Talk:Wanted: Bebop & Rocksteady/@comment-34811886-20180513020306/@comment-995426-20190316215653

While I can't say I've read every single Archie TMNT comic in existence (though I've tried to collect them all), I recall no such 18+ scene with Leonardo and April. Actually, while the Mirage comic was primarily for adults (but usually still accessible to teenagers, usually a PG, PG-13 and occasional R), the Archie comic became squarely for teenagers, and as such it avoided outright 18+ content. The only exception I can think of is Ninjara: Seed of Destruction which was specifically for adults, but even then wasn't more than an R rating.

And Archie TMNT's Shredder only really featured in the first half of the series. He didn't have nearly the constant plot presence he had in the 1987 series, though perhaps more plot presence than he had in Mirage TMNT (he was killed off in the very first issue). Archie TMNT had other adversarial characters of variously shifting loyalties like Armaggon, Bellybomb, Chameleon, the Four Horsemen, the Gang of Four (not to be confused with the Horsemen), Ha'ntaan, Krang, Maligna, Null, Scumbug, Slash, Verminator X, and Wyrm. Other characters like Leatherhead, Ninjara and Wingnut were antagonistic in their early appearances, but largely because of misunderstandings, conflicting goals, etc.

As for Bebop and Rocksteady, they were henchmen with a criminal streak, but they were never actually evil or mean-spirited (or all that bright, either), and when they no longer had the Shredder or Krang to work for, they decided they were most happy being pacifist environmentalist nudists who retired alone together to an Eden World to live out their lives together in tranquility. You see, even though they were pretty buffoonish, the story never lost sight of their motivations and development as characters, and they never really got buried in the same kind of character development wasteland that tended to befall any 2012 series character who started working regularly for the Shredder, and they weren't as prone to the one-dimensional whims of shifting writers and showrunning decisions that could be so disruptive and derailing to a character's development. As immature as Archie Bebop and Rocksteady were, their characters still nevertheless matured, and became this friendly pair, commenting on each other's clothes, going shopping/shoplifting together, revisiting with people they think of as friends, etc.

2012 series Bebop and Rocksteady could be interesting episodically, especially before they mutated, but they had too little lasting depth from episode to episode (in some episodes having none whatsoever), and were mostly used in the show as cheap nostalgia bait.