Originally Posted by Andrew NDB
TMNT Present Mighty Mutanimals #1-3 **** -- I'm just going to go ahead and lump these all together for the purposes of this little review. Quite the little epic in itself, really. The only other thing to compare it to would be the whole "Final Conflict" event, but this wisely takes that as a springboard to launch into not only a new, bigger event but also a whole new spinoff team that would earn its sealegs as a result. Pretty savvy planning all around and a fun time to be reading TMNTA. Basically we catch up with Man Ray, Dreadmon, and Jagwar watching as these Malignoid larva hatch from the asteroid they watched crash, eat up a bunch of rainforest, and then gestate inside cocoons until they emerge into the more traditional Malignoid warriors we've seen before. Cudley gets shot down at one point and unwittingly (or was it knowingly? you never know with Cudley) brings Leatherhead to the team. What becomes a really powerful scene is when the Mutanimals (let's just go ahead and start calling them that) ponder over the helpless cocoons of the Malignoids. They could easily just walk up to them and slice them to pieces, and they know it -- and just about do that. Cudley talks some "sense" to them and they hold fast and we realize that these aren't just a band of Secret Six-like misfits... they do have a code of honor. In the midst of all this there's a plot with Raphael, who has stowed away with Mondo Gecko aboard the Malignoid flagship but soon become caught. Relatively long story short, the Mutanimals handle the matured Malignoids, the Malignoid flagship lands (pouring alien ships that attack all over Earth... I mean bigtime, we even see its ships attacking malls and the Washington Monument -- if there's an issue after this where there's people doubting the existence of aliens, that's bull****), chaos ensues, everybody learns how to act as a team, "Kid" saves the day and holds Maligna over a barrel and forces her retreat. At the end, the Stump Network is living it up because they've just broadcast the mother of all broadcasts (you guessed it, they'd been televising the whole thing).
I tell you, though, as a kid and even now, the most disturbing thing to me is probably the halfway point in this where we finally got the Jagwar origin. I mean really, guys, let's take off our nostalgia goggles and break it down. I know later on in the actual Mutanimals ongoing series they went into it a little more, but here... here we only get a single page about it, and it's pretty troubling. Basically, Jagwar's mom -- a human who "was not like most people... she was very--how you say--bored, and uninterested in everyday life" -- gets up and goes to to check out this temple, meets the spirit of a living jaguar and "they met as equals... and their spirits came to know love." This is indicated by a panel in which she's sitting cross-legged and her spirit is holding hands with the jaguar spirit. The next panel is her holding a newborn baby jaguar with the caption, "And through that love... came I."
That's it. That's all the origin we get. I mean, what are we supposed to get from that? She got bestialized on the astral plane and came back pregnant? Good god. Did she get slipped a proverbial roofie and impregnated somehow by the "jaguar spirit" somewhere lurking in the bushes? Was this pregnancy even planned, discussed beforehand (and if not, how would she have thought, known, or expected a pregnancy to result from an innocent enough meditative astral plane encounter?)? It just seems like she meditates and says, "hey, wussup, jaguar spirit... you seem kinda cool" and the jaguar spirit pipes back, "Yeah, you're kinda cool too" and then BAM, pregnant. Why isn't she pissed? Pretty well beyond jarring, especially when read now. What's even more disturbing is knowing that later on, having read some of the Mutanimals ongoing issues, that this "jaguar spirit" can -- at times -- assume apparently physical form... do you see where I'm going with this? Yikes, guys. Just yikes.
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