So I finally finished working through the book.
One thing that stuck out to me is that while I liked some of them more than others, none of the stories had bad art. They all looked really good. But here's my overall breakdown:
The Good
I didn't expect this, but the story I liked the most was the 2012-inspired story "Kraang Among Us" by Ciro Nieli. The art was just beautiful. There were a couple of hilarious and expressive panels in the first few pages that I particularly enjoyed. There was also a lot of fun onomatopoeia and lettering that seemed to be hand-drawn. What's crazy is that I didn't expect Ciro Nieli to be a great comic book artist — it's not exactly what he's known for. But in this book, he completely blew the comic book "professionals" out of the water.
The Urban Legends story was pretty good. Even though the story was pretty inconsequential, it really did feel like a few pages from Image TMNT with Frank Fosco's art.
I'll say pretty much the same thing for the Saturday Morning Adventures story. It wasn't that exciting, but it felt like it fit the tone of Saturday Morning Adventures. At this point, it's expected that Erik Burnham and Sarah Myer can crank out decent work.
I was extremely impressed with the art in the 2003 story. Each page was just back-to-back eye candy. This is what the Dreamwave comics should have been like. But could this level of quality be maintained over a full 20 pages? Okay, probably not. But I'm glad they went all-out for the 8 pages in this special 40th anniversary issue.
The story with Tristan Jones and Paul Harmon was a nice callback to issue #59 of Tales of the TMNT volume 2, which was created by this same duo. Paul Harmon was really the only person who provided some much-needed grittiness, darkness, and shadows in this otherwise very bright and colorful 40th anniversary issue.
The "TMNT Adventures" story, or informally known as the Archie TMNT story, introduced Casey Jones. It's kind of a mind fuck to think about the fact that Casey had never appeared in Archie previously. The art is really well done — I wish the original TMNT Archie comics looked this good! Clearly, Chris Allan put a lot more care and love into this story than any of his Archie issues from back in the day.
The Disappointment
Look, it's probably taboo to criticize Eastman in TMNT spaces, but I just have to get this off my chest. I was very disappointed in the Mirage selection. Kevin Eastman's story was a story about TLR but it was categorized under "Mirage" because it was made by Kevin Eastman. Don't get me wrong, it's cool to get a Kevin Eastman story, but it's not a Mirage story. And I hate to say this, but it just seems like Eastman has been phoning it in working with IDW over the past decade. This wasn't really a "story" because it was just four splash pages and an Edgar Allan Poe poem. And the art wasn't Eastman's best either. I've seen Eastman do better work than this. I've read full-fledged issues by Eastman before. Remember The Unmentionables? Where the fuck is that?
And I've got to say that I was disappointed in the Lawson story as well. This was not the same Rat King I knew from Tales of the TMNT or City at War. How can this be called a Mirage story? I liked the story, and it's awesome to see Lawson and Lavigne work on a new TMNT story, but it's not Mirage. Good story, good art, but not Mirage.
As for the IDW stories, they were just kind of boring to me. Maybe I'm just burnt out on the IDW continuity. Whatever it is, the two stories in this book didn't do it for me. Although, I was happy to see Ronda Pattison here after IDW seemingly stopped giving her work on the main comic. And funnily enough, I did enjoy her story more than Tom Waltz's story, even though Ronda is less experienced as a writer.
The Bad
Another thing I was going to say was that it's a shame that they made the Rise story the longest one in the book, but that's not true. It just seemed like it was the longest because it was that boring. These characters just don't feel like the ninja turtles to me. In fact, the more I see them, the more I loathe them. The art was good though.
