FOREVER WAR - now it depends on YOU!

[Leo656]

The book started to really lose some people when the Turtles started going on adventures all over the world and the book got VERY preachy about the same "The world is gonna end in ten years if we don't all recycle Right Now" stuff that we're currently being fed. It went over the heads of the little kids who just wanted straightforward action stories, and some of their parents were really upset about them being "indoctrinated" by stuff like that and all the time spent talking about other cultures and religions and whatnot.

Didn't actually bother ME so much, but there were some times where as a result of these things the book felt like it lost a bit of focus. Selfishly I couldn't wait for the Turtles to get back to NYC and start having more conventional adventures again. Later on I had a bit more patience for the stuff, but at age 7 it felt a bit "off".

Another controversial bit was when Ninjara got written in and became the fifth member of the gang for almost the entire rest of the run. There had been some to-do in the letters page about "needing a girl mutant in there" so little girls could "be represented" (little girls apparently didn't like April much since she'd typically just been a Damsel or Plot Device, which is fair criticism), so I assume that Ninjara was created to quiet some of those concerns/complaints. And *I* thought she was fine but it was very controversial all the same; statistics showed that "little girls" never really jumped onto the book ANYWAY even after Ninjara was put in there, and a ton of the boys were simply put off by having "the bad boy" Turtle they all liked so much suddenly playing kissy-face with a furry.

You'll still find a lot of hate for the book to this day, and a lot of that stuff tends to be why. Now again, for me, personally, it's my favorite TMNT comic but I have to chalk a lot of that up to the fact that I was a kid when I first read it and thus have a strong sentimental attachment to it. In a vacuum, there's a lot about it that a person can rightly say isn't great or could be better - Ninjara, herself, being Pretty Evil upon her introduction and then suddenly Not Evil Because Plot was pretty ass, and her dumping Raph in the end while making it out like she was the victim and he was wrong when she was openly c*ck-teasing another guy right in front of him for several issues in a row never sat well with me at all.

BUT, I'd argue that it ultimately had more Good than Bad, and that the Bad wasn't really all THAT bad. But it's also interesting to note that some of the very same things people complain about Right Now in TMNT comics aren't even new. Even back then there were complaints about the book losing focus, "I don't want any romance in TMNT", etc. etc. I'd argue that those complaints are more apt Right Now than Back Then, but they're definitely not brand new complaints.

Originally Posted by Coola Yagami

Their return story was good though. It featured Slash, an action figure accurate wild and crazy violent Slash, not the buck toothed idiot from the cartoon, and we had the Turtles actually be proactive for a change and purposely seek out the Shredder to defeat him once and for all.

Oh yeah, I won't argue. The Archie book treated the FW characters and concepts way better than the cartoon show ever did. I don't see how that's even a debate. It's just that the comic did a good job standing on its own outside of being trapped within the cartoon concepts, to the point where while it was nice they were included the book didn't exactly "need" them anymore.