Once upon a time, Peter Laird and Jim Lawson began writing Volume 4 of the TMNT comic book – skipping the much-maligned Image Comics run that is Volume 3. Due to a variety of factors including the sale of the TMNT property to Viacom, Volume 4 only lasted about 30+ issues before it was eventually abandoned.
Well, it looks like IDW is going to pull the same shit they did with Volume 3 – where they reprinted the entire run before poaching the original creatives to produce a proper finale for this thing – but this time with Volume 4, a series that also had its share of mixed reactions.
Admittedly, I wasn’t a huge fan of the book. Maybe it was the slow pacing, the slow output of issues during the latter period, or maybe just the overall general direction… but it never grabbed me as much as some of the older stuff did. If anything, I found myself enjoying the relaunched Tales Of The TMNT series more; those were self-contained stories that did whatever and covered whatever, but you had some genuinely fun stuff in there that more than made up for the dull pacing of the main book… even if you had to put up with the harsh political slant of the letter pages, which I generally avoid because those things almost never age well.
Still, seeing this get a reprint and possibly a proper conclusion is somewhat exciting. Maybe giving this another shot decades after its initial inception will change my perception of this run… or maybe it won’t. But then again, I didn’t completely hate Volume 3 back in the day and actually did look forward to that coming to a conclusion, so… fuck, who knows?
dtm666 