It's a shame Cha Ocho and Hun were so underused in the comics
 

Now I realize Hun was part of Tristan's story that he can't continue (at least, for now), because Tales is closing, but I can't help but feel disappointed. Hun only appeared in 2.5 issues of Tales. For all the hype of a cartoon character appearing in the comics, he was never used to his full potential. Again, I know Tristan would have used him more had he had the chance.

Next, we have Cha Ocho. One of my favorite new characters from Volume 4. Had some interesting interactions with Leonardo in early Vol. 4, he still has a grudge against Leonardo, and he got two Tales issues, one that showed his backstory and another where he went to a bar with Raphael. Then in late Vol. 4 he simply disappears as if Laird forgot about him.

This is the thing that bugs me about the comics the most. They constantly have the Turtles fight one-shot generic aliens/monsters/robots/random criminals, yet all the big-name characters are so underused and never get used to their full potential.

It's a shame.

Which is why I thought they introduced these characters, to give the Turtles some big-name villains that weren't one-shot generic aliens/monsters/robots/criminals.

It's amazing that after nearly 150 Mirage TMNT comics, most of them feature one-shot villains, or characters that return once only to get killed off in their second appearance.

I appreciate that Mirage never did a whole lot of resurrections, but yeah... I do hate the more generic baddies.

And while most of Tales volume 2 is great, there were some real wastes... "Origin of the Super Turtles" comes to mind instantly.

Hun had a lot of potential and WAS being built up as a strong, stable long-term villain. But the cancellation of Tale and the Viacom buy-out put an end to that. To Mirage's credit, they were going to try with him.

Cha Ocho? I never really felt enthralled with him as a character. His origin was a bit convuluted, particularly in the way Leonardo was behaving and he never proved himself to be more than a lackey with hurt feelings (his sparing matches with Leo always ended embarassingly for him).

I never felt he even had much potential to really waste. So, honestly, I sort of just forgot he even existed.

Yeah that's a shame, specially with Hun. But again, it's just too bad that Tristan can't finish his arc, it had so much potential.

You didn't dig "Scars"? I've always thought it was one of the better Turtle stories ever told - certainly one of the best Leonardo stories. So for that issue alone, I'm sorry Cha wasn't used more often. Plus, it's kind of cool that he can be drinking with Raph one moment and plotting Leo's demise the next.

And Complete Carnage, we hardly knew ye. His first issue was a yawner, but all his appearances after that were pretty threatening. When you step back and think about it, he is - hands down - the most powerful enemy the Mirage Turtles ever faced. Tons of wasted potential there.

He was a bit like Savanti Romero, in a way. TONS of raw power, but squandered by an idiot.

Complete Carnage had power over all man-made materials. That right there is world-conquering power. Unfortnately, he was nothing more than a thug and was never capable of utilizing that power to its full potential.

Yeah, he did suffer a bit from incompetent-bad-guy-syndrome.

I think that owes itself to the fact that he started out as gag/homage character, and after he became a serious villain, his abilities were simply too great to write many stories around. It's the same thing with Viral in the 4Kids series. What exactly are you supposed to do with a character that powerful?

That said - I want everyone to think about how balls-to-the-wall awesome a fight between Carnage and the Turtles in the sewer would have been. Talk about nowhere to run.

We actually got that with the second Savage Dragon crossover, albeit it was the Complete Carnage clone and not the original article.

The fight was well-drawn, but Carnage didn't really make use of his surroundings in any meaningful way, so it was sort of a let down.

Complete Carnage just came off as a supervillain knock-off to me for Radical to fight. I can see why the character was never used outside the comics, aside from being a parody, he's really one-note.

What could Cha Ocho do to cement his place in Mirage, you think?

That is where the need for other media to capitalize on notable characters is a problem. It develops our expectations of having notable characters every single story fight the TMNT or whatever hero. We get spoiled having The Shredder in 61 out of the first 65 episodes and having any notable villain either tied to him or allied to him aside from Don Turteli as an example. I really feel like Mirage messed up by not doing their own takes on characters developed outside of Mirage/Image. I would have loved to see a renegade utrom named Krang and mistreated alligator snapping turtle have a blind hatred of his 'brothers' for example. Also, Rat King dies after his FIRST appearance and returns as a spirit twice more? Iconic characters has such low mileage on them.

I never thought much of Hun, a thug who got lucky and was reluctantly loyal learned from watching Shredder. There were many other characters I thought would have been adapted and be more interesting than him, but perhaps its Laird's desire to keep the mutant animal count down to the four Turtles, Splinter, and Leatherhead being the only other one that caused that.

After Hun killed Arnold Sr. for not paying turf tax and then being Casey's father himself in IDW was an interesting twist. Definitely better than Bruce Lee calling himself Hun. It's a letdown that he never saw redemption in IDW.

That's probably a bug, not a feature.

Man its 2010 era me, I had more hair back then.

2010 is now 12 years ago...what the hell.

More appearances.

Vol. 4 implied that there was a long standing rivalry between Leo and Cha from multiple encounters over the years yet we only saw a single encounter. Also while Scars is good story if we were only going to get the one story it probably needed to be meatier than what we ended up getting.

This is were Tales Vol. 2's format just wasn't the best of ideas. I'm fine with it being an anthology series with a revolving door of creators but they should have all done multi-issue arcs. Imagine you've head some hype online about Tales of the TMNT #36 and pick it up and love Jones and Harmon's modern yet gritty take on the turtles and you can't wait for the next chapter in the story but then you learn it may not happen and if it does it may not be for several issues down the line. Instead you get completely unrelated one-off stories with all kinds differing art styles and tones.

Even from a creative standpoint most of the stories would have been better as multi-parters. The Cha Oco story would have been more impactful of we'd have time to see Cha bonding with Leo while searching for his wifes killer. Then Leo turning on him would have meant more.