I don't agree that the artwork is horrible, its just really rushed in a lot of places.
I personally loved Volume 4. In retrospect, I can agree with you to the extent that it was really some of Peter's best creative concepts executed extremely poorly. I wouldn't mind some of those ideas leaking into the IDW series if Viacom does in fact own the content, if not the legal rights to add to it.
It's simply not true that "nobody read Volume 4" because lots of people read it. The book was however expensive to produce because Peter didn't care about sales. He lost money on it at times but adamantly refused to let it die (probably because he used part of the letters section to purport his liberalism). He did it so aggressively and obnoxiously and had the attitude that "he was going to say what he wanted because he was having to foot the bill since he was losing money on it any way." This came off to many people as tacky and offensive. To be fair, I was a practicing liberal at the time Volume 4 was being printed and
I found it cringe-worthy. I think he was hoping for his own renaissance with him at the helm of his own political and profitable pirate ship, but nothing that came out of this era of TMNT could hold a candle to candy-coated Turtlemania in the nineties. His children had yet again disappointed him due to poor leadership on his part and he disowned them.
I'm not proud of how caught up in this I got.
