Eastman & Laird’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
Mirage Studios Volume 1, Issue 3
Story & Art by Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird
Read it at NinjaTurtles.com

When Worlds Coincide

Book 3 begins nicely. We pick up where we left off, with April and the freaks having just dug their way out of Baxter Stockman’s chamber of doom, returning to the surface before they part ways. There’s a sense of the reality of it all as April reckons that, with her being terrorist Stockman’s assistant, she’ll “have some questions to answer.” A very reasonable assumption (and yet, if I recall correctly, Stockman is never mentioned again).

The Turtles return to their sewer home to find the place all ramshackle and Splinter gone. Here we get an interesting taste of the guys and their relationship with the rat — though godless beasts they may be, they are still only boys, and Splinter was their father. They’re panicked and lost without him, so they call on the only other adult they know, April.

She comes to get them, and it’s right around here that E&L must’ve realized this shit’s boring as fuck. We’re at page 11 and there hasn’t been a single act of violence yet. Something had to be done, so they pulled that ever-reliable device out of the ol’ storyteller’s toolbox: the coincidence.

Seems the old VW van April drives is the very same model a gang of bank-robbing badniks used as their getaway vehicle not twenty minutes ago! Darn it! But April can’t pull over to explain the misunderstanding, because she’s got a group of hideous monsters in the back, which is strictly prohibited under New York roads by-law 681B. It’s like when you want to call the cops because your neighbour is making all that noise at three a.m., but you can’t because they might find the two dozen Polynesian children you’ve got chained to sewing machines in your bedroom.

So, car chase! And more car chase! And really, that’s all this issue is. Car chase.

But by now, E&L have painted themselves into a corner. How do they end this car chase? It’d be just a wee bit far-fetched to allow April to outmaneuver the elite NY police force in their slick NY police force vehicles with her dumpy hippy van. Time to go back to the classics: the car chase happens to take them past the actual bank robbers’ VW. It’s a fundamental equation, coincidence can only be resolved with coincidence. Everything comes back into balance.

And we can get back to the non-action-packed story of crying over lost Splinter. April brings the uglies to her apartment, which sits above the old antique store that was run by her father until he had a stroke about six months previous. It’s a good device that strengthens the connection between April and the Turtles. Their father’s missing, her father’s missing some brain function (another item which, I’m fairly sure, never gets mentioned again).

Coincidences make for a tiring day, so the Turtles plop right down on April’s floor and pass out, but not until after she attempts to corrupt them:

It says right in the title that they’re teenagers, so what’s the deal April? Beer? You trying to seduce Raphael? That’s pretty sick, plus I’m not entirely sure he has a penis.

At this point, we learn (in case we hadn’t figured it out already) that this entire escapade was just a way of killing time before the big reveal. In an exciting Epiflashbackologue, we learn what has become of sensei Splinter — attacked by mousers, he was found in a drain, half-dead-but-chatty, by a couple of sewer workers. But there’s something strange about these two jumpsuited fellows, evident in the way that they use smart-people words like “Observe” and “Irregular,” and in how they decide to take the giant rodent back to their mysterious workplace, rather than crush its skull.

Returning to the Epipresentologue, Splinter awakens to find that he has not, as one would expect, been dissected; instead he’s been put in ICU and given medical treatment of a quality not typically reserved for a sewer-dwelling mutant I only have to assume is uninsured.

And then … Krangs! What kind of strange coincidence is this? Is it simply an unlikely meeting of two of New York’s most unusual inhabitants, equally bizarre but ultimately unrelated? Or is this coincidence somehow something … more?