Odd Similarities to Mirage
 

For some reason, I find Rise to have a whole bunch of odd similarities, perhaps coincidental, to the first volume of Mirage.

# The sheer randomness. In Mirage, the turtles could barely spend a week without being ambushed by all manner of oddballs that they'd usually never see again. This is the same here. While they do have some re-occurring enemies, the number of allies and enemies they encounter, and their weirdness, does bring these comics in mind to me. One can say the same thing happened in Fred Wolf, though.


# Splinter being far less than ideal as a parent. The original raised his children as weapons of revenge, specifically for one purpose; kill Oroku Saki dead. This one is milder, mainly being a lazy deadbeat.

# Shredder’s legacy having more of an impact than Shredder in person. Similar to Shredder dying at the start of Mirage, Shredder is now a sealed demon who’s impact is felt more from a distance rather than in person.

We've truly come full circle.

That's really reaching.

You could sat that about any version of the TMNT.


I've always felt that the whole angle of Splinter raising the turtles as weapons for his revenge is a more than a little overstated and born out of trying to make the material more edgy than it is.

Sure, it's true but is it ever referred to after that very first issue? It's alluded to in a pretty neat issue of Tales of the TMNT V2 but that's it. It's never stated that was the sole reason for training the turtles in ninjutsu and I don't think we've ever gotten the impression he was not a loving father to his sons

While the first Mirage issue had a limited scope, owing to how it wasn't planned to be a series, it DID include the line "We hate running from those who would be our allies", referring to the cops. So Splinter didn't raise straight-up crooks.