Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Adventures #1 Review (Archie)

Adaptation, Art, and Letters: David Garcia
Colors: Barry Grossman
Editor: Victor Gorelick
Release Date: March, 1989

Oh man. We're really scraping the bottom of the barrel here. This is as useless as Turtles stories get. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Adventures started out as the 1989 cartoons socially challenged third cousin. These early issues were dull adaptations of the cartoon series. It's astounding how these first few comics are even more lifeless than the show.

The issue opens with Leonardo and Michelangelo shopping for pizza topping ingredients. Don't know how the Turtles get money for things like grocery shopping, maybe they steal it? Who knows. Suddenly two 80's punks rob the store! But they're stopped by the threatening sounds of the fight. "CLONG! CLICK! THUNK! KERASH!" It's so bad.

The story goes back to the sewers where we see Splinter, and he couldn't possibly look worse. It's not the art, even though the art is awful, everything looks so flat and lacks any depth or dimension. The problem is the colors. Barry Grossman must have only watched a few Turtles toy commercials, because everything is so wrong. Splinter looks like your typical Wal-Mart shopper on any given Tuesday; strolling along with a mean hang-over in his bathrobe and not having shaved in two weeks. The colors are honestly some of the worst I've seen in any comic. Everything is lazily applied, no care has been taken to stay inside the lines of the art. It's sloppy and breaks rules preschoolers are taught not to do. This are gets a "F" for lack of effort. And for possibly being drunk while completing them.

We then follow Shredder back to Earth where he takes over a ninja dojo for douche bags. It's such a wonderful 80's story, the dojo that only consists of ass holes who only want to hurt other people. They become the Crooked Ninja Turtle gang after about thirty minutes of training from Shredder, where he honed their skills.

Chanel 6 is on the job to follow the Crooked Ninja Turtle gang! Thank god they use the characters names, because I'd have no idea who was who otherwise. I already said the art was pretty bad, but it's at least recognizable to the art style of the show. But the Chanel 6 characters don't even resemble their cartoon counterparts. Vernon and Irma look nothing like the show, and it doesn't help that the colors don't match up with how they look either. But hey, April was black once, so I guess weirder things have happened in the color department of Turtles before.

I can praise the writing of the issue for the most part. Not because it's engaging (it's not), but because it comes off sounding like the show, which is what they were going for in the early issues of TMNT Adventures. Some of it is strange, like all four Turtles saying one word of a sentence. "Master" "Splinter" "Needs" "Us". Just does not flow well and would sound weird coming out of the characters mouths.

The issue ends at the halfway point of the show. That's right, this is a two-parter. What an abomination. Thankfully, the series would break off into it's own original stories after only a few issues, but that point doesn't come soon enough.

1/5