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[Thad]

Apparently the new TMNT comic's ready to go.  $10 for a direct-order ink-and-paper version from ninjaturtles.com, and should be showing up free on wowio.com shortly.  (I'm waiting for my Wowio account to validate.  The whole identity verification thing seems so unnecessary.  But I guess it'll all be worth it to get my hands on high-quality comic books like XXXena: Warrior Pornstar.)

[Thad]

Thad reviews the online-distributed TMNT #29, using an inordinate number of parentheses, possibly because he has been staring at LISP code all day.

The book has a strong Star Wars Cantina vibe, from Casey and the Utroms in New York (complete with Yoda cameo) to Leonardo and Oroku Yoshi in the Battle Nexus, with Michelangelo on the Triceraton ship feeling a little more Millennium Falcon-y.

More than anything it's designed to ease the reader (and presumably the writer) back into a series that's been on hiatus for the past two years.  A fun vibe, some interesting developments with Casey, Karai, and the Warriors of Perfect Virtue, with some teasing on the Guardifriends too.

As for the presentation: the 10MB PDF is DRM-free, bookended by ads, and with an unobtrusively tiny serial number tucked into the margin of each page.  It looks pretty decent zoomed to fullscreen (1024 in my case, though come to think of it this would be a perfect excuse to try out my monitor's rotating-screen feature -- maybe next ish), though the format makes the Photoshopped textures in the backgrounds much more obvious (and, to date myself, they look like something out of late-1980's MacPaint or HyperCard).  It's also an ill-suited format for two-page spreads, of which there are two in this issue.

The story clocks in at a sizable 37 pages, with two pages of letters and a page of Laird on his soapbox.

I'm reserving judgement on his "remastering" of the original series until I see it (though the Special PBBZ Edition of issue #1 doesn't fill me with confidence).  He makes a good point for why his motivation is not to slight Kevin, but what I'm more concerned about is whether we're looking at Star Wars Syndrome here.  (He's already announced he plans to re-remaster #1.)  For all that it "muddies" the inks, I think I prefer the old toning technique that doesn't look like something I did on a Mac Plus when I was 8, but again, I want to see what the finished product looks like before I start wailing about it.  Curious as to whether the remasters will also be put up on Wowio; that'd beat paying for them.  In the meantime, the official website has lower-res JPG scans up to issue #9 of the original series (excepting #8 due to the Cerebus copyright).

Anyway.  The book is free.  Signing up for Wowio is a bit of a hassle, but worth it.  Give it a glance.  And if you'd rather not jump into the middle of the series, the first 28 issues are also free (though you can only download 3 a day).

[Thad]

New Tales of the TMNT is good.  There's some Lovecraftian monster stuff in there, an Elder God who feeds off the lies and betrayals of man and yadda yadda, but the good part is the mundane -- this story takes place shortly after the Utroms' arrival, and the Turtles are getting used to a life where they no longer need to stay hidden.  They go on a camping trip and play baseball in the middle of a field with humans passing by.  Don and Raph's relative viewpoints about whether they should be carrying their weapons in public are a nice touch too.

No Leo in this one, and Raph makes a vague reference to needing a break from him.  This fits with his Vol 4 depiction as intense to the point of obsession and increasingly isolated from his brothers.

Not 100% where this fits in the timeline, but obviously before the four parted ways.  Maybe sometime after Splinter's death.

Slow week this week; the only book left in my stack is Batman, which I'll address in the Bat-thread once I've read it.

Did anyone stick with Countdown through the end?  Anything I should know?

[Thad]

Tales of the TMNT #49 is an object lesson in why it's usually better to leave big mysteries unsolved.

It explains the ending of TMNT vol 2 -- in a profoundly boring, too-neat way that's far below the potential the ending gave.

The whole thing's basically a TMNT/Doc Savage crossover fanfic.  (Because that's what comics need, more Doc Savage crossovers.)  It was magnanimous of Lawson to let this ride as the epilogue to his story, but I wish he hadn't.

[Thad]

On the subject of Tales of the TMNT: I thought to punch up the Books of the Future page, and while it's a little out-of-date, some interesting things to note:

• The preview cover for Tales #49 doesn't match the final cover; it was turned into the frontspiece.
• Following the Leo and Raph miniserieseseses, the next one up is Mike, in a story set right after the Utroms' landing; it looks to focus on the anti-alien militant groups that cropped up around that time.  Good idea; I've said since the beginning that the Turtles' transition from hiding in the sewers to walking the streets in broad daylight is ripe for stories.
• #50 reunites the team from #36, for my money the single best issue of the series to date.
  
• #51 is a Renet story.
• #52 is another COWboys crossover, which would have me a little nonplused, but the cover shows an Utrom in a COWboy exoskeleton, and the preview teases an appearance by Cudley the Cowlick.

No news on the "main" series.  Laird's presumably busybusybusy ramping up the 25th anniversary stuff for next year.  He and Eastman have to pretend they like each other and the original cartoon.

[Thad]

So apparently the new season of TMNT starts on the 13th.  It looks like it will be better than Fast Forward!

[Thad]

So uh I just watched the first ep of TMNT: Back to the Sewers, except the file I downloaded turned out to be only 16 minutes long.  Yet it SEEMED like a complete episode.  Anybody else catch it?

Anyway.  Don't care much for the Turtles' new designs -- the eyes are going to take some getting used to, but in particular I don't like the colored belts.  Splinter's new design was better, though I'm not so sure about the chest hair poking up out of his kimono.  April and Casey look good from what I saw in the titles, but they didn't appear in the episode proper.

As for the tone -- I've already expressed my concern for the "cyberspace battles" premise, though, again from the opening titles, the Tron+Turtles mashup is pretty funny.

The "searching for Splinter" MacGuffin has been done to death; not fond of that choice.  Also, whatever pathos his "death" should have had was sort of diminished by the fact that he died with a fucking Asteroids animation.  Also, I don't care how much you're grieving, you don't fucking just walk away while the possessed robot is still standing right the hell there.  In fact, pretty much the only characters who weren't complete dumbasses in this episode were Mikey and Splinter.

Probably the best bit was the traveling to the not-too-distant-future and the foreshadowing from same.  I didn't watch much of Fast Forward, but from what I saw it blew a lot of opportunities to do neat things with time travel (the Bishop ep DID pique my interest; is it worth tracking down?).

Anyway.  Thoroughly meh overall, and downright bad in places -- Donny shooting a decompiler beam, monologuing villain in the Internet, and THEY KEPT THE MOTHERFUCKING ROBOT BUTLER.

I'm not quite on the "Yeah, not watching this anymore" vibe that I got after the first episode of Fast Forward, but I'm certainly leaning that direction.  Although, Tron+Turtles...

[Thad]

Second ep of Back to the Sewers: not great, but good enough that I'll stick around for another week.  A huge improvement over last week's.

Anyway.  Don't care much for the Turtles' new designs -- the eyes are going to take some getting used to, but in particular I don't like the colored belts.

Colored belts and pads are gone, back to the original brown.  Also, they've muted the colors on the weapons' wrappings; they're still blue, orange, red, and purple, but they're not as loud as in earlier seasons.  So, really no gripes anymore; the new designs are good.

April and Casey look good from what I saw in the titles, but they didn't appear in the episode proper.

April's new look is actually an improvement.  She's still got an 18-inch waist, but she no longer dresses like a whore and her hair color now resembles something that might occur naturally on a human being.  Really she looks more or less like the version from the movie.

As for the tone -- I've already expressed my concern for the "cyberspace battles" premise, though, again from the opening titles, the Tron+Turtles mashup is pretty funny.

Still no Tron stuff outside the opening titles.

All in all?  Still establishing the new status quo.  New villain (not that damn impressive), and Donny is the latest in the round robin of angst.  Maybe next year Mikey will be the angry turtle!  That would be cool.  Like that episode where it's a dystopian future and he's all bitter.

[Thad]

So in a rant about global warming, Steve Murphy has sort of buried a lede (although, on the other hand, it's something a hell of a lot less important than the ice caps melting and venting methane into the atmosphere): Dean Clarrain, of TMNT Adventures and Mighty Mutanimals, is a nom de plume; Clarrain was actually Murphy all along.

I see examples of this now again, often on licensed comics, and usually for vague reasons.  Karl Bollers wrote for Sonic the Hedgehog (also by Archie) under an assumed name for awhile; IIRC it was pretty much to make the fans look stupid by panning his work as Bollers and praising his work under the new name.  I'm still not sure what the story was on Brad Mick, a pseudonym James McDonough used in the Dreamwave Transformers series.

[Thad]

Please don't link TV Tropes unless you want to pay me for the hours of otherwise productive time I will invariably lose.  Thank you.

Hours of fun.

It would have been instructive in helping me describe the new season of TMNT, except I already knew what an Idiot Plot was.

I'm debating whether to give up on the series or save them to watch over beers with Ben and laugh at.

It's one thing to throw around jargon like "decompiler" and "data bits" (hell, there are shows that use far more retarded mashups of random computer terms that AREN'T made for eight-year-olds), it's another to put together a plot that breaks down on every level.  The Matrix at least made a half-assed effort to explain why the heroes had to go into the Matrix instead of just hacking it from a terminal.  Here, all they're doing is fucking data recovery; the "we have to digitize ourselves into the Internet to access it" point is never really explained.

As for the first encounter with the Cyber Shredder...I'm trying to decide which is dumber, the fact that none of them seem to recognize him even though they already encountered him TWO WEEKS PRIOR when they wound up in the future, or that the Shredder's contingency plan in case he ever got defeated was to make a backup copy of himself...and then lock it away using super-advanced alien technology so that it could only be retrieved by an AI from the future that just happened to travel back in time.  (All the more baffling is that, per the flashback, Karai knew about the backup yet apparently never made any attempt to restore from it.)  What's the trope called where Rambo knew just which tree, out of the entire fucking forest, the cop was going to stand under?

EDIT: Fallacy of the Predictable Tree.  I like that name better than Contrived Coincidence.

[Saturn]

one of my favorite tropes

[Brentai]

I caught an ep of the new Turtles thing and, not having seen the show since the first season of the last remake, kinda wrote it off as the new standard.  It was the episode where Raphael goes to a wrestling match and gets into a fight because apparently he's switched personalities with Mikey.

Oddly enough, I actually didn't mind this.  I mean, yeah, it's traded in the thoughtful writing for what amounts to zany fluff, but that's the Ninja Turtles I grew up with.  As far as I'm concerned they ought to do more stuff with Mikey trying to be a superhero and sewer monsters disguised as pizza.

[Thad]

...there was only one season of Fast Forward.

It just SEEMED a lot longer.

[Brentai]

Oh, I thought that was the new thing.

[Thad]

Nah, season 6 was Fast Forward, where they were 100 years in the future, and season 7 is Back to the Sewer, which is basically a Tron ripoff.  And not a very good one.

It's not that I have a problem with silly shit, I just have a problem with shit where it looks like the writers aren't even trying.  And I REALLY have a problem with acting like the audience is stupid just because it's made up of eight-year-olds.

EDIT: And you know, it bears going back and noting that part of why this is so disappointing is that they had several different pitches for the gimmick of season 7 and seem to have gone with the WORST one (although it could have been worse yet; originally the Turtles were supposed to be teaming up with their preteen selves).

Steve Murphy had a perfectly good pitch, largely involving bringing a bunch of characters and threads from the Archie TMNT series into the cartoon universe.  (Of course, now that we know Steve Murphy WAS the writer of the Archie series, it's clearer why he'd have a personal investment in it.)  My sense is that Laird rejected it because he doesn't like the Archie series.  I'm not sure why; part of it is probably because it was based on the original cartoon.  It's also possible that there's some truth in Eastman's accusations that Laird is a control freak and dismisses other people's ideas out of hand, but honestly, Laird's spent a lot more time giving yeas and nays to other people's stories than writing his own over the last four years or so.  And Murphy's pretty much been running the show at Tales, the flagship TMNT comic and presumably the TMNT product that Laird has the strictest standards for, so it's likewise hard to figure Laird doesn't hold his pitches in high regard.

Hell, I recently read an interview with Laird where he said Same as It Never Was was his second-favorite episode, right after The King, and for God's sake Same as It Never Was may have been the single most Archie Turtles-influenced episode of the series to date.  So I don't know WHAT he's thinking.

[Rosencrantz]

Okay, so, for the 25th TMNT anniversary there's gonna be a straight-to-DVD special that crosses over the 80's cartoon with the 2003 cartoon (and, if the rumors are true, the Mirage Comics TMNT). I don't have a legitimate source yet, but you can see a few seconds of it at the end of this commercial. (At 0:37 you can see 80's Mike with 2003 Mike.)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gUBLIi2FH1Y

And there's Bebop and Rocksteady! 

...Well, this is the closest thing I could find to an official announcement.

[Brentai]

Apparently "all time" means "the last five years or so".

So no voting for the one where April O'Neil orders a pizza topped with SEWER MONSTERS.

[Niku]

I had that one on one of the giveaway VHS tapes from one of the fast food places.  Probably Pizza Hut.   

[Brentai]

Pretty sure it was Burger King actually, which makes somewhat less obvious sense but then it would be weird for Pizza Hut to sell videos of nightmarish killer pizzas.

[Rosencrantz]

Yeah, it was Burger King. I got some episode with that mobster who would tie people up and tickle their feet with a feather to get them to talk.