love classic Mirage books aswell, I just think that Vol. 3 was a great series in it's own.

[The_Realest]

I've read almost all of Volume 1, and love the continum part of it. As for Image, I've only read the first issue, which I really enjoyed. I never read any of Volume 2, and am just now picking up Volume 4, so I guess I can't say which universes I like better. I'll have to read more of te Image series and more of Vol2/Vol4 until I can decide.

[Straight-Edge]

>>wheater or not you like the changes in Image is a matter opinion>>

Well, of course, I'm not looking to push my opinion on anyone. This is the way *I* feel, not the way things actually are. I'm just presenting a viewpoint, and backing it up (cuz I'm so not a troll). If I persuade a few people to look at the Image series a little closer, then cool. If not, then I had fun writing those posts, and getting my ideas straight in my head.

Peace.

[Aztec General]

I had such high hopes for the Image series. I really wanted to see the TMNT become a part of a major comic universe (which Image certainly was at the time). I was also excited to see their Mirage adventures continue. But I was terribly dissappointed with the results. The comic just did not have the same feel as the Mirage series. The Mirage series was so much more intimate and personal. This perhaps extends from the fact that it is an Independent publisher. The Image issues just seemed IMHO to be an attempt to thrust the TMNT into a generic mid '90s action hero comic. To me the mutilations of the characters were symbolic of the mutilation of the Mirage order. That was just not what I was looking for.

[heretic888]

yah.... but you gotta admit that, when they weren'r mutilating or deforming or mutating them, the image series portrayed the characters VERY well.... far better than Volume 4 has so far (although Volume 4 is superior in all other respects besides this one).

[xZAOx]

actually, this question is answered directly in the letters page. they were going to put the turtles through some hell-a-sish times, and didnt want the turtles running to splinter every 5 secs for him to tell them what to do. so they remove him for a bit, and get the turtles to figure out things on their own. for example, don's battle with the cyborg, raph deciding to become the next shredder...if splinter was there, it would have went differently

Well I for one don't thin there was any sense in transforming Splinter into a giant bat. It doesn't fit the TMNT universe at all... Of course Image did evrything in it's own way.

[Karpo_007]

They took Splinter away from them in Mirage to, it wasn't a new Idea. But transfoming him into a bat? Ridiculous.

[HorseTechie]

Yeah.. The Splinter Bat thing really got on my nerves. Raph's ailment actually had been forcasted. Look at the Archie's, Future Raph has an eyepatch over the same eye. Or that one artists pic (Berger, I think), with Raph hunting for rabbits.

I was also cool with Don the cyborg. But I think cyborgs. robots and techie stuff like that is cool anyway. What I didn't like what how they portrayed Don. You think he would have much more of that internal struggle between him and the PITA artificla intelligence. Or that he becomes "mr Almighty" afterwords.

Raph as the Shredder.. ugh. Leo getting shot, acts like it's nothing, then has his hand bit off. :dead: *stops reading Image after that* I mean, come on, any one who knows a thing or two about komodo dragons would realize they have poisonous spit that'll later completely paralyze it's victum after the first bite! It's a no win situation!

Sure.. while Mirage doesn't seem to have a moving storyline, at least it;s not a extremely farfetched and ludircous as Image! I also spoke with Frank Fosco at one comic con, and he admitted the team working on the comic were having some major issues with each other. They couldn't agree on story line, facts, or anything.

Thus, I still stand for Mirage. But Cydon will always have a spot on my website. :evilgrin:

[Apple Cat]

---delete this

[Dinny]

Image wasnt THAT bad it was just a little bit,... well...EXTREMELY confusing

[Tetsu Deinonychus Power-5]

I said this before but the only thing I liked about the Image series was Raphael as the new Shredder. Besides you have to read volumes 1 and 2 before you read volumes 3 OR 4.
BTW you didn't mention Archie. :cry: It wasn't as good as Mirage but was awesome in it's own right (Turnstone saga rocks! :D ). Better than Image anyway. :lol:

[Karpo_007]

I have to agree.