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So having one's face scarred is somehow more damaging than losing half of one's ability to manipulate?
Leo lost a *hand*! He's a swordsman, and he only has one hand! That's way worse than Raph's simple loss of depth perception. And he didn't look like he was any worse for it later on.
If you're looking at Image as a continuity, then you have to assume the old Mirage series are the backstory for it, same as Vol 4.
Neither Vol 3 nor 4 would exist if it werent for Vols 1 and 2, so the first two have to be removed from the comparison, cuz Vol 3 wasn't a start, it was a continuation of quality stories that already existed.
The only true comparison between Image and Mirage is between Vols 3 and 4. And in the comparison, I thoroughly enjoyed Image, and am only passingly interested in Vol 4. Vol 1 laid the ground work, got a little muddled, but ended with City at War (the pinnacle of TMNT storytelling). Vol 2 upped the ante by going to color, and pushing the danger to a higher level (April in peril, and the Triceratons attacking).
Image took the stories even further, putting the turtles, their family, their friends, and everything else in jeopardy through *character-driven stories*. Shadow's abduction was a result of Casey's life during City At War, not some random kidnapping... the plot resulted from the actions of Casey, Gabby, and her husband. The Turtles left New York to find Splinter, not *just* because they needed to Crossover with Dragon, or Knightwatchman.
Vol 4 has gone nowhere. The Utrom arrive... no story. Instead we get a plot about how April is infected as a result of Vol 2's encounter with Baxterbot. Splinter and the Justice League spend two issues interrogating Shadow's boyfriend (don't ask how she's acting/looking nearly 16 when the timeline has advanced only ten years since the first issue of Vol 1), then they just erase it from his memory. The whole plot was obviosuly just a way to familiarize the audience with these characters... why not just have a flashback story? And while Petey boy spent so much time reintroducing these peripheral characters, he spent no such time reexplaining Shadow, the living situation, or even the origin of the turtles... Its all over the place, really. I mean, I'm sure it'll make more sense when this arc concludes at Issue #10, but the dialogue isn't very punchy (or really funny at all, actually), and the characters aren't really well defined... There's ten years of murky backstory that I couldnt really care about... Something's gotta pop soon, or I'm gonna wind up dropping the book.
Image vs Mirage
Turtles with their shells in dissarray vs Turtles with tattoos on their carapaces.
April and Casey with money troubles (and a baby) vs April and Casey having relationship stress and lifetreatening nanoprobes
Splinter missing and ultra-mutated vs geezer-ing it up in the country with Steve and MetalHead.
Superhero friends that are are Cool outside the Turtle stories vs Superheroes we can't even identify (from Issues #3 and 4).
Enemies like Pimiko, the Mob, Lady Shredder, that Foot medicine man, Dragonlord, the Triceratons... vs a Foot guy that sounds like he was named by George Lucas...
Ok, I'm shutting up now... I like the new book's more dramatic pace, and its nice to see old favories like Honeycutt and Lou, but between the art (even though Lawson has been doing the Mirage in-continuity at since Vol 1 #19), and the lack of character development, I'm wishing they'd have picked up ten years after the Image story (so the backstory to this could be how the turtles were un-deformed: a storyline Lawson and the gang were cooking up anyway before the book was cancelled).
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