Image tmnt thoughts
 

I am debating on getting some Image tmnt comics and I am wondering on what everyone's feelings are towards it. I am loving the idea that the turtles actually got hurt so I am curious.

The dialogue is awfully hamfisted during the first five or issues or so. But it gets really good.

It sounds really weird hearing people talking about it and even reading the synopses, but if you actually read it, it feels right at home in the Mirage universe. So if you're all caught up on volumes 1 & 2, give it a look.

When they were originally in production I remember not being all that blown away by them. I was leaving highschool/starting college at the time and didn't have much space in my life for comics, let alone books that made narrative decisions with my favorite characters that I didn't like.

Rereading them now I think they're a great time capsule into what indie comics were doing at that point in time. It was all MAN STRONG RAGE HUGE RAAAAR all the time. Which...has it's place, and is wildly entertaining in hindsight.

:lol: that's a good summary of most mid nineties comics, but you just specifically made me think of Image Comics' Badrock with that.

It actually covers a lot of important plot points in Mirage history that the actual Mirage comics never cover:

- Pimiko, Shredder's actual daughter (NOT Karai) shows up

- We see Shadow as a toddler and we see her biological father show up whose a mob boss and tries to reclaim her. Shadow's father never shows up in Mirage so this is a great plot point. I also love gangster/mob stories in TMNT so its fun.

- Raphael (briefly) takes over the mantle of Shredder and leads the Foot Clan for a short time. Of course the Foot eventually betray him and he's exiled from the Foot, but that's toward the end. Seeing Shredder as a mantle makes a lot of sense too. Raphael wearing Shredder's armor is rather cool.

- Splinter turns into Man-bat and it leaves the Turtles on their own for a while to figure everything out themselves without their master around.

- We see Leatherhead again, the Triceratons briefly teleport to Earth, an Utrom named Dr. X (who also is in Tales) all make appearances.

- Stuff like Don turning into a cyborg and Raph getting his face scarred is no different than Peter Laird turning Raphael into a mutated dinosaur for half its run or Don becoming the size of an action figure...the Turtles go through weird changes in every series.


I'd say the worst part of Image is the lame crossovers with some Image superheroes other than Dragon like Vanguard and stuff, but that's only for a few issues.

The Image series is my favorite of them all. The themes are kinda dark, there's tons of action/violence, the art is maaad good, & the pacing is on point. One of the best aspects of it is that it gives Mikey a lot of development. This is where we learn he likes to write, for example.

O.k. you guys convinced me lol I am so going to get the image series. I read a little into it and I am extremely excited to hunt this series down.

It gets off to a rough start. In the first 12 issues or so, only the Shadow kidnapping arc is really good (and it's pretty great, in fact).

But as soon as the Deathwatch arc is over and the Turtles stop constantly crossing over with other Image comics, the book really comes into its own and gets good FAST.

There are ideas I don't like, even through to the end of the run, but I think it averages out to a pretty good series when taken altogether. If you can just fight past the Lord Komodo and Deathwatch arcs at the start, the book turns into something very enjoyable and even some of the ideas that sound sketchy on the surface (Raph leading the Foot) are excellent in practice.

I have some duplicate issues I'd sell. PM me if interested.

I've read a few of them, but they're pretty great. Pick them up if you have the chance.

I have the whole run, just missing the TPB though

Shouldn't IDW be getting to volume 3 probably sometime next year? TMNT Classics 8-10 are volume 2, and 10 is due out around April if Amazon can be trusted. I'm hoping/assuming IDW will at least go through volume 3 with the reprints since there seems to be plenty of interest in that series. Hell, I want to read it too.

What are the cross over issues? I have the specific turtle books but I dont know if I have all the cross overs
Any info would be great
Thanks

Here's a list of all the TMNT comics published by Image while they held the license.

None of them weave in and out of the TMNT Volume 3 run, though. They're mostly random cameos. Big Bang Comics #10 is probably the most "vital", as well as those early Savage Dragon crossovers since they set up the TMNT's relationship with him (and the seed of Mikey's romance with Horridus).

Awesome. Thanks for the links.
Would have missed most of these

Image was probably better than both Volume 2 and 4, honestly. Volume 2 had some good concepts but got way too rushed at the end (and the beginning wasted time with a pointless Leo Vs. Fish mutant battle), and Volume 4 just goes on and on and on.

Without the Image series the Mirage timeline feels a lot more disjointed and rushed. If you include Andrew's #24-25 conclusion it also ties up all the loose ends and also ends a plotline from Tales with Lady Shredder.

Not a huge fan. It's an "ElseWorlds" book, to me. I didn't like a lot of the choices they made for the characters, and you could tell that the people who did the first batch of issues had no idea how to do a black and white comic book, because a lot of the art for the first few issues is an indecipherable mess. You have to draw and ink B&W comics completely differently than color comics, and a LOT of the early Image issues look less like a B&W comic, and more like a comic that was simply never sent off to be finished. They fixed it eventually, but when it was bad it was bad.

They had some interesting ideas, but by and large it's not something I go back to often. I think I need like three issues to have them all, just for the sake of completion.

Not really. It's rather common for comics to use the old, "Some stuff happened off-camera, and now here we are" trick to bridge long gaps in the narrative. They tend to assume that readers aren't entirely clueless unless everything between A and Z is spelled out in detail for them, and can fill in some of the gaps themselves, using either light exposition or their own imagination.

I'll agree neither Vol. 2 or 4 were all that great shakes either, though. Vol. 2 seemed like it was just saying, "Hey, LOOK! We're in color! Finally!", as if that's all it needed to do. And Vol. 4 was just, "LOOK! New TMNT comics! Finally! Nothing anyone would actually want to, y'know, read, because these stories are boring as f*ck, but still! NEW TMNT COMICS!" God, I hate Vol. 4. I kind of like it least of all, because the guy who created the franchise wrote it, and... it's Not Interesting. Other Bad TMNT things can be expected to be less than stellar because at least they were hack jobs. Vol. 4 was like... "THAT is your Best Stuff? You created these characters and this universe and THAT is what you choose to do with it?" It's like the most boring TMNT fanfiction ever written more than anything.

:lol:

Even after all this time it feels like nothing that happened in Volume 4 even mattered all that much, other than Utroms coming to Earth and allowing aliens and the Turtles to walk around freely with humans.

All the plotlines in Volume 4 could have made condensed into one-issue Tales of the TMNT stories and it would have been better off.

At the risk of being "off-topic", but Tales was INFINITELY a better TMNT book than Vol. 4. It actually felt like a TMNT book, with all the requisite action and stories and humor and colorful characters you'd expect. Vol. 4 read like Peter Laird's Mid-Life Melancholy, put to paper. Tales was Fun to read, Vol. 4 was a chore, and reading TMNT should never be a Chore.

Good luck finishing the run. Thats gonna be a hard series to find and finish. Maybe its better to wait for IDW to collect it into books?