Unpopular/obscure characters showing up just to die (minor spoilers for #96)

[neatoman]

So comic books tend to build up a large roster of characters, simply because they run for decades and grow extremely large if there's adaptations/AUs adding new stuff. Understandably, not all the characters remain signifigant for long, most go away after a few issues or simply remain in their adaptation. An example of this would be the single issue appearence of Dan Kingsley as the Hobgoblin, he was originally introduced for the sole reason of explaining how his twin brother Roderick could be the Hobgoblin despite his alibi. In fact, he was killed off for the sole reason to fake out the readers into thinking Roderick was dead, which lead into a different plotpoint. Basically some of these minor villains who were killed off tended to come back for no appearent reason, presumably because the writers forgot that they had even died in the first place, so when it was revealed that Roderick was alive it turned out he was selling the dead villains gear to random crooks wanting piggyback off their reputation. That's right, this happens so often they faked a version of it to set-up a quick default explaination for when a death is so unremarkable it's literally forgotten by the people who are meant to keep track of it.

Anyway, enough about Spider-Man, what does this have to do with TMNT? Well, TMNT as a franchise is pushing 40, it has a ton of loose adaptations that add a bunch of stuff and "serious" TMNT comics have over 500 issues in total... And look at that, something like this just happened.

The IDW versions of Big Louie and Don Turtelli showed up to be on a couple of panels in the latest issue, only to be killed off just as swiftly alongside the barely more prominent IDW version of Don Puzorelli. Looks like TMNT is finally extensive enough to do this sort of thing. Normally I'd consider this a waste of characters, but then I'd remember that these characters are basically just known for tickle torture, stealing anti-freeze and some weird kidnapping/forced baptism plot. They were probably killed off because they were memorable enough to not come across as randoms by the fans, but not popular enough to be missed by either newcomers or longtime fans.

Spoiler:

I hope they do this to Muckman next.

[CyberCubed]

They technically did this to Wingnut/Screwloose too, who only appeared in one issue and were thrown back in time to "perish in the fire." Granted they could have survived, but as we know right now that's the end of them.

They had a chance of killing Mutagen Man when he was just a head, but he's sticking around it seems instead.

We also have the Punk Frogs, or IDW's take on them anyway, who appeared briefly in the second Ghostbusters crossover if I remember right. Weren't killed off but they were discarded quickly as opposed to the theory of the Toad Baron having them as his soldiers or something.