Okay, so, a couple of years ago, I did a big re-read of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Adventures comic series published by Archie Comics 1989-1995. If you need a refresher of that series, I’d suggest you first go read those posts.
But if you’re lazy, to sum up: The series was aimed at the kids watching the cartoon show, but diverged from it early and sent the turtles on a continuity-heavy, globe-trotting and time-traveling extravaganza. Later issues of the series got darker, including a storyline called “Megadeath” that killed off the Mighty Mutanimals, and a time-travelling Raph getting to punch Hitler.
The series was supposed to end on a five-part epic called “The Forever War” that never got into the original run because the series was unceremoniously cancelled. There was buzz for decades about crowdfunding it but it seemed to just keep dying.
Enter Arseniy Dubakov.
Dubakov is an artist and letterer who apparently first got in touch with artist Chris Allen in 2014 when he was working on new covers for the Russian reprints of TMNT books. Dubakov and Allen took Dean Clarrain’s script for issue #1; and then Dubakov, Artem Tsarkov and Egor Prutov wrote the rest of the story and Andrew Modeem turned it into a script. Chris Allen drew it, Dubakov inked and lettered it, and they got the whole thing printed as pamphlets, trade paperbacks and fancy hardbounds.
You can actually get your own copy of this, plus other TMNT “continuation” books and spin-off projects at Turtles Club. The trick is that they don’t actually have a storefront. If you want to buy something, you need to email Dubakov, Paypal him some money, and eventually get a package that looks like this.
Which I think is literally the sketchiest piece of mail I’ve ever received, and I regularly order from AliExpress. But! I did, in fact, contain this comic!
We open on the turtles and Splinter training at home in the NYC sewers. Notably, Raph is in his all-black outfit that commonly appeared during this series. A time-slip hole appears, and when they go through to investigate, they find a grievously injured future-Don.
Don explains that Shredder came through a time-slip, surprised him, stole the time-slip generator schematics, and left him for dead—and future-Don dies in Splinter’s arms. Then the turtles realize Shredder left a bomb, and jump back through the time-slip just in time to escape it.
But the world they return to is not the one they knew. Shredder rules everything, mysterious drones patrol the streets, and new versions of familiar faces lurk in the shadows.
Clarrain still has a script credit for issue #2. After re-establishing where the turtles landed, we switch perspectives to Shredder and learn what he’s done:
He stopped a young boy from losing his pet turtles down a sewer grate.
The turtles spot April doing a news report that explains Kid Terra was caught and Chu Hsi (the Warrior Dragon) has been killed. They head to Channel 6, but April doesn’t recognize them, and a group of massive Foot Supersoldier robots attack. April is killed by one of them, almost as an afterthought. When things look bad for the turtles, the resistance including Ninjara, Golani, and a woman named Claire we’ve never seen before) come to their aid.
Issue 3 is where Clarrain starts getting an “Idea” credit and it’s clear the rest of the writing wasn’t his. It opens with Shredder talking with his alternate self, who he’s kept captive. Shredder then flashbacks through his entire rise to power: He stops his younger self from dropping the mutagen in the sewers, then finds Hamato Yoshi and flat out kills him.
(Brutally!)
Then he finds Krang, and cuts him in half.
After that, it’s pretty straightforward. He used Dimension X technology and his future knowledge to conquer the world and form the Foot Confederation world government. But when the turtles reappeared from the other timeline, he realized something important: “Time remnant” rules are in effect. He doesn’t need his younger self alive, so he kills him, too.
Meanwhile, the turtles meet up with the rest of the resistance, who include Bookwurm, Al’falqa, Chameleon, and Katmandu. They catch the turtles up with another flashback: That Shredder created lots of mutants, but killed the ones who wouldn’t be loyal to him. He defeated Sarnath when it arrived, took the third Eye, and reprogrammed Sarnath to fight for him. Using the Eye and the schematic, Shredder is building another time-slip generator in this new present.
But the flashback doesn’t last for long, because Shredder has tracked the turtles to the resistance base and sent his troops. The resistance is badly outmatched, so the turtles (along with Splinter, Ninjara, and Claire) flee across the river.
Issue 4 opens with the turtles in flight. Note Raph using a gun in this splash panel, something that was explicitly forbidden in the cartoon show. They flee into the Rat-King’s domain, but not before Claire dies taking down Sarnath. And we learn the secret origin of the Rat-King:
He was Chet, the boy who dropped the turtles.
After Shredder saved the baby turtles and took them, Chet returned to the sewer the next day, and was splashed with mutagen when Shredder clocked his alternate-self. That mutagen gave him the ability to commune with rats.
Agreeing that Shredder was their common enemy, the turtles and the Rat-King arrange to attack the Technodrome, and get the turtles to the new Time-Slip Generator so they can change history back.
Shredder is prepared for the attack, and releases his elite troops: The Mighty Mutanimals! The turtles take them out while the Rat-King and Ninjara fight but eventually lose to Shredder. But the distraction works, and the turtles jump through the time-slip and blow up the portal behind them.
Issue #5 opens back on the day after Chet didn’t drop his turtles, when Shredder attacks himself in the sewer and accidentally creates the Rat-King. The turtles and Splinter attack, and there’s a drag-out fight through Manhattan to save the young, unmutated turtles.
As they fight, Shredder fills in the missing pieces of the puzzle of his chronology: After the Future Shark storyline, Shredder was stuck in the future, Armaggon was gone and Verminator-X was turned back into Manx. Shredder hunted down the time-slip remote that future-Don had dropped in 1945 Germany while Raph was punching Hitler. He had also met the Rat-King by that point and learned the origin of the turtles, including the exact day. He used the remote to attack future-Don, get the schematics and set a bomb, and then go on a few more quick jumps through time.
But when he’s beaten, Shredder reveals he still has that remote, and attempts one more jump just as the time-slip generator in future-Don’s lab is destroyed.
The turtles and Splinter retrieve the baby turtles and dump them in the sewer, along with the mutagen, ensuring that history will resume. Past-Shedder wakes up, sees Hamato Yoshi with the rats, and flees back to the Technodrome. The turtles scratch a message in a wall to let future-Don know when to retrieve them from when he first builds the time-slip generator. (And Current-Don makes him promise to wear a Kevlar patch under his coat.)
And Shredder appears back in TMNTA #4, ten minutes after Armaggon first took him to the future, with his memory scrambled and his plans in ruins.
The bonus story (with art by Jim Lawson) is “Shredded Time,” in which Null visits Shredder in prison (so, sometime after Cherubae sent him there in TMNTA #12) and uses his demon powers to unlock all of Shredder’s memories and trace his entire timeline, in case you had a hard time following it from the previous story.
Oroku Saki exiled Hamato Yoshi and took over the Foot Clan. Saki came to America, met and allied with Krang, dropped mutagen on Yoshi and the turtles, and got beaten by them. The alien with the Eye of Sarnath landed, TMNTA #4 happened, and then Armaggon showed up and took Shredder to the future with it. After their first trip to the future, Shredder tried to go back and change the past, but ended up stuck circa TMNTA #14, and continued fighting the turtles as normal until he was taken over by Krang in #25. Armaggon eventually found and retrieved him, and they managed to travel through time to get the White Stone of Mecca (#36) and do the Future Shark storyline (#42-44). Then he found the time-slip remote left in 1945 Germany, attacked future-Don, and changed the future as we just saw…except not. He got as far as grabbing the baby turtles and knocking himself out when the turtles arrived, fought him, and he accidentally time-slipped himself back to the ending of TMNTA #4. Then he had the events of TMNTA #5-11 and was put into prison by Cherubae. But now that he has his memory back, Shredder might escape and return to trouble the turtles once more!
(The first trip that got him stuck in the past for two dozen issues was clearly invented by these guys to reconcile Shredder’s timeline, specifically how Shredder would know the turtles saved him from Krang. We all assumed—heck, I’m sure Dean Clarrain assumed—that Shredder just escaped from prison between TMNTA #13 and #14. This version of the timeline actually has two Shredders existing for most of the series.)
The final stinger is a story called “Locket,” where Splinter reveals that as Claire was dying in the alternate timeline, she gave Splinter a locket and asked him to get it to her sister.
The picture is of Claire with April’s family…but April never had a sister! BUM BUM BUM!
So presumably as long as Dubakov can crowdfund enough to pay Chris Allen, the series will actually continue from here, but that doesn’t really matter to me. We hit the end of Dean Clarrain’s vision and a solid, actual ending to the series. The alternate timeline gives them a chance to bring back pretty much every character for a last hurrah, even if that means most of them die. (It’s a little annoying that alt-April dies as a side-note and does nothing of value, but I understand there really wasn’t a good place for her in this story.) I really like the fact that they tie up the history to create a continuous, harmonious timeline (including the Rat-King’s origin!) while maintaining the timey-whimey nature of the original series. (Unfortunately, it follows that future-Don is indeed killed by Shredder—the Kevlar is probably why he survived long enough to tell the past-turtles what happened.) And the Mighty Mutanimals still are killed in Megadeath, and Splinter still dies of old age sometime in the 21st century, and global warming still floods the world. But the legacy of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles lives on.
And hey, isn’t it cool that this thing finally exists, thirty years later?
But if you’re lazy, to sum up: The series was aimed at the kids watching the cartoon show, but diverged from it early and sent the turtles on a continuity-heavy, globe-trotting and time-traveling extravaganza. Later issues of the series got darker, including a storyline called “Megadeath” that killed off the Mighty Mutanimals, and a time-travelling Raph getting to punch Hitler.
The series was supposed to end on a five-part epic called “The Forever War” that never got into the original run because the series was unceremoniously cancelled. There was buzz for decades about crowdfunding it but it seemed to just keep dying.
Enter Arseniy Dubakov.
Dubakov is an artist and letterer who apparently first got in touch with artist Chris Allen in 2014 when he was working on new covers for the Russian reprints of TMNT books. Dubakov and Allen took Dean Clarrain’s script for issue #1; and then Dubakov, Artem Tsarkov and Egor Prutov wrote the rest of the story and Andrew Modeem turned it into a script. Chris Allen drew it, Dubakov inked and lettered it, and they got the whole thing printed as pamphlets, trade paperbacks and fancy hardbounds.
You can actually get your own copy of this, plus other TMNT “continuation” books and spin-off projects at Turtles Club. The trick is that they don’t actually have a storefront. If you want to buy something, you need to email Dubakov, Paypal him some money, and eventually get a package that looks like this.
Which I think is literally the sketchiest piece of mail I’ve ever received, and I regularly order from AliExpress. But! I did, in fact, contain this comic!
We open on the turtles and Splinter training at home in the NYC sewers. Notably, Raph is in his all-black outfit that commonly appeared during this series. A time-slip hole appears, and when they go through to investigate, they find a grievously injured future-Don.
Don explains that Shredder came through a time-slip, surprised him, stole the time-slip generator schematics, and left him for dead—and future-Don dies in Splinter’s arms. Then the turtles realize Shredder left a bomb, and jump back through the time-slip just in time to escape it.
But the world they return to is not the one they knew. Shredder rules everything, mysterious drones patrol the streets, and new versions of familiar faces lurk in the shadows.
Clarrain still has a script credit for issue #2. After re-establishing where the turtles landed, we switch perspectives to Shredder and learn what he’s done:
He stopped a young boy from losing his pet turtles down a sewer grate.
The turtles spot April doing a news report that explains Kid Terra was caught and Chu Hsi (the Warrior Dragon) has been killed. They head to Channel 6, but April doesn’t recognize them, and a group of massive Foot Supersoldier robots attack. April is killed by one of them, almost as an afterthought. When things look bad for the turtles, the resistance including Ninjara, Golani, and a woman named Claire we’ve never seen before) come to their aid.
Issue 3 is where Clarrain starts getting an “Idea” credit and it’s clear the rest of the writing wasn’t his. It opens with Shredder talking with his alternate self, who he’s kept captive. Shredder then flashbacks through his entire rise to power: He stops his younger self from dropping the mutagen in the sewers, then finds Hamato Yoshi and flat out kills him.
(Brutally!)
Then he finds Krang, and cuts him in half.
After that, it’s pretty straightforward. He used Dimension X technology and his future knowledge to conquer the world and form the Foot Confederation world government. But when the turtles reappeared from the other timeline, he realized something important: “Time remnant” rules are in effect. He doesn’t need his younger self alive, so he kills him, too.
Meanwhile, the turtles meet up with the rest of the resistance, who include Bookwurm, Al’falqa, Chameleon, and Katmandu. They catch the turtles up with another flashback: That Shredder created lots of mutants, but killed the ones who wouldn’t be loyal to him. He defeated Sarnath when it arrived, took the third Eye, and reprogrammed Sarnath to fight for him. Using the Eye and the schematic, Shredder is building another time-slip generator in this new present.
But the flashback doesn’t last for long, because Shredder has tracked the turtles to the resistance base and sent his troops. The resistance is badly outmatched, so the turtles (along with Splinter, Ninjara, and Claire) flee across the river.
Issue 4 opens with the turtles in flight. Note Raph using a gun in this splash panel, something that was explicitly forbidden in the cartoon show. They flee into the Rat-King’s domain, but not before Claire dies taking down Sarnath. And we learn the secret origin of the Rat-King:
He was Chet, the boy who dropped the turtles.
After Shredder saved the baby turtles and took them, Chet returned to the sewer the next day, and was splashed with mutagen when Shredder clocked his alternate-self. That mutagen gave him the ability to commune with rats.
Agreeing that Shredder was their common enemy, the turtles and the Rat-King arrange to attack the Technodrome, and get the turtles to the new Time-Slip Generator so they can change history back.
Shredder is prepared for the attack, and releases his elite troops: The Mighty Mutanimals! The turtles take them out while the Rat-King and Ninjara fight but eventually lose to Shredder. But the distraction works, and the turtles jump through the time-slip and blow up the portal behind them.
Issue #5 opens back on the day after Chet didn’t drop his turtles, when Shredder attacks himself in the sewer and accidentally creates the Rat-King. The turtles and Splinter attack, and there’s a drag-out fight through Manhattan to save the young, unmutated turtles.
As they fight, Shredder fills in the missing pieces of the puzzle of his chronology: After the Future Shark storyline, Shredder was stuck in the future, Armaggon was gone and Verminator-X was turned back into Manx. Shredder hunted down the time-slip remote that future-Don had dropped in 1945 Germany while Raph was punching Hitler. He had also met the Rat-King by that point and learned the origin of the turtles, including the exact day. He used the remote to attack future-Don, get the schematics and set a bomb, and then go on a few more quick jumps through time.
But when he’s beaten, Shredder reveals he still has that remote, and attempts one more jump just as the time-slip generator in future-Don’s lab is destroyed.
The turtles and Splinter retrieve the baby turtles and dump them in the sewer, along with the mutagen, ensuring that history will resume. Past-Shedder wakes up, sees Hamato Yoshi with the rats, and flees back to the Technodrome. The turtles scratch a message in a wall to let future-Don know when to retrieve them from when he first builds the time-slip generator. (And Current-Don makes him promise to wear a Kevlar patch under his coat.)
And Shredder appears back in TMNTA #4, ten minutes after Armaggon first took him to the future, with his memory scrambled and his plans in ruins.
The bonus story (with art by Jim Lawson) is “Shredded Time,” in which Null visits Shredder in prison (so, sometime after Cherubae sent him there in TMNTA #12) and uses his demon powers to unlock all of Shredder’s memories and trace his entire timeline, in case you had a hard time following it from the previous story.
Oroku Saki exiled Hamato Yoshi and took over the Foot Clan. Saki came to America, met and allied with Krang, dropped mutagen on Yoshi and the turtles, and got beaten by them. The alien with the Eye of Sarnath landed, TMNTA #4 happened, and then Armaggon showed up and took Shredder to the future with it. After their first trip to the future, Shredder tried to go back and change the past, but ended up stuck circa TMNTA #14, and continued fighting the turtles as normal until he was taken over by Krang in #25. Armaggon eventually found and retrieved him, and they managed to travel through time to get the White Stone of Mecca (#36) and do the Future Shark storyline (#42-44). Then he found the time-slip remote left in 1945 Germany, attacked future-Don, and changed the future as we just saw…except not. He got as far as grabbing the baby turtles and knocking himself out when the turtles arrived, fought him, and he accidentally time-slipped himself back to the ending of TMNTA #4. Then he had the events of TMNTA #5-11 and was put into prison by Cherubae. But now that he has his memory back, Shredder might escape and return to trouble the turtles once more!
(The first trip that got him stuck in the past for two dozen issues was clearly invented by these guys to reconcile Shredder’s timeline, specifically how Shredder would know the turtles saved him from Krang. We all assumed—heck, I’m sure Dean Clarrain assumed—that Shredder just escaped from prison between TMNTA #13 and #14. This version of the timeline actually has two Shredders existing for most of the series.)
The final stinger is a story called “Locket,” where Splinter reveals that as Claire was dying in the alternate timeline, she gave Splinter a locket and asked him to get it to her sister.
The picture is of Claire with April’s family…but April never had a sister! BUM BUM BUM!
So presumably as long as Dubakov can crowdfund enough to pay Chris Allen, the series will actually continue from here, but that doesn’t really matter to me. We hit the end of Dean Clarrain’s vision and a solid, actual ending to the series. The alternate timeline gives them a chance to bring back pretty much every character for a last hurrah, even if that means most of them die. (It’s a little annoying that alt-April dies as a side-note and does nothing of value, but I understand there really wasn’t a good place for her in this story.) I really like the fact that they tie up the history to create a continuous, harmonious timeline (including the Rat-King’s origin!) while maintaining the timey-whimey nature of the original series. (Unfortunately, it follows that future-Don is indeed killed by Shredder—the Kevlar is probably why he survived long enough to tell the past-turtles what happened.) And the Mighty Mutanimals still are killed in Megadeath, and Splinter still dies of old age sometime in the 21st century, and global warming still floods the world. But the legacy of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles lives on.
And hey, isn’t it cool that this thing finally exists, thirty years later?
